Media companies and losing talent

January 2, 2012 By 6 Comments

A couple of very interesting posts regarding the ever-changing media world popped up last week. Jeremiah Owyang catalysed some interesting discussion when he posed the idea that the Golden Age of Tech Blogging is over (A theme I’d covered earlier with a less provocative headline – curses!) We both broadly agree on the topic, although I think we’re probably both being slightly biased towards anecdotal evidence and especially an understandable English-language bias.

One thing we both mentioned was the move for senior writers and contributors from notable blogs to be starting out on their own – whether as a group or individuals – e.g. The Verge, The Kernel, Uncrunched, The New Gambit, etc).

And related to that was Neil Perkin, with a typically insightful post asking ‘Why big companies get rid of talented people?’. Considering AOL looms large in the stories of TheVerge and Techcrunch,  it’s a pertinent question to the state of tech blogging, along with all large media businesses at the moment. To quote:

Despite talking a good game, many large organisations remain relatively poor at moving talent around the company. The silo culture that still characterises many businesses doesn’t help. Requirements and expectations become optimised to local needs rather than those of the organisation as a whole. Strangely, the people who can really see the bigger picture and are often the ones to challenge existing assumptions are the ones that begin to not fit so easily into those silos. So companies take the easy option.

In my view, it’s their loss.

I’ve certainly suffered from those elements of traditional business culture, and also been lucky enough to benefit from senior individuals who looked beyond it and saw reasons to do things differently. I also commented on Neil’s post that there’s an element of a culture clash – anecdotally, the most talented digital and non-digital people I’ve worked with have all been more concerned with solving problems across the business than staying within their assigned role or concentrating on office politics and have often suffered for it, even within firms which are supposedly extremely tech focused.

The major difference is that digital tools mean those people have less reason to accept their given role – there’s greater access to other opportunities whether with another company or via self-employment. I haven’t timed it for a while, but a new site via Blogger, Tumblr etc is about 1 minute to set up, and however long it takes to get your first post written – all for no financial outlay.

exit.

 

How big media companies can keep talented people

1. Hire and fire the right people:

First up, there’s an oft-quoted rule about A players hiring A players. You need to be hiring people who you can trust with the freedom I’ll mention in tip 2, and who can work with a high degree of autonomy. Those people who will identify a problem, come up with a solution, and then get it done, rather than just sitting there.

You also need management at all levels who can accept constructive criticism, work with it, and are able to change things. And you need a level of honesty throughout about whether or not it’s working, because even if you can convince yourself within your business that everything is fine, it’ll still be apparent outside of the office by the output.

2. Freedom

Everyone knows about Google and their 20% time. Barely any companies ever actually do anything similar. Lots of people can provide empirical evidence about how small changes and innovations lead to big results, and yet very few companies ever put that type of approach into practice. Every company would love the next big thing, but hardly any would let someone build something and get it straight out the door to see whether it works or not, without months of watering it down into something non-offensive, and uninteresting. I have to mention my former employers at Absolute Radio as one example of a business which puts an above average level of mutual trust and respect in the talented people they employ, and as a result continue to constantly churn out a variety of interesting projects and innovations, some of which are highly successful.

And when it comes to freedom, common sense goes a long way in revising employee contracts and guidelines for areas such as social media. In a litigious area, it’s easy to forget the effect that what may have seemed a legal safeguard will actually have on a normal employee, especially when it comes to legal attempts to own innovation rather than encourage and reward it.

3. Support and reward

Psychologically, money is not the biggest lever to increase productivity and success, provided it’s at a decent level. Crucially in the media industry, the attraction of a career leads to a high amount of applicants for roles, and a correspondingly low level of pay for many. If you want employees to focus on the best way to make your business more money, then you need to understand they can’t do that if they’re constantly worrying and stressed about making the next mortgage payment and their increasing overdraft.

