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Issue for October 2020

Saving Local Journalism

Posted on Saturday, October 31, 2020 at 5:17 PM

In the news: There are several proposed measures to rescue the ailing local news industry, including a proposed bill in the House of Representatives. But are there too many cooks in the kitchen?

“How many plans to save local journalism are too many?” asks a Poynter.org headline this week. Rick Edmonds discusses some of the proposals making the rounds. Of particular note is HR 7640, aka the Local Journalism Sustainability Act. The bill, which has bipartisan support in the House, would provide tax relief and credits to news organizations and subsidize small business advertising, Edmonds summarizes.

There are other bills in the works, including safe harbor bills in both chambers of Congress, Edmonds reports. However, nothing is set in stone, he warns: “Despite the flurry of interest, nothing will happen until after the election, possibly in November or December or more likely as a new Congress comes back in January. Then there will be the added challenge that local news may not rise to the top of a crowded agenda.” Read more here.

Also Notable

Covid-19 Hits Ad Industry

Advertisers are bracing for long-term hardship beyond the end of the pandemic. Although ad spending figures were better than expected this quarter, “the risks of extensive and long-lasting economic trauma are on the rise,” reports Seb Joseph of Digiday.com. Citing impending lockdowns in France and Germany, Joseph cautions that although we’ve seen recovery in the short term, the future is far from certain: “Media buyers [are] bracing for choppy economic climes and closely watching indicators -- namely, what happens to media prices should consumer spending remain in free fall.” Read more here.

Also Struggling: The News Industry

Newspapers have been hit hard by the current pandemic as well, as discussed in a recent Pew Research Center piece by Michael Barthel, Katerina Eva Matsa, and Kirsten Worden. The three writers discuss the Q2 numbers and other developments in the news industry. “Among the six publicly traded newspaper companies studied ... advertising revenue fell by a median of 42% year over year,” they report. The digital side is struggling as well: “Digital ad revenue fell by a median of 32% year over year in the second quarter.” Circulation revenue is down 8 percent as well. Read the full report here.

MarketWatch Adds Paywall

Popular finance and business site MarketWatch has added a paywall to its news content. Sara Guaglione of MediaPost.com reports that “a subscription to MarketWatch costs $1 for the first four weeks, then rises to $19.99 a month. It includes unlimited access across devices and platforms, member-exclusive content and fewer ads.” However, the paywall does not cover the entire site; Guaglione says that “much of the site will remain free, such as MarketWatch’s market data pages and the Virtual Stock Exchange.” Read more here.

Automation to Augment Journalism

Can bots and humans coexist in the newsroom? Sérgio Spagnuolo of the International Journalists’ Network thinks so. This week, he discusses how automation can relieve journalists of tasks that sap time from their actual reporting. He discusses how he was able to develop a Twitter bot and automate report delivery, while hiring a human community manager to oversee the process. “Automation in journalism is something that continues to raise quite a few eyebrows.... Journalists might (and should) be wary of the effects of automating every single aspect of a newsroom -- as Microsoft tried to do with MSN -- but the key thing I took from that experience is that automation is a great ally, not a standalone solution.” Read more about how automation can streamline things in the newsroom here.

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Align Your Objectives and Key Results!

Posted on Saturday, October 31, 2020 at 5:16 PM

Putting Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to work for your publication.

By William Dunkerley

The publisher of a popular magazine recently went to a chiropractor. The treatment consisted of manually aligning her spine. That's a key element in the chiropractic approach.

Now that same publisher is herself faced with performing a different kind of alignment: the aligning of objectives and key results throughout her publishing organization.

Previously the publisher's spine had been in a state of distress. Now it's her company. The business's pains radiate from the impact of the Covid crisis on the economy and on a resultant shift toward a work-from-home business model.

What does it mean when a company's objectives and key results are misaligned? It means that the various parts of the company, the individual departments, are not working together optimally. They are not creating synergy.

