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

If you are a digital subscriptions leader, you probably face a paradox every day: all the accountability, almost none of the control.

Having led subscription businesses at two US media companies, and now advising publishers on subscription growth in Europe, I see this everywhere, all the time. The head of subscriptions holds the P&L responsibility. But they rarely hold the assets—the CTO controls the dev queue, the Editor-in-Chief controls the headlines, and the CPO controls the UX. If the head of subs is lucky, they control email marketing and customer success.

If that’s you: To get anything done, you cannot just decide—you have to barter.

Because subscriptions sit at the exact intersection of business, product, editorial, and data, you are an elite player in a game of extreme cross-functional collaboration.

Here’s the playbook for surviving in that gap.

The post Alignment as an extreme sport: 5 things effective subscriptions leaders do appeared first on Audiencers.

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

There is no shortage of data in media operations. There is also no shortage of stress and overwhelm in media operations – and an abundance of data is now contributing to it.

“There’s so much data – I don’t know what to look at, I don’t know what’s important.”

Data is an opportunity for media operations. It improves four things at once:

• Audience understanding (the foundation on which everything else lies)
• Content strategy
• Business performance
• Impact measurement

Unlocking these improvements rely on appropriately leveraging the data in meaningful and actionable ways. And when done systematically, harnessing data becomes a natural part of operations. That’s a data culture to strive for.

Building such a data culture doesn’t happen overnight. And some newsrooms are certainly further along on their data maturity ladder than others.

The data maturity ladder is made up of three rungs:

• Data-informed: we have a basic understanding and visibility on what’s happening
• Data-driven: we are actively using data to support strategic decisions, and ultimately growth
• Data-led: we are putting data in service of business outcomes, having systematised its leverage

The post 7 ways media can build a practical, empowering data culture appeared first on Audiencers.

Alban Mazrekaj leads the Editorial Product Development team at NZZ, establishing a new way of  working that respects journalism while making it more audience-centric, going beyond traditional  journalistic performance metrics to align with broader business goals. 

With this kind of job description, how could we not want an interview to find out more!

“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.” 

> NZZ has built an Editorial Product Development team that sits beside the classic product team. Three editorially-minded people translate journalists' needs into product decisions rather than imposing product thinking on them

> Each of the three keeps a foot in the newsroom, spending two days a week in their original editorial role. One is a former newsletter editor, now the newsletter product manager

> The journalists who suit these roles aren't the ones who love the craft most. They are the ones already asking about target groups, business goals and internal processes

> Research found readers couldn't tell opinion pieces from news. The fix, showing the writer's face in the teaser, needed editorial buy-in, and it lands better from a colleague than from a product manager with post-its

> Because the team already knew the photo desk's workflows, defining requirements took half the time. Success is measured on completion rates, recirculation and engagement, treated as a leading indicator for churn

Tell us a little bit about you & your background 

The post Alban Mazrekaj: bridging newsroom and product at NZZ appeared first on Audiencers.

Peter Brumby is Product Manager at Financial Times

The post Building a Product team on a tight timeline appeared first on Audiencers.

At The Atlantic, we pride ourselves in fostering an environment that abides by a guiding principle: a spirit of generosity, or, in other words, “a natural disposition in each colleague toward service and selfless conduct.” We embody this spirit throughout the product-development process by putting an emphasis on collaboration from idea conception to product launch.

This kind of collaboration requires open lines of communication, flexibility in planning, and a commitment to serving the reader, which is a goal every team at The Atlantic has in common.

In product, and especially in news product, it’s so important for every team to be rowing in the same direction. Collaboration needs to happen across the newsroom, marketing, sales/advertising, engineering, design, audience research, data science, and many other teams in order to get to a launch.

To illustrate, here’s how we launched our article-gifting feature with successful cross-functional collaboration throughout the process.

The post A Spirit of Generosity: How The Atlantic team collaborates to launch features like article gifting appeared first on Audiencers.

Editorial, product, marketing… Bridge roles, squads, mission teams, forums, stakeholders… Acquisition, conversion, retention… There’s certainly a lot to consider when organizing your teams. And with digital transformation comes to the need to reconsider siloed teams to ensure everyone’s working together, cross-functionally (yes, we’re talking to you editorial!) towards new goals, including acquiring and retaining subscribers rather than simply searching for clicks.

To help benchmark how other publishers are organizing their reader revenue teams, we spoke to a collection of publishers on their team structure, KPIs and how this links to their overarching business model.

The post Ask the experts: How publishers are organizing their reader revenue teams appeared first on Audiencers.

The separation between editorial and business activities of news organizations has long been a fundamental norm of journalism. Journalists have traditionally considered this separation as both an ethical principle and an organizational solution to preserve their professional autonomy and isolate their newsrooms from profit-driven pressures exerted by advertising, sales and marketing departments.”

Interviewing 41 media professionals in 6 European countries, an interesting 2020 study (although a bit dated now given the rapidity of change) looks at how editorial and commercial integration has become the norm, and what this looks like. Paired with best practices from those working within the industry, there’s some valuable lessons to be learned and perhaps a new role for journalists: subscription sellers.

The post Breaking the silo: bridging editorial and commercial teams, the essentials for success appeared first on Audiencers.

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

As an external engagement strategist, Morten has had to learn the languages spoken by those across publishing teams in order to understand their context and help to build new mindsets (which often get termed ‘audience-first’, or ‘membership’). From his experience, teams often don’t agree which is the ‘right’ language and mindset. But, in fact, the truth lies in between: 

The post It’s all Greek to me: the art of translating between editorial and commercial, the example of Hearst UK appeared first on Audiencers.

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

The post Bridge roles in practice: the models, strategies and structures for success appeared first on Audiencers.

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.

The post 5 projects of a PMO at NYT – The Interaction Model appeared first on Audiencers.