Selma Stern is a strategic advisor helping media leaders transform their organizations for sustainable growth, drawing on 15+ years of experience in consulting and global news media. In particular, Selma bridges the gap between high-level strategy and the messy reality of execution, helping publishers fix the internal structures that hold them back.

In this article, Selma shares 5 recommendations for surviving in this gap as a subscription leader:
- Accept your real job: consensus builder, not decision maker
- Master internal storytelling
- Build cross-functional infrastructure
- Invest in human chemistry
- Give away the credit

Khalil A. Cassimally, Consultant in Audience Development, User Needs & AI, and regular contributor to Audiencers, shares 7 strategies to not only become data-informed, but data-led.
1. Data is a compass, not a map
2. Connect every role to the bigger goal
3. User value first; business follows
4. Don't focalise on tools
5. Create one source of truth
6. Start with one analysis, and keep going
7. Optimise the funnel; small lifts compound

“In product management, empathy for users is key. But in media, success starts with empathizing with  those who create the experience: journalists. Their work is the foundation upon which all product  experiences are built. Without understanding their needs and challenges, no product can truly  succeed.” 

Tell us a little bit about you & your background 

With a product background from the airline industry, I first entered the media industry 5 years ago. Thanks to my understanding of data, I began in advertising before moving into subscription. I quickly realized that editorial newsletters were the best-performing conversion tool, so gradually shifted my focus there, putting my product knowledge to use again. 

At NZZ, where I work now, they were looking for a product manager for their newsletter portfolio – perfect! So I joined 4 years ago. Today, I’m responsible for the entire editorial product development.

What is “Editorial Product Development”? 

Editorial Product Development aims to establish a new way of working that respects journalism while making it more audience-centric.

The concept bridges the gap between editorial and product teams. This takes more than alignment meetings and shared goals. It requires a role that speaks the language of editors while thinking in product principles.

Enter Editorial Product Development! It brings together product- and editorial-minded individuals to align newsroom workflows with audience-driven strategies while preserving editorial independence. It translates the needs of journalists into product  solutions and ensures that decisions empower the newsroom rather than burden it. 

Building this Editorial Product team 

There are 3 editorial-minded individuals in our team. One focuses on digital workflows, such as homepage curation, planning tools, push notifications, etc. The second is the Newsletter PM, who previously worked as a newsletter editor and therefore has operational experience of what works and  what doesn’t. Finally, we have the Editorial PM for off-platform work – an essential perspective for any new product development today. Each of them spend 2 days a week in their original editorial roles and the rest of their time in a more product-focused role within my team. We sit next to the classic  product team, who manage the website and app features – while we focus on making the content come alive. 

A powerful combination

You have strong UX professionals coming from product, who deeply understand user needs and how to act on them. At times, their deep empathy can lead to a strong user-first perspective. Journalists offer a valuable counterbalance. They come with a clear story to tell and a drive to share it, even if it’s not always based on detailed user research. 

Bringing these two mindsets together – such as having a journalist step into a product management role – creates a powerful blend. It’s the kind of balance media companies need to serve both their audience and their editorial mission. 

How to pick the right journalist 

There are journalists who quite simply love the craft – they want to write the story, produce the video, or create the podcast, but aren’t particularly interested in what happens after publication. They are essential! People ultimately come to us for our stories, no matter how great the product experience is. However, they are not necessarily the ones who will thrive in product roles.  

Others are curious to go beyond content creation. They ask questions about target groups, business  goals, and internal processes. These journalists show potential for working in product. Bringing them into product roles not only increases the chances of success but also fosters greater acceptance and cultural change. 

“Media companies cannot afford to treat product development as separate from editorial realities.  The best digital products come from organizations where product and editorial teams co-create rather  than operate in silos. Empathy makes this possible – empathy not just for readers, but for the people  who bring the stories to life every day. If we want to build truly impactful media products, we must  start by understanding and supporting them.”

The team’s work in practice 

When launching a new audience feature, an Editorial Product Manager doesn’t just look at  engagement metrics. They also analyse how it impacts storytelling and how it fits into the workflows and constraints journalists face under tight deadlines. This understanding is crucial for developing products that support rather than hinder the newsroom. 

One case study involves opinion pieces. User research revealed that while some readers – especially younger audiences – prefer unbiased facts, others enjoy opinion-based content. However, many readers couldn’t distinguish opinion pieces from regular articles. One idea was to display the editor’s  face in the teaser when it’s an opinion piece. Here, Editorial Product Managers played a crucial role,  particularly in two ways: 

1. The cultural aspect: We needed editorial buy-in. Not every journalist is thrilled about having their picture attached to an article. But if the idea comes from someone within editorial who understands their work, it’s received much better than if a “product guy” comes along with post-its  and user-centric arguments. 

2. The process aspect: We had never used photos of editors at article level before. We needed  support from the photo editorial team to source consistent images. Because Editorial Product Managers already know these workflows and backend processes, defining requirements and  moving forward took half the time. 

