Pubs Need to Push Back Against Teams That Resist Experimentation
When’s the last time you sat down with your staff and asked them to come up with a big idea? We’re talking an idea that’s outside of the box, potentially risky and, overall, atypical for your business.
For many of you, the answer is it doesn’t happen often. That makes sense because there is a real risk aversion in the media industry. By and large, this is an operators’ business where you find something that works and do it on repeat until you become unbelievably good at it and can scale.
The problem with this is that you start to fall into a trap of doing things because you have always done things. The business starts to look almost robotic. Why do we publish at midnight? We’ve always published at midnight. Why do we host an event in a hotel? We’ve always hosted at a hotel. History becomes the norm.
The way things are done is looked at with pride and the history is celebrated. That can be a massive problem. In early 2024, Dotdash Meredith CEO Neil Vogel was on the People vs Algorithms podcast and he said this:
I’m convinced your job as a leader of these organizations is to beat the sentimentality out of them. Because people who are creatives—like me included, you guys included—you fall in love with what you’re doing, particularly when it’s successful. But you have to be really, really willing to not do something that [has] worked because you need to do something different that might work.
It’s a value system. You have to get a value system, at a publisher, of people willing to take educated guess chances as opposed to do more of the same and spin faster. We go through all of this annual planning. If people didn’t have two or three big ideas to at least take a shot at with some resources, it was like, do it again.
Rather than making tiny little changes, what if you took chances? Rolling Stone recently interviewed Ben Collins, CEO of The Onion, and he said this:
We’re in a unique position, certainly. And other places have to learn from this — being afraid all the time and just constantly making transactional moves. How long can you survive like this? What is even the point of being alive if you’re just gonna continue managing rot? And it seems like that’s what 98 percent of people are doing in these media companies right now. I don’t know, take a chance. Nobody likes what’s happening. Especially if you’re a journalism company or a media company, you’re [meant to be] actually reflecting what people want or what people believe. So get some guts and do something interesting. It’s not that hard.
The problem is that to do something different in an industry that has done things one way is to, in effect, be heretical because of how strict the rules are in a media business.
I’ll give you a good example. A journalist interviews a source. We then go off and write a story, using parts of that interview. We don’t allow the source to record the conversation; we don’t publish the full interview. We choose what parts we want. And maybe we use fragments of the conversation. Good media companies will fact check, but not all of them. Then we publish. We don’t share the story ahead of time. Then we move on.
That’s how journalism is done. But what if there was a different way? The Washington Post is piloting a new feature called From the Source. When a journalist publishes a story, the quoted sources can annotate articles that they appeared in. According to The New York Times:
The program will allow only people identified by name in an article to comment on it, and the articles included for now are only those published by The Post’s climate team, according to the memo, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. The Post will vet their remarks for accuracy and fairness, and the publication said it also might withhold comments that violated rules against defamatory or obscene submissions. The submissions will appear as annotations, revealed to readers if they click or hover a cursor over the source’s name in the article.
In his Status newsletter, Oliver Darcy walked through a number of reasons why it might not work and ends by saying, “it’s a feature designed to spark conversation, but it seems destined to create plenty of headaches.”
Maybe. Or maybe not. Publishers need to do a better job keeping people on their site rather than having folks read stories and then go to social media to fight each other about it—including sources. This is an attempt at solving that.
Our industry is fundamentally changing. I view the arrival of AI to be equivalent to the arrival of the web browser. What the internet did to print media, AI could do to digital media if we are not careful. That means we need to foster a culture where doing things differently is not only okay, but celebrated.
But I come back to what Vogel said on that podcast. The people that are rewarded at companies are the ones that stick to the status quo. We all know this is true whether we want to admit it or not. Don’t rock the boat and you’ll be rewarded. Fear of losing one’s job means nothing changes.
This is how you lose. Whether you’re running a department or you’re the CEO, if the words “this is how we’ve always done it” or “we’ve never done that before” pop up in conversations, be worried. We’re all going to have to make hard decisions as the industry continues to evolve. Those that make it will be those that foster a culture where sentimentality is beaten out.