A Case Study in Organizational Misalignment

An example of this is in a story that I've told before and now bears repeating:

It's of a magazine that was struggling to survive. After talking with the publisher, I interviewed the key players: the manager for ad sales, the audience development manager, and the editor-in-chief. I asked each one the same question: "What's wrong here?"

The ad sales manager told me that his sales team was doing a great job selling advertising. The problem was that the circulation manager was selling subscriptions to the wrong people, people who had no interest in buying what was advertised. As a result, advertisers would go away when they got little response to their ads.

The audience development manager indicated that her department did extensive testing and had developed highly targeted marketing approaches that were very successful at bringing in new readers. The problem was that the editor was writing to a different audience. The articles he was publishing didn't resonate with the new readers, and they rarely renewed.

The editor explained that he and his staff did a masterful job of creating highly interesting and insightful articles. The problem was that the ad director was filling the magazine with irrelevant advertisements, and the marketing manager was selling subscriptions to the wrong audience.

Sadly, across the magazine business, not all publishers are aware that their business is misaligned. Some attribute unsatisfactory performance to external causes. Others are content with less than optimal results.

The Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) Framework

In the last issue we introduced the concept of establishing a management framework called Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). The starting point is to set the company-wide OKRs.

There are various opinions about how many individual objectives and key results are appropriate. We'll take a pragmatic approach here.

For definitions: An objective specifies something you want to achieve. A key result is a benchmark for accomplishing an objective.

Ideally each key result should be quantifiable and measurable. However, in publishing we deal in part with qualitative material for which judgment, not a measuring stick, is required for evaluation.

A Sample OKR Statement

So here is an example of a company-wide statement of objectives and key results for a publishing company. It is offered only for illustrative purposes, not as a recommended blueprint. The numbers presented are just for discussion and are not recommendations.

XYZ Magazines Inc.

1. Objective: Operate profitably.
a. Key result: Achieve a minimum of 15 percent net revenue.

2. Objective: Produce an editorial product that will...
a. Key result: Maintain or improve competitive position with regard to editorial quality.
b. Key result: Achieve a 60 percent renewal rate.
c: Key result: Attract new subscribers to replace expires, plus 3 percent.
d. Key result: Meet all deadlines.
e. Key result: Sustain appropriate staffing through training and recruitment.

3. Objective: Secure advertising and audience that will...
a. Key result: Achieve sufficient sales to meet net revenue objective.
b: Key result: Maintain or improve competitive position with regard to audience size.
c: Key result: Maintain or improve competitive position with regard to ad market share.
d: Key result: Achieve a 60 percent renewal rate.
e: Key result: Attract new subscribers to replace expires, plus 3 percent.
f. Key result: Meet all deadlines.
g. Key result: Sustain appropriate staffing through training and recruitment.

Although not comprehensive, this should give you a general idea of how to state objectives and key results that are appropriate for your situation.

Key Questions to Consider

As you go through the process, here are some questions to ask yourself:

1. Are the objectives attainable?

2. Are current capacity and resources adequate, or should they be augmented?

3. Is there sufficient expertise for achieving the results?

4. Are you anticipating future conditions?

If you are an association publisher, there are some obvious adjustments that should be made to this. For example, unless your publication department has its own P/L responsibility, you can substitute a specific "contribution to organizational budget" for net revenue, etc.

In a future issue we'll expand the OKR process down to the departmental level, where the approach will be slightly different.

William Dunkerley is principal of William Dunkerley Publishing Consultants, www.publishinghelp.com.

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Free Assistance and Recovery Help

Posted on Saturday, October 31, 2020 at 5:16 PM

During this time of crisis, we stand ready to answer any specific questions our readers may have, time permitting. You can contact us at:

crisis-help@stratnewsletter.com

When the national health crisis subsides, publishers unfortunately should not expect to easily resume business as usual. Economists are predicting tough times ahead. In addition, the impact of the crisis may well result in different expectations of us on the part of our audiences. STRAT will provide a series of articles to help you all through the period of recovery and readjustment.

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