What does success look like for Editorial Product Managers? 

Our work contributes to overarching business goals, such as increasing subscription or advertising revenue. Success is measured using journalistic performance metrics, depending on the initiative – such as article completion rates, content recirculation, or user feedback. Ultimately, engagement is our  key success indicator. It drives conversions and prevents churn. Engagement thus serves as a proxy for harder KPIs like subscription sales and cancellations, which it significantly influences. 

Success is also about empathizing with journalists: helping their stories gain the value they deserve from both audiences and the business. Journalists sometimes feel that their role is becoming less important – when in fact, the opposite is true.

Clarify why

Before beginning development on a new product or feature, we step back and ask: Why? Why this feature? Why now? And why should we do this versus something else? Often, it’s insights — information gathered from quantitative and qualitative data that helps us better understand our audience — that enables us to answer these questions.

Having a clear motivation is helpful in organizing teams, especially cross-functional ones. And the more rooted in data, whether it’s direct customer feedback or data analysis, the stronger the case for why.

Article gifting is a feature we launched late last year. The feature enables subscribers to share Atlantic articles with others (even those without a subscription) on a monthly basis.

We know our subscribers not only enjoy engaging with our journalism themselves, but also find delight in sharing it with others. However, if their recipient didn’t have a subscription, they often were unable to view the full article.

Our audience-research team reported that the lack of the ability to share access was one of the most frequent pain points noted by both active and prospective subscribers. Armed with this information, we considered how article gifting might fulfill this request and how it would work at The Atlantic.

Article gifting is not a concept we created. Many other news publishers, like The New York Times, The Financial Times, and The Washington Post offer this type of functionality. While it was helpful to look to these as examples when considering our version of the feature, we wanted to make sure we built something specific to our audience’s needs that also aligned with our own business goals.

> How we introduced group subscriptions to The Atlantic

Set clear goals

Goal-setting is another essential step in the development process that creates focus for the feature and the cross-functional team working together to build it. By setting a clear goal up front, it ensures everyone is on the same page about what the solution is meant to do or solve for.

It can also illuminate when different teams are not on the same page about what the intended outcome should be. Still, it’s better to have that come to light at the beginning of the project versus after launch.

For the article-gifting feature, our goals were two-fold: 1) provide a new, highly-requested benefit to subscribers to improve satisfaction and 2) create a new way for those who aren’t subscribers to access our journalism.

While we believe our journalism is worth paying for, we also know that some readers need more time with us before committing to a subscription. With article gifting, we could give subscribers a way to be our advocates and share with family, friends, and followers — with hopes that they eventually become subscribers, too.

Source ideas from everywhere

Good ideas really can come from anywhere. Whenever it’s time to consider a new feature or product, the product team aims to include partners from across the organization. We host cross-functional brainstorms and design sprints, consistently share ideas and learnings from our peers, and collect feedback on requirements and designs. For product managers, sourcing ideas and leaning on our partners for their respective areas of expertise is our superpower.

For article gifting, we worked closely with design, marketing, copy, engineering, data science, and audience team members to define how the feature would work, what it would look like, and exactly what success would mean in terms of metrics. This also helped us think through potential risks and ways we might be able to mitigate them.

(Over)communicate

Good communication is often the difference between a successful project and one that stumbles to the finish line. But having open lines of communication is challenging, especially when every team is busy and has its own priorities and deadlines. This is why we’ve established some lightweight, repeatable ways for our teams to facilitate communication and foster collaboration.

For instance, with article gifting, we leaned on a project-based Slack channel and a weekly 15-minute check-in to communicate progress, major decisions made, or open questions that needed to be resolved. We also made sure the PRD (product requirements document) always had the most up-to-date information about the feature as well as how we were progressing against our timeline to launch. This enabled partners on other teams to stay updated without having to spend too much time in meetings.

> Also from The Atlantic team: bringing more value to readers and subscribers through our mobile app

Share results and learnings far and wide

After a feature launches, it’s important to understand its impact against the goals articulated at the onset. Like every other step of the development process, this shouldn’t be done in a vacuum. We often share post-launch performance reports soon after a launch that detail how the feature or product is performing, lessons learned, and any changes we plan to make. It’s important to share our learnings across the organization because it develops a shared understanding and sometimes inspires new ideas for us to pursue.

For article gifting, we learned quickly that subscribers were having a hard time distinguishing article gifting from our regular digital-sharing functionality. This led us to reconsider the user experience and update the flow to make it more intuitive. Monitoring subscriber behavior with the feature, as well as engagement with the gift articles by recipients, has inspired several optimizations we’ve made since launch.

Feedback from subscribers has been overwhelmingly positive in response to having this new benefit, many expressing gratitude for enabling this capability so that they can share with friends and family. Article gifting has also enabled our journalism to reach a wider audience, converting many into new subscribers, too.

