Leadership = Readership: Partner to improve

By focusing on community leadership and consumer interests, media organizations can create incentive for improvements without compromising the core values of objectivity and the First Amendment.

The Situation

A cycle of declining circulation, fewer staffers and high fixed operational costs mean that media organizations are faced with the idea of ‘doing more with less’ both in the newsroom and in the overall business.

The Challenge

The challenges here are two-fold.

1. Newsrooms provide a unique challenge in that the outcomes for improved performance are not revenues, but rather “click-throughs” or circulation – a challenging, and potentially damaging, proposition to the content it’s designed to improve. What’s the incentive for the consumer to read/participate?

2. On the business side, niche marketing threatens traditional advertising processes. Declining readership is also a problem; fewer readers = lower ad rates. What’s the incentive for consumers to read/participate?

The Opportunity

By focusing on a newsroom’s overall operation – producing content and community services that work for its constituency – a newsroom and its business operations can create employee and operational partnership programs that offer multiple incentives for improved performance while still protecting the core values of objectivity and the interests of the readership.

Solutions

Rather than thinking of the situation as ‘doing more with less’, newsroom and business leadership should clarify the mission of the core operations and focus on creating operational ‘value-adds’. View the company from 30,000 feet. Why would someone want to work there? Why would someone want your product? How can we sell our employees on making these improvements? Actively engage a team in generating new and unique ideas that generate revenue or incentive, and support the implementation of those ideas.

By Team Ops members: