Don’t repeat the mistake of previous disengaged leaders
When I worked in newspapers we used to “relaunch” the product every autumn. The paper’s design would be tweaked; editors would be told to secure big interviews and book serialisations; and money would be spent on a TV campaign.
We are not about to run a TV spot but, as you will have noticed, this newsletter has had an autumn refresh. From today, it has a new name, Media Hunter.
No prizes for guessing how we came up with it, but it reflects the newsletter’s evolution from being a pick of articles to my thoughts about where the news industry is heading and the stories I am hearing as the transformation continues.
The content will stay broadly the same as, working with your feedback, we think we’ve iterated to a format that works. Having said that, we are open to change it further and would love to hear more of your ideas.
For 85 editions now, I have never found a lack of something to write about. An industry that barely changed for a couple of hundred years has changed rapidly and constantly for the past 30.
The response to that change has, I’m afraid, been patchy. Much of the industry made a foundational mistake to ditch the idea of a cover price and give journalism away for free online. It sucked up to Facebook and the other social networks, only to discover that they weren’t our friends at all. And it set aside the tenets of original and distinctive journalism to chase an SEO dream that only really served Google in the end.
Of course, there are honourable exceptions to all of the above and on the plus side our output is now read by more people than ever and more publications survived than many predicted. Nevertheless the industry’s overall thinking has tended to be short term and tactical, rather than long term and strategic.
Why is this? There are many reasons but I think one that gets ignored is the people factor. Many of the leaders who were making the early digital decisions were people who were getting near the end of their careers and, frankly, knew that whatever they decided about “the digital future”, print would see them through to retirement.
I experienced this at first hand, working under leaders who either metaphorically or literally waved me away when asked for their decision on things that were complicated or potentially painful. Alongside the universal, and natural, resistance to any kind of change this meant that the possibilities of digital publishing have only been half realised.
I raise all this not because I want to rake over old ground but rather because the same impulses are now affecting the media leaders who must deal with the AI disruption.
Of course they are a new generation of leaders compared with those who dealt with the digital transformation, who are now mostly retired. This is a challenge for Gen X, who aged 46-61 are generally the people occupying the industry’s hot seats.
I was talking about this generational shift with Ana Jakimovska, Mediahuis’s head of AI strategy, the other day. She pointed out that it was a slightly different one than that faced by the Boomers of the previous disruption. The Gen X leaders of today have seen fundamental change before. They experienced the print-to-digital revolution earlier in their careers, often as frustrated neo-digitals (we are a non-digitally-native species, as endless TikTok’s on the subject can attest). The Xers were the ones being held back by the Boomers.
As we talked, Ana and I wondered whether the experience of that change combined with frustration would be an advantage in the current environment. Having felt the feeling of being thwarted, we should know to avoid inflicting it on others.
On the other hand, having fought so hard for digital over print, we wondered whether our generation would actually have the energy to commit to another revolution.
Obviously, Ana does – she is a whirlwind of ideas and action – and I think that most people now recognise that inaction is not an option. But nevertheless it requires eternal vigilance not to fall into the trap of thinking that AI is an issue for the next generation. It is emphatically an issue for now.
It’s also something with which leadership must positively engage. One of the big problems of the digital revolution was that junior staff were always having to explain the most basic tenets of digital publishing to their bosses. This cannot be the case any more. A simple test: if you are a senior leader and you can’t explain in layman’s terms what an MCP server is and what their relevance is for journalistic output then you’re not doing your job properly.
What’s more, today’s leaders must open up their horizons to beyond their (hoped for) retirement dates. They need to be thinking not just about the late 2020s, but the whole of the 2030s. It’s too easy to say: “We can’t possibly know what the world will look like then.” We can, and we can actually do something to shape it.
Some people who are already working on this are Shuwei Fang and David Caswell who last month produced their report on their Signals at Scale summits held over the past year. In short, their ambition is to facilitate the creation of a socially positive information ecosystem that is fully mediated by AI. For today’s leaders who want to drive this change rather than let it happen to them, this is a good place to start educating themselves.
Separately, these issues are exactly the kind of thing we envisaged as subjects for our 121 Consulting, which we launched last week in this newsletter. Reply to this email if you want more information.