This feature’s success was absolutely a result of many teams at The Atlantic being generous with insights, ideas, and feedback to ultimately deliver something of value to our subscribers. And it’s this spirit that we aim to bring to everything we build.

Understanding the root of this challenge

Work into cultural and structural change needs to start with understanding the context, the existing shared unconscious beliefs and how they play out against current priorities. Many skip this stage and jump straight into change places. But the better existing values are understood, the more focused change work can be, the more easily existing values can be used to leverage change and the better the outcomes. 

When it comes to bridging editorial and commercial teams, the study outlines concerns with journalism autonomy, a key tenet of the journalist’s identity and a way to safeguard the credibility of the information they produce. 

Journalists often employ the metaphor of the ‘wall’ of separation between editorial and business departments, staff and functions. As suggested by Coddington (2015), this metaphor evokes the separation of ‘church and state’ established in the US First Amendment, and journalists who use it tend to ‘characterize themselves as the church and the business side as the state’. Consequently, the newsroom turf is characterized as ‘sacred’, and breaches such as intrusions of business interests into news production processes are considered ‘heresies’ that damage the purity and integrity of the profession (Coddington, 2015: 73).”

In short, separation is traditionally a norm in journalism, an informal schema and assumption, often applied unconsciously. 

Other editorial norms include a commitment to accuracy, fact-based discourse, the practice of reporting, as well as, to different degrees in different countries and organizations, ideas of fairness, impartiality and/or objectivity. When discursively articulated, norms often take the form of ‘ought statements’, that is, morally potent prescriptions defining how individuals ought to behave to be consistent with shared values (Horne, 2001: 4).”

Breaking down the silo 

Despite this editorial norm, editorial–commercial integration processes have been accelerated in response to structural changes like the move to an increasingly digital media environment, greater competition for audience attention and advertisers’ expenditure, and the declining profitability of many newspaper organizations. 

I am convinced that, today, it is not possible to think of building a sustainable business model if the editorial component does not constantly talk to the business component. The traditional canonical separation between the state and the church has no raison d’être any longer, and this is because we no longer live in a time of separation between the state and the church. We are at a time when […] the business component, the management, needs to keep listening to the editorial component, […] and, at the same time, the editorial component cannot pretend that it does not have a sustainability model on its horizon, because otherwise I don’t think we are going anywhere. (Editor, newspaper, Italy, from study)”

Language is important, it reflects and elicits change

Whilst interviewees used building and spatial metaphors to represent the separation in the past (walls, silos, boundaries), current practices were described with phrases connoting a softer separation (blurred line, wall with holes) alongside ecological metaphors, linking this process to evolution and adaptation. 

“This alternative perspective posits that organisms must adapt to survive major environmental changes; likewise, it suggests that, faced with diminished profits and layoffs, news companies are ‘naturally’ responding to structural changes by pursuing higher integration between news and advertising. By adapting new metaphors, journalists legitimise new practices that clash with the traditional norm of separation (Artemas et al., 2016)”

The new norm of integration

Following the study, we can consider this new norm to be based on three main concepts – collaboration, adaptability and business thinking. 

Collaboration: cross-functional teams representing editorial, marketing, sales and tech departments need to be involved when new digital products are designed. Inter-departmental collaboration is thus normatively framed as a necessary condition to favor exchanges of ideas and innovation in a digital environment.

We had this expression here, for many years, ‘the Chinese Wall’ between the business side and the editorial side. Right now, [journalists] can see us every day, because we sit in the newsroom, and we are really interested in the work. We’re attending all the meetings. […] (Manager, newspaper, Poland, from the study)

The second concept, adaptability, is also framed as a key value. This is clearly illustrated, for instance, in the following quote from a manager of a French broadcaster:

I don’t know if tomorrow the job that we do today will be the same. Our business keeps changing every day. And, in fact, I think the key to success is adaptability. It is not easy if we do not have journalistic, marketing, and business teams that are able to adapt to changes. (Manager, TV, France, from the study)

Business thinking is the third concept that emerges as a central value in the norm-building process. Like the other key values, it exerts moral force. This is illustrated, for example, in the following quote from an editor of the previously mentioned French broadcaster, who normatively frames the development of business-thinking skills within editorial departments as a new essential requirement.

Now it’s clear, especially for a journalist, that it’s important to know if the content you’re producing can bring money in. A few years ago, this might have seemed crazy, but now we have to know, if we want to survive, whether what we produce can have economic [gains]. (Editor, TV, France, from the study)

A new role for journalists: subscription sellers

With these new norms, journalists should also develop new skills and adopt different approaches to their daily work to favor collaboration with editorial. Ultimately, in the digital world, journalists are expected to fulfill the new role of subscription sellers. 

My biggest [lesson] learned is: ‘Put the numbers on the table and then let the journalists be very creative and find their way to those numbers’. […] You need goals and parameters that you can follow every day […] in order to get people understanding the need for change […] [and] that their work actually affects the whole newspaper. […] They just need to be activated, not by saying what they need to do, but they must become both problem solvers and subscription sellers. (Editor, newspaper, Finland)

Key takeaway here: those working on these integration projects (often ‘bridge rolers’) should help journalists understand why they need to take on this role.

Balancing old and emerging norms 

Money cannot actually affect the news. […] You have to find the right balance between having the business side working with the editorial side and some sections [that] should be completely free.

The gradual move from old to emerging norms involves a difficult, ongoing negotiation. Cultural change doesn’t happen overnight, it’s not about revolution, but evolution, and understanding and dealing with this requires strong leadership. 

Buy-in from the top 

The leader is the single most powerful influence on an organization’s culture, and their signal in a certain direction will be the single most powerful lever for change (and the opposite if they don’t buy in). 

The uniform recommendation is fast, unilateral action: the longer you wait, the higher the price – strategy implementation is hesitant, big decisions are fudged, transformation is slower. 

Make use of data 

Although culture is the one thing that transcends all KPIs, they’re valuable for adding a layer of explicit accountability to middle management, turning journalists to focus on more business-oriented metrics. 

Reuters Institute gives the example of The Guardian who uses data to create nudges for the team.

One of the big reasons this has been so successful for us is because of structural changes three years ago when we required desks to be wholly accountable for their work and for their staff, so they couldn’t hand things off anymore, as with ‘I’m only responsible for like this one element’. Now it’s ‘No, you’re responsible for all of it’. … because of that, people had to start leading and managing their teams better because the buck stopped with them.

We added a field in the CMS… ‘the article should be this long’ … The action we wanted was, ‘just think about how long it should be’. … we did that not by telling them to do that but by putting in a small field, adding a tiny bit of friction

Data projects are about far more than the data. Data interventions can deliver cultural change and strategic change, provided there is clarity around what they need to deliver from the start:

The main thing is the specificity of the aim … start with something specific that you’re trying to change. If you’re able to change it using the data, then that leads you into very interesting places, and probably ensures that things go well. … I think that’s why loads of people who have tried to copy us sometimes fail, because they think what they’re doing is about data. … They think that it’s just important to have data in the newsroom … If your aim isn’t, ‘we need to improve this thing. And the data will help us do that’, then you’re on a hiding to nothing.

Training your new leaders

Reuters bring up the important question of leadership in this new domaine:

Leaders in the middle of the organization increasingly carry the burden of achieving OKRs and KPIs – and they need support and training to do this. Previously they didn’t need to be good leaders of people, now they do. But how to be a good leader needs to be learned. Few are naturally gifted, and management was not what they signed up for when many leaders chose journalism as a career. Investment in skill building here, especially in performance management, project management, feedback and mentoring, will pay huge dividends. Good leadership is learned, not innate.

For examples of bridge roles in action, working to bring editorial and commercial closer together, have a read of this article with cases from Berlingske Media, New Statesman Group and BBC.

The Audiencers' Festival in London in October 2023 did not disappoint! With 145 digital publishing professionals the afternoon was filled with insightful conversations both on and off stage. To reflect this, we're publishing not just one, but a series of takeaway articles from the event!

Our final session of the day: The art of translating between editorial and commercial

On the panel:
- Maria Bissendorf, Head of Membership Development, now Head of Transformation at Hearst UK
- Morten Ro, Independent engagement designer and advisor

Instead, collaborate and explore a new, shared language. The only place to look for the truth is by connecting deeper with your audience, those at the strategic core of it all.” 

A membership / audience-first pivot essentially looks like this:

The most powerful role in this pivot is a bridge role. This bridge-builder, translator and collaborator will be able to do the ground work between teams before trying to gain support and buy-in from senior leadership, and using patience and experimentation to show the benefits of cross-silo and cross-language efforts. 

And this is the context of Maria’s work at Hearst UK.

3 years ago, the company put their foot on the pedal to launch a digital membership model. But what wasn’t in place back then was a structure and mindset to support this move, and drive success – such as membership or engagement roles, product teams, investment into product, customer experience and UX thinking, etc.

At the time, digital was a scale play, built around traffic and reach rather than bringing audiences back and keeping them, understanding what the reader is doing and why. Afterall, memberships are a product whereby teams need to turn digital content into an engagement play.

Changing organizational charts and KPIs is the simple part of the process. What’s tricky is getting people on board with this new direction and approach, changing mindsets on what’s good“

> Also from The Audiencers’ Festival: Bridge roles in practice: the models, strategies and structures for success

A new mindset that connects old languages at Hearst

Having previously worked in marketing and events, Maria moved into this new thing called ‘membership’ in 2020 with the goal of launching ASAP. However, she quickly realized that the structure wasn’t there. Whilst subscription targets could be hit with little collaboration in a print-driven mindset, siloed teams wouldn’t work for digital membership models. 