I’m not suggesting you pay huge amounts over-the-odds for people who aren’t going to be productive, but that you adequately reward people that are. And that doesn’t necessarily mean in basic wages – give people a chance to share in success, and make it meaningful.

Whatever your opinion of Richard Branson, there are examples in Business Stripped Bare of cleaners and watersports instructors rising to management positions. At the same time, cabin crews on their airlines earn slightly less than competitor employees but receive other rewards for their contributions to improving the business.

 

Culture Jamming by Hugh McLeod (cc Licence, ref gapingvoid.com)

It’s worth reading this Hugh McLeod post that accompanies the above cartoon on Culture Jamming. The money quote is:

‘chan­ging your company’s for­tu­nes NOT by trying to directly change what the gene­ral public thinks of you, but by trying to change what YOU think of you.‘

And that’s the massive, massive problem with most media companies up until now. Along with marketing and advertising, they’re the companies most used to talking at audiences, and have spent decades, or even hundreds of years perfecting that art. And when you’re used to playing a part to an external audience, it’s hard to even start to acknowledge what’s going on internally.

Filed Under: Business, Digital Culture, Digital Publishing, Digital Television, Entrenpreneurship, Magazine Publishing, Media, traditional media Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Tech blogs, they are a-changing

December 19, 2011 By 2 Comments

It’s a bit of a strange time for the digital publishing world, and tech blogs in particular, as they seem to be going through the kind of upheaval you’d be forgiven for presuming was a print monopoly.

So far we’ve had Techcrunch acquired by AOL, shortly followed by most of the best reasons to read Techcrunch rapidly leaving, and we’ve seen Paul Carr is launching The New Gambit, which is an e-reader/tablet subscription only ‘Economist as written by The Daily Show’.

We’ve recently had ReadWriteWeb acquired by SAY Media, which was preceded by Marshall Kirkpatrick announcing he’ll still be posting on the site, but is stepping back from other activities to build his own startup (which is one that sounds particularly exciting.)

Meanwhile Guardian News and Media has announced it is selling ContentNext, the parent of PaidContent.

On the gadget side, The Verge arrived, formed by the former core of Engadget.

And today at some point we should see the arrival of The Kernel, the new project from Milo Yiannopolous.

The only constant is change

It feels like there’s a trend for incumbent owners/publishers to be trying to get out now as revenues are unlikely to skyrocket – especially when you compare web publishing with location-based apps, social games, or winning Euromillions. And we’ll have to wait through the transition period to know whether those venerable old grandfathers of digital are worth sticking with.

Meanwhile, those who were senior figures and who’ve wanted to create their own products and businesses have struck out to try just that.

And somewhere there are some brilliant, exciting and interesting new titles and blogs out there – the biggest challenge is locating them at an early stage, and it’s a challenge which no one still seems to have cracked despite all of the content discovery, language analysis, and other mechanisms for sharing content. It’s still mainly about the existing names and the content they are producing – so if you have any recommendations for new sites and blogs, please do share them…

Personally, I think there are still some big gaps and opportunities for digital content on the web, along with the latest gold rush for mobile, tablet and e-reader publications. If not, I wouldn’t still be fascinated with trying to establish my own titles as a viable business which can grow and one day support a staffed business. But there’s not a tech news blog among them for various reasons.

But what is crystal clear and is being proven yet again is that the era of years of stability in any form of publishing have gone forever – print is subject to continued transformation and decline into a different method of survival for some titles and formats, whilst the move to digital brings only more challenges and a need for continual evolution. I suspect the two keys to success are being able to cope with constant changes under your feet whilst also accepting the fact that digital publishing is a longterm business which can be profitable, but isn’t goldmine. Although when it comes to blogging, I can point you in the direction of a million eBooks which would try to convince you otherwise…

Filed Under: Blogging, Digital Publishing, Media Tagged With: , , , , , ,

What really ended EMAP’s golden days?

