C3?
- Image of Shannon Booth
We have our quarterly board and employee meetings this week. We are an ESOP company, owned by our original founding families (over 126 years in business), and the Employee Stock Ownership Trust. So everyone is interested.
The last time I made a formal report, we were having difficulty forecasting our sales, and we did not know if we would be able to cut sufficient expenses to offset our accelerating revenue declines. We were in danger of not meeting our bank covenants.
Today, I am very appreciative that we have stabilized, thanks to the wonderful support of our customers and the hard work and dedication of our over 500 employees. We are profitable, have positive cash flow, have met the bank covenants and have been able to maintain our cash position after paying millions of dollars to ESOP participants who have left the company.
So, we are stable, but not out of the woods. How deep are those woods? How dark? David Olive challenges us to be “essential” and reviews how we got here — by being bland and boring, then buying other media at unsustainable prices. Now, he says:
We have to surprise and entertain. We have to be willing to offend, in causes we know to be right. It’s really quite simple. We need to be essential.
But it is clear that David likes newspapers. He is not focused on the fundamental changes in economics and social behavior that others see, and occupy much of my time. Neil Perkin does a wonderful job in his most recent slides of capturing these new dynamics, and graciously gave me permission to use a few from his June 2008 slides at the Newspaper Association of America convention this March. For a more comprehensive view of these fundamental changes, and potential future states, download and read the new study The Big Thaw from The Media Consortium (with a helpful list of efforts to explore in Appendix E). Doug Fisher includes many of these new points of view in his review of the literature, including our friend Dan Conover. As regular readers know, I have been exploring new organizing thoughts, culture, technology and organization for some time. Some people say I make this too complicated. So let’s try simple. Most of these slides have been used before, including a few of Neil Perkin’s from the March NAA presentation, but what do they mean, in practical terms?
Shannon Booth, our Director of Digital Products, would like to offer easily accessible, relevant information to any one person in our community, on whatever device they possess, where they are, simply. In order to do that, we need to change how we create the information in the first instance, make sure it is properly tagged (linked to descriptions of the information that travel with the information) and can be published anywhere. That means that the content creators in information content and commercial content much change the way they work, and the systems with which they work. It means that IT has to develop and support robust systems of content creation and management. It means that our product managers must develop presentation systems that allow both “packaged products” such as newspapers, broadcasts and websites as well as flexible and free flowing user requested information. It means our sales department must be able to consult with our advertisers to advise them on how best to reach their desired audience, not just sell them products. Our financial metrics, and billing procedures, need to support this free flowing information. Lots of change. But clearly doable, if we want to. If anyone does not want to, then my advice would be to find something you do want to do.
National Public Radio is well down this path. Their Create Once, Publish Anywhere system is a joy to use. Try their iphone/itouch application.
Think of Shannon Booth, and her attempts to connect to the communities we serve, at the top of this pyramid, artfully created by Mike Coleman . We all need to support her.
As our friend, and consultant, Abe Abreu, Sr. notes, this will not be easy, and we need people who want to play.
Well, I trust your three Directors – Content, Commercial, IT – on my team understand the purpose [of Content Engineering], and that the Content Director has the authority to execute on the organizational mission. I believe we have a solid plan to help build a bridge across the content creation and packaging chasms that now exist and everyone is struggling with.
I also feel that we have a solid platform on the way on which we will build new tag-at-first-instance workflows in the DAM [Digital Asset Management system]. And it doesn’t hurt that Dan [Conover] is a rock star.
But frankly, and as you’ve often blogged, the biggest challenge, as it turns out, is going to be the [people within the] organization itself. Is the desire and the willingness to change there yet? Will TV and Broadcast play nice? Will print and online willingly merge around a new digital-repository-first methodology? Those are issues that the leadership at large must address.
For now, we are creating a 10-person prototype/team to deploy the tool, test my content-waterfall theories and new work flows, use those to prime the DAM with content, seat 2-3 content originators, flow content out to an alpha site, and fix the inevitable bugs.In the meantime, company leadership needs to be equipping the rest of the organization with, metaphorically speaking, rough-terrain gear and leading them to the other side of the chasm across the narrow donkey bridge we will build. If that doesn’t happen, no tool or methodology in the world is going to save the business!!
We’re building the tools, we are working together to build the process to connect the people with the tools, but somebody has got to lead the people across the bridge – and that’s a function of talent, competence, passion and commitment. Clearly, the hardest work of all!!
People-Process-Tools! It takes a village
[Edited by Chuck Peters 10/25/09 at 8 PM CDT to correct typos noted by Abe in his comment]
Related articles by Zemanta
- Divide and conquer (wemediaguru.com)
October 25th, 2009 at 10:28 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Steve Buttry and geir stene, geir stene. geir stene said: Read an learn!Show this one to every manager in the media business you know of! My friend @cpetersia knows what to do: http://bit.ly/1rCWhV [...]
October 25th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
Hey Chuck, decent post, nice board recap, and thanks for the attribution. Seems my typos made into your post as well. I also noticed my ICMF thing made it to the board meeting – again.
What’s amazing to me is, that the ICMF concept persistently permeates my new concepts, one way or another. From the point of view of the life cycle of content – from acquisition to connection to sharing and packaging – this life cycle idea has, at least in my mind, stood the test of time: the WHAT (a life cycle for maximizing content value/chain) hasn’t changed much; the WHY (connecting communities, sharing, multiple channels, monetizing the atoms etc.) has morphed a bit as an articulation, but not as a business objective. But the HOW – now that’s where much of the action seems to be.
In the last year alone, the “smart content” space (e.g. using semantic technologies to mine relevance and maximize connection/value)is where all the slideware is emerging. We’re even starting to see some value emerge as well. And while we are seeing progress in he “user engagement and experience layer” (e.g. iPhone interface, minimalist/visually rich designs, embedded navigable video, etc.)we still are a long way from (and I’m really starting to tire of this phrase) “monetizing the engagement”. It seems that what we are lacking – still – is business innovation.
So what? We have new technologies! How do we make life better for our users and how can we make a living doing it?
Despite all the advances, It seems the end results is still web sites that splash stories, link videos, place search and puke ads. The “new monetizable value” is still not apparent, and consequently, media maintains a posture of skepticism. Media is as media does, I guess!
After several years of consulting for you at the Gazette on these big changes, I feel like rubber is just starting to hit the road – on the systems/design and implementation side, mostly. Once we get this prototype off the ground at the Gazette, e-Me will be focused on packaging the experience, technical content, processes and methodologies and related knowledge assets into an engagement service to both help other similarly risk-willing media companies walk this path.
To be fair, e-Me needs to advance its own work, We need to figure out creative ways (in this investment-narrow market) to get to the capital and people needed to complete the work we started, and to develop new applications to sit on top of this growing heap of semantic piece-parts. In the meantime, our community experiment over at The Daily Blank is gaining traction, writers and a following.
I believe that this experiment between Gazette Company and e-Me will have mutual benefit and help us both survive the times.
Thanks again for the opportunity!!
Abe
abe.abreu@e-meventures.com
I look forward to working with my core team of Audrey, Becky, & Mike to get to a baseline. From there, lots of work internally to “seat” people in front of the new semantic content tool kit.
Progress!!
October 25th, 2009 at 8:43 pm
Thanks Abe. I should have noted that your comments were from a public exchange between us, but were not edited for publication. I have made the edits, as I now note. Look better?
October 27th, 2009 at 11:23 am
Looks much better Chuck, thanks. Everybody needs an editor, I guess
October 27th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
[...] And be ready for further change, this is not over, it’s barely began. Take a look at the at 3C for further understanding of a new media house set up, I’ve been blogging and discussing [...]
October 28th, 2009 at 6:22 am
[...] and the implications of the changing community information environment outlined in my recent post C3 with interested employees over the next two days. In the spirit of transparency and maximum [...]