So, whilst Maria’s role was to develop the membership product, focussing on the ‘what’ alone wouldn’t work. In order to achieve this goal, silos would need to be broken down and mindsets changed to have engagement and conversion as key performance indicators, instead of reach.

This involved 3 key areas of work: 

• Ways of working: membership will bring the organization together organically, with constant product iteration, paywalling the website and full funnel approach. This means challenging habits and familiarity, and being prepared to fail, something we naturally avoid
• Building a shared language: this often happens organically as you begin collaborating
• Reorganizing: some barriers need to be broken down. The key learning here, for Maria, is that senior leadership needs to be on board. “It’s amazing how fast barriers can get removed if the senior leadership is on board”

Difference in languages: how did that show most concretely?

“The same conversations with different teams had very different outcomes!” 

There’s a huge spectrum between teams: 

• Marketers are often the most chameleon-like
• Editorial and tech are usually the furthest away from each other as their worlds didn’t meet before. Editorial teams are creatives, storytellers, ideas machines, opinion leaders. They’re quick decision-makers but also quick to change their minds
• Tech has their own language (literally!), many acronyms, all about detail, sprints are locked in, juggling lots of dependencies
• ALL teams are flexible and can respond to the user/reader needs, but the challenge can be bringing them on the same page with what we’re doing, or not doing (just yet), as the lead times that they’re used to are incredibly different

How can you bring these two teams closer together? 

• Separated briefing sessions to stay within each teams’ language and give them the details that only they are after (time efficient), then run combined status sessions to build trust and respect
• Build a shared understanding for what we do right now, what we do later, what we don’t do and why, and keep re-enforcing that where needed
• For any ideas that we’re not using right now, save them for later so everyone feels their voice is heard. At the same time, this promotes a focused approach to continue moving in a single direction, which keeps more techy folks happy
• Understand that some words are particularly delicate, mostly the very basics, such as “readership” vs “user” vs “customer” vs “audience”. It’s not about arguing over which to use but making sure everyone’s on the same page and understands each other

The skills needed for this bridge role

Absolute clarity:

What are we doing, why are we doing it. But just as importantly, what are we NOT doing, why are we NOT doing it?

Why is this such a challenge in itself? 

• Leaders and managers aren’t often aware of all the projects happening across the organization, which means they don’t have an accurate perception of people’s workload
• Leaders and managers aren’t aware of the “multiplier effect” — that one initiative in one department could require resources from another, which could stretch them too thin
• People leave or are let go, but their work is simply transferred to another employee

Empathy: 

“I hear this a lot where teams clash and people mistake ‘someone that’s not easy to work with’ with ‘unaligned objectives or difference in language‘.”

Communication: 

Consistently speaking to all teams, which is probably the hardest part because it’s both proactive (e.g. giving KPIs) and reactive (e.g. catching when something goes wrong and correcting it)

“The way to be successful in a bridge role previously came down to your personal relationships, your social capital and your network within the organization,” says Robin Kwong, new formats editor of The Wall Street Journal, on the Journalism.co.uk podcast.

“Now that it’s more mature, it really comes down to having common goals and documentation, and set processes for how you communicate with each other.”

How do you decide what is truly not worthwhile?

Ask your teams, regularly and often, “What are you doing that you don’t think is a good use of your time, and why?”

The American Press Institute recommends this framework:

“In the top-right quadrant are items that both drive revenue and are aligned with your news organization’s mission — enterprise reporting that is shown to engage readers and drive subscriptions, for example. Things that fall into this category of work are likely worth continuing.

In the bottom-left quadrant are items that neither drive revenue nor are central to carrying out your mission. Consider this category the “low-hanging fruit” in your effort to cut out low-value work.

Things that fall into the top-left quadrant — they drive revenue but aren’t “mission-critical” — may be worth continuing and can help “subsidize” the work in the bottom-right quadrant, which doesn’t necessarily drive revenue but nonetheless is central to your mission.”

Tips for staying patient and keeping focused

Reflection:

“Back to my point about empathy, you have to ask why something is not working. What do they need to hear? How can I be honest with them but also give them what they need? For example, discussing what is and isn’t in scope with an editorial team. How we have to start small and simple, something that they’re not used to thanks to their print mindset where they could only send the ‘perfect product’.”

Be comfortable with success not always being defined by KPIs:

“There’s no doubt that we need KPIs, but realizing that you’re making headway in bringing teams together is just as valuable. For example, I don’t yet have an engagement target for our products but there’s nothing more satisfying than having conversations with an editor and a marketeer whereby the editor has an idea, the marketeer underlines it as they can see the customer in front of them and I can imagine what this looks like as, for instance, the app.”

Morten’s perspective

“Building audience and membership mindsets is a marathon, not a sprint, and you need allies in other parts of the organization. Look for bridge roles, creatives, non-ego and low power people who aren’t protective of their own silo or language. Build a creative and playful space to explore where your languages and success metrics overlap and differ (this might be in your spare time if needed). Build a catalog of experiments that you’d love to do. Wait for the right opportunity to pitch. Pitch experiments as a learning effort and document extensively to make learning a success metric in its own right.”

A final takeaway? 

You’re not alone! You’re actually at the center of it all.

Learn the internal politics, but don’t choose a side. You’re the audience advocate.

Senior leadership owns the keys to your success – are they bought in and do they support you and your role? Offer a way to document/illustrate that your discipline is different and important.

Our first session at The Audiencers' Festival in London last week did not disappoint, with 145 digital publishing professionals the afternoon was filled with insightful conversations both on and off stage. To reflect this, we're publishing not just one, but a series of takeaway articles from the event! 

Kicking the day off: How bridge roles can be used to bring editorial, marketing and product together to increase ARPU

On the panel: 
- Martina Andretta, Head of Social at the New Statesman
- Lars K. Jensen, Audience, data & journalism at Berlingske Media
- Dmitry Shishkin, Independent Publishing Consultant

“Bridge role”, a concept that existed without a name for a long time but one that reflects the shift towards subscription as a revenue model. One where teams need to come together to put audiences first from every angle, representing and aligning interests across the company.

But how can publishers succeed in developing or improving a bridge role? Our 3 panelists share their perspectives on some of the essential models, stragies and structures needed for success.

1. Internal alignment

Martina is Head of Social at the NS, a role that developed into a bridge fairly organically as she works increasingly between editorial, and everyone who isn’t editorial – data, tech, product, and other brands in the NS Media Group. 

For Martina, one of the biggest challenges for those in a bridge role to tackle is internal alignment. Getting all teams working towards the same goals, speaking the same language and, in the case of subscriptions, understanding the value of their work in the same way (e.g. an article written for high page views vs high conversion rates).

Simply building a timeline of the title’s changes over the years proves why alignment is a challenge… With digital transformation and the shift from advertising to subscription-based revenue models people within the company have been required to make significant changes in their day-to-day work.

Thus came the realization that an audience team was essential for success in these subscription projects, ensuring teams talk to each other in a productive and regular way necessary to align and advance in projects. 

First steps in this role to ensure alignment: 

• Define your value proposition and North Star with senior management. Repeat this often during meetings to ensure everyone’s working towards the same goal
• Identify the customer by carrying out audience reviews
• Get everyone in the same room. Set regular catch-ups, get invited to meetings to understand other team’s mindset, review as regularly as possible 
• Get to know the team. In practice, listen! Other people’s frustrations can often offer the solution to the challenges you are facing 

A case study example of aligning teams

With the integration of paywalls and registration walls into articles came the need to ensure teams were working towards the same goal. For example, the audience team worked with editorial to define the KPIs for success, moving from a purely advertising (reach) focus, to also writing for conversions. I.e. ensure there’s a mutual relationship between the wall and article, rather than one being dependent on the other.

The project: a data-led approach to commissioning stories

The challenge: different teams were working on different goals, understanding what success looks like. 

The solution: long-tail analysis.

In practice: the team analyzed 844 articles published over 7 weeks (taking out any ‘huge hits’ that might skew the data) with the goal of looking at content that performed well in terms of both page views and conversions (note that the graph above only shows the page views analysis). 

For example, the above graph, looking at page views, revealed that most traffic was only coming from 25% of articles. I.e. 75% of articles were doing nothing for the NS business. 

After this analysis, on both PVs and conversions, articles were placed on a chart to discover which content performed well for both metrics: page views (visits) and conversions (subscriptions).  

For articles falling into the “Under performers” category, that’s where work needs to be done to ensure it supports to at least one business goal.

This analysis and chart was developed for every editorial category so the audience team could speak with every editor to have regular catch-ups, understanding what was and wasn’t working, trends, etc. 

For instance, the culture team took the advice on board, optimizing the performance of each article for these 2 goals. The result was that they ended up publishing fewer articles but with higher page-views and conversions. 

But, importantly, this success helped to get other teams on board. The culture team became brand ambassadors to prove that the analysis and changes made were working. They also organized regular meetings with editorial and data teams, as well as establishing lines of accountability – having some kind of backing from senior management. 

What needs more work? Clear roles and responsibilities (fairly hard in a small team, but this makes it all the more important to manage correctly), as well as moving away from legacy workflows, working towards a more circular model where data analysis and feedback informs the planning/commissioning (where everyone is involved) before the editing, design, etc. thus helping to better align teams.