October 7, 2011 By 6 Comments

There’s an interesting article on the Huffington Post UK site by former EMAP Director Colin Morrison, in which he asks Who Killed Britain’s Best Media Company, and goes on to discuss the inner workings of the leadership of the company at the time, before it was split into a consumer business which was sold to Bauer, and a B2B business which continues the EMAP brand joint-owned by Apax and Guardian Media Group.

It makes for interesting reading – the relationship between Robin Miller and David Arculus for example. By way of context, the ‘glory days’ appear to have been 80s and 90s – basically right up until around the time when I joined, which was after U.S investment went badly wrong, and the initial heavy investment in transferring brands to the digital worlds also had a major stumble.

But I do think he overestimates the brilliance of the leadership versus the problems of a traditional media company faced with the age of digital disruption that has seen the internet, mobile and tablets appear alongside a number of major digital properties which now command the attention economy.

Even now traditional media companies are still struggling and battling to make the transition to the web, whether newspapers, magazines, radio or television, and they’re all still behind where they should be. A lot of that is down to the nature of the organisational structure, and the risk averse tendencies of a middle management who are being pressured from above, and block so much potential from below.

It’s no coincidence that at the time myself and other digitally-addicted colleagues were pushing for ideas like low cost digital launches based around teams of 2 or 3 and a blog-based platform, Mashable was being launched by the then 19-year-old Pete Cashmore (2005). The same year saw Yahoo Answers launch – I suspect that was before I suggested the idea of the Ask An Expert section on MCN, but certainly we beat the likes of Quora by some way. I’d try and check, but it appears Bauer’s sites are experiencing an outage at the moment…

And funnily enough, the best time and definitely the most innovative I experienced was when for a few months a small team of us operated with barely any ‘adult’ supervision. Suddenly we were able to produce a variety of RSS feeds for starters. And initially noone paid much attention to my friend, colleague and talented video specialist Angus Farquhar starting to mess around with Youtube, establishing a channel which became a Partner channel early on, and has now racked up over 88 million views. I’d like to think that was partly down to my own appearances on the daily news show we started, that sadly petered out due to a lack of involvement from anyone else, along with the podcast Angus initiated.

I also took the chance to start playing with social media – we quickly had a Myspace page and Flickr group up and running, to be joined by Facebook and Twitter.

This isn’t to blow our own trumpets – there were lots of other talented digital people across the business, and many of them have gone onto great success since moving to other companies or starting their own businesses.

But the scary fact is that EMAP had websites for titles dating back to 1998, such as the original motorcycleworld.co.uk site, as captured by the Wayback Machine Internet Archive. That was around the same time as Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google. Since then, we’ve had Myspace (2003), Facebook (2004), Youtube (2005), Twitter (2006), the iPhone (2007), the iPad (2010), and Blogger (1999) or WordPress (2003). In addition to Mashable, there’s the likes of Techcrunch, PerezHilton, the Huffington Post itself, Boing Boing going web only, and hundreds of other sites commanding a large amount of content and attention.

And many content companies have changed how they do things, giving rise to the likes of the Demand Media content farm which is built to respond to search and advertising demand. And that’s before we get into the likes of Paper.li, or Flipboard etc.

(I actually remember bringing in the wonderful Andrew Davies from Idio to discuss the idea of personalised digital magazines on-demand to a bemused audience).

Oh, and there’s the whole world of Glam Media, Shiny, B5 and all the other content networks that exist in a myriad of sizes, shapes and forms.

And yet, the traditional organisations, structures and practices still remain. Even when they did try, they put all their eggs in one basket, and then set fire to the basket (e.g. Ditto.net).

As any blogger will tell you, bespoke quality content is incredibly labour-intensive with low margins, and the rise in content marketing is due to the fact it works extremely well for business which have products to sell.

What’s going to hurt even more…

And that’s where the increased pain is going to come. More and more businesses are realising how useful content marketing can be, which is great for me as a consultant in that field, but not good for magazines, which are going to increasingly be cut out of the loop as middlemen unless they can build their own value as arbiters of taste in a cost effective way which includes social signals and added value.