Martina’s key takeaways: 

• If you are thinking of introducing a bridge role: look around the newsroom. Often people with the right skillset are already part of your organization, and may only need further training or support
• If you are in a bridge role: get to know people. Bridge roles can have levels of seniority, but being respected and listened to is key. 
• If you are in a bridge role: if there’s an area you know less of, get yourself invited to their regular catch-ups
• If you are starting out in a bridge role: bring concrete examples of how your work has made a difference and how it could make other people’s jobs easier

> To add to your reading list: The Audiencers’ Festival in Paris according to Marion: the ‘best ofs’ from our event

2. User needs at Berlingske Media

The audience team at Berlingske Media is made up of 3 people who together own the user facing features like paywalls, registration walls, user journeys, flows etc. and working with every part of Berlingske Media. 

Lars’ role specifically: 

“To work together with our newsrooms and editorial staff to ensure that we develop and present our journalism in a way that is relevant to our audience and generates value to us as publishers.”

User needs use case

The project: produce content with a user need in mind, understanding which user needs are best for achieving business goals such as subscriptions

The challenge: too many articles weren’t converting. 

The solution: a year of user needs projects! Helping teams to understand the different ‘needs’ and using it as a prism for analyzing stories with the goal of converting readers into subscribers (focus was therefore on the title, sub-heading and first 2 paragraphs).

Putting this model into practice has taken a year – starting with analysis and presentations, buy-in from editorial teams at each title and workshops with each department (for instance with exercises to understand the user need that each article falls under). It was also essential to use this time to develop a shared language on user needs and understanding audiences across titles. I.e. What is a connect me story? Does everyone agree on this definition?

The final step to put the changes and work into practice was to translate this to journalism.

This research revealed that some needs are very effective at converting, but are under-served (and vice versa). For example, whenever an “update me” story was published, the number of conversions also went up.   

What needs more work?

Cultural change – “It’s so very hard!”… but here are 3 tips to help success.

• Get buy-in from management: it will give you both leverage and confidence in what you are doing and trying to achieve
• Find a clear narrative and stick to it, don’t have 10-15 points on how user needs can improve journalism. Instead start with 2-3 and really make it concrete to editors, showing why and how it works. 
• Find out what success is for others and help them achieve it (the social aspect of jobs to be done) – when are your colleagues succeeding? How can you help them achieve that with the user needs project? 

What next? 

Strategy execution

4 important pillars for executing strategy:

Structure is actually not the most important, rather communication and information workflow – How are people talking to each other? Is the right data going in the right places? Where does one person’s work end and another’s begin?

Smarter collaboration

Bridge roles are also about designing how people can work better together, being the one who actually acts to put the bridges into practice, rethinking existing roles and structures.

“Yet our data suggest that publishers whose corporate structures house product and analytics functions in centralized parts of the organization, even while their newsrooms are decentralized, have difficulty fostering the kind of on-the-ground, close-to-the-reader collaboration between disciplines needed to make a reader revenue strategy really work.

[…]

So what can legacy publishers do to create structures that drive reader revenue? Structure doesn’t have to mean just relationships on an org chart. Sometimes rethinking existing roles and workflows can be a solid first step towards larger structure changes.“

Columbia Journalism Review / Tow Center

To do this at Berlingske Media Group, Lars and his team have now developed forums in the middle of all teams from the 4 groups, one for advertising and another for logged users, with representatives from each title. The goal here is to first develop their strategy in a sustainable manner, learning from each other and bringing expertise together before executing in each title. 

3. Bridge roles move your organization forward

Dmitry, Independent publishing consultant and “influencer” of the industry, particularly when it comes to bridge roles and user needs, was the final panelist to take to the stage, discussing some of the essentials for success in bridge roles based on his experience.

Start by relaxing decision makers

People are naturally averse to change, but change is your friend disguised as your enemy! 

Words matter – you need a common vocabulary

If you describe the same thing differently across multiple teams it’ll be like you’re talking about different things. Instead of competing for the “right” language, collaborate and explore a new shared language.

Train people to go from one part of the organization to another 

By moving between teams and understanding various goals and what “success” looks like, your people will gain respect and trust from teams.  

Those in bridge roles need soft skills and to be able to communication easily 

Bridge rolers are in the “people” business, and good communication skills are essential:

• Needs to have a deep understanding of the organization of the company & its values
• Needs to be respected by all teams – socializing is very important; get to know people in their everyday lives. So you need to be up for that
• Will wear lots of hats, so should enjoy constant change & development
• Keen to learn – humble to not understand something (similar to project managers) 
• Listener & leader – good communicator who isn’t afraid to say no, having a narrative over what needs to be prioritized to achieve business goals 
• Patience – not always a directly rewarding role, has to evaluate whether something is worth continuing
• Should be able to translate between teams – teams use different languages, so those in bridge roles should be able to help translate but also connect the two, help them understand each other
• Be bold, use data and tell stories. If something is obvious and no one can see it (or don’t have the time), think of how you can visualize it with data, tell it as a story or something else. And present it to the right people in the right context. If you firmly believe in something, giving up should be the very last resort ;-)

Tolerance to fail if lessons are learned 

For example, back in 2016, Dmitry worked on a BBC hackathon project in Africa. Whilst the products launched weren’t successful, it did allow the BBC team to learn some important lessons, both internally and externally.

1. Listen to audiences, and then listen again, using these learnings to be more precise in task-setting

2. Try new things, but make decisions quickly – listening to audience feedback also helped us to drop one idea and take another further and then scale it from one regional solution to several international ones

3. Prepare: things do still take time. 

4. Get the team environment right, people need to be flexible to make it work

5. Understand what you get into – for instance, in this project, Africa includes many emerging markets with talented developers, many of whom are working within digital start-ups and have little free time

The takeaway: part of a bridge role is having the confidence to try new things, accepting that you may succeed in a way that you weren’t expecting. 

Integrating user needs is a typical bridge role task

But to ensure success, all teams need to be involved. They need to understand what user needs are and how to push in the same direction. 

More on bridge roles:

• What are bridge roles in media organizations?
• From problem solver to innovator: how bridge roles have evolved in newsrooms
• The rise of bridge roles in news organizations

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As part of a reorganization of The New York Times marketing department, Perrine Pavageau took on the role of "Program Manager" (PMO), a role at the crossroads of strategic vision and execution (read our article introducing her role here). Her main objective: to put in place operational mechanisms to ensure the success of marketing strategies. It's a function that answers the questions "how do we do it?" a contact person for teams to turn to express and overcome their organizational challenges. 

In this series of articles, Perrine recounts 5 operational projects carried out in this role for The New York Times.

As The New York Times revisited its paywall strategy, a specialist media strategy team was created in-house – expertise that had previously been completely outsourced. Why this decision?

• Firstly, the cost. Working only with agencies could limit the work to “scopes”. With The New York Times strategy in the midst of reform at the time, greater flexibility was needed. As Janis Huang, VP Subscription Growth, says, “Working with an agency required a lot of work to convey our strategy, but we were in the process of redefining our strategy.”

• Also, the desire to rethink the marketing campaigns for The New York Times, which were mainly made up of banners and emails. According to Janis, the answer to the question “What should The New York Times Marketing look like to the world?” was to bring the campaigns to life, for a stronger emotional impact. This could be done with new media such as audio, radio, TV or outdoor.

• Finally, there was a desire to measure the “brand affinity” impact of these new formats on specific brand attributes.

The New York Times therefore switched to a hybrid model. Experts in digital and traditional media were recruited to join a team called “Marketing & Media Strategy”. The New York Times chose to bring in experienced leaders to guide the strategy and establish capabilities from the ground up. While still using agencies, especially for brand campaigns or specific expertise.

My first project as Program Manager was to review the campaign execution processes to integrate the media team’s work. This was called the “Interaction model“. A new term, which has become part of everyday language.

An Interaction Model is a framework that defines the roles and responsibilities of each team, strengthens collaboration, and brings transparency and alignment. For The New York Times, the objectives were:

• Minimize disruption from reorganization

• Provide a common structure, understood by all

• Improve visibility throughout projects

• Establish a structured and positive collaboration

• Reduce operational risks

A bit like an internal consultant, I went through the following steps:

1. Listening to existing processes and challenges
2. Defining a framework that included phases, roles, interactions and deliverables
3. Obtaining validation from the teams and management
4. Integrating the framework into the templates of project management tool
5. Communicating and evangelizing the framework to ensure adoption

It included:

A high-level framework for monthly, quarterly or annual planning. The objective: that teams anticipate together, and are aligned on the priorities and necessary resources.

An end-to-end campaign framework with all steps and interactions.

Here are the points that really made an impact, in my opinion:

• Clearly naming each phase – like in agile. It doesn’t sound like much, but it helps. When I said to management “we have a sticking point in the media build phase”, they knew what I was talking about

• An “official” kickoff phase followed by a brief for the creative and media teams. This avoided projects being launched on an impromptu request. And everyone was briefed in the same way

• Creative & Media checkins so that creative teams and media planners would work together, just like in an agency. Imagine: the creative team starts with an illustration-based concept, but the media team ends up recommending audio. These teams need to communicate upstream to have time to look at each other’s progress

• Sharing results with the creative teams, so that they understand what worked and what didn’t. Through this, the creatives have started to acquire a business language and a better understanding of the issues at hand.

The challenge was to get this framework adopted. We quickly had to make specific versions for different types of campaigns or business lines. The 3 weeks of Concept & Planning were not always possible with the increasing pressure on the pace of promotions. And not all projects needed an innovative media plan. In contrast, Brand Campaigns had a much longer Concept & Planning phase.

For me, what has kept these interaction patterns going was:

• Management support 

• The Program Management function, which guaranteed their adoption

• Daily stand-ups with the project teams. They allowed us to discuss the status of each phase, the blocking points and the dependencies

Today, the teams still rely on a system of Interaction Models, which have of course evolved over time, constantly being called into question according to structural changes and company objectives.

> To add to your reading list: The New York Times dynamic paywall model, analyzed