And the areas which do create bigger margins are those around social, data, analysis – all the areas which allow a small team with a lot of technical knowledge and skill to achieve far greater scale for the cost of servers and number crunching. Meanwhile we’re still in the very early days of social media and mobile, and both are still operating in a manner similar to media companies when it comes to generating revenue, which means as they’ve gained respect and interest of the advertising agencies and clients, the pot of money available for the media brands is being thinned out.

Meanwhile small independant blogs and websites are still appearing every single day, powered by the availability of self-publishing and self-promotion, and the simple fact that some of us, despite the knowledge of the economics of the media, just love to write. Hot Mod Media is the catch-all for my own network of sites, and with a total financial outlay of about £500 per year, it’s already reaching over 200,000 uniques annually (Oct 2010-Oct 2011, and that’s going to rise massively with audiences increasing 500% already this year). Most importantly, the only ongoing investment at the moment is my spare time, and that of a small number of volunteers.

So as much as the leadership changes and struggles may make for good reading, and there’s undoubtedly some elements which affected the company as a whole, I wouldn’t say that it’s ultimately what ended the golden days of the big British media company…

Filed Under: Digital Publishing, Magazine Publishing, Media, newspapers, Print Publishing, traditional media, Writing Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Why is mainstream media still confused by the 80/20 rule?

June 9, 2009 By 4 Comments

A recent study by Purewire revealed that only around 20% of Twitter users are contributing to the service, with 80% having fewer than 10 followers, and 37.1% having no tweets – leading Techcrunch to suppose most people on Twitter are sheep.

Meanwhile the New York Times reports the shocking discovery that bloggers who assume it’s an easy way to get a book deal or give up their day job often get disillusioned and give up. The article quotes the 2008 Technorati State of the Blogosphere, with 7.4 million (5%)  of the 133 million blogs tracked by Technorati having been updated once in the last 120 days.

The most active 2% of Wikipedia users made 73.4% of edits in 2006 (including maintenance and administrative edits).

The iPhone OS had 8% of the smartphone market, but generated 43% of mobile web requests and 65% of html usage.

Are we noticing a pattern here?

I suspect around 20% of the people reading this post will be knowingly thinking of Vilfredo Pareto, who noticed that 20% of the people of Italy owneed 80% of the land back in 1909, which was then generalised by Joseph M Juran in 1941 into the Pareto Principle, as the common rule of thumb that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes, i.e. a Power Law with a The Long Tail.

Internet access gives everyone the ability to self-publish – it doesn’t mean everyone will. Or entitle everyone to be able to make a good living out of it.

And more importantly…

Even if just 1% of bloggers, people uploading video to Youtube, or podcasters achieve sustainable fame and income – how does that compare to the number of aspiring writers, film directors or radio DJs who never even got published or broadcasted under the old model?

The Long Tail never said everyone would get rich – you can either try to rise up to the hit end by being one of the small percentage working harder, being smarter, and getting luckier – or you can aggregate the long tail by working harder, being smarter, and getting luckier, just as Google did with Adsense.

As usability godfather Jakob Nielsen broke it down in 2006: “In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.”

The internet doesn’t radically change that dynamic (although it’s definitely possible to move the figures slightly within a specific online community). What it does is hugely increases the numbers included in that 1%, and in that 9%, which has a bloody big impact on the 90%.

That’s the big lesson – a small number of people can get Wikipedia over 55 million U.S. visitors in a year, or create the fact that 20 hours of video are uploaded every minute (equivalent to Hollywood releasing 86,000 films every weekend!). It’s what got facebook to over 200 million users, and Twitter to over 32 million.

It doesn’t mean it’s all popular, or high quality.

It just means that most of mainstream media is likely to end up covered in content as if it went out in a desert sandstorm – and successful businesses need to figure out how to engage and build on that 1% or 20% which creates the value for everyone else.

Filed Under: Digital Culture, Digital Publishing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,