Matt Martel, managing editor of audience and platform curation, has a particularly unique perspective on how to work in the media world. He comes from a media background, working with BusinessDesk — New Zealand’s leading data-driven news network — as an editor.

Once NZME bought out BusinessDesk, however, he was moved to The New Zealand Herald, which recently became a truly digital-first newspaper through separating its print and digital teams.

“We’re really successful as a publisher, and we’re still growing,” Martel said during the during the recent INMA Asia/Pacific News Media Summit. Even still, the Herald is looking for more traffic.

Part of how it’s doing this is learning to accept failure.

Their goal is to create a start-up culture, one focused on the development of the company through trial and error, experimentation with new processes and being unafraid to try something new.

One of the things they tried was going into the world of application development — creating First Look AI, a tool to help with drafting headlines and assisting in the media creation process. “It’s so successful it has its own development team,” Martel said.

The focus has shifted with what types of stories they do as well — ones focused on updating and ones focused on educating. Education-focused articles tend to do better than those focused on updating, and so now they’re able to tailor the ratio of articles on the site towards the distinct needs of each user.

“One thing we’re [also] driving out at the moment is an AI driven homepage,” Martel said. He described how this new technology pushes different stories to readers based on what’s most likely to generate the most views. They want to make the homepage relevant to every user of their site, increasing retention and increasing profit.

They’re also focusing on tracking progress of every editorial section: “Everything we do is under constant review, and if it isn’t working we change it,” he said. They’re not afraid to change it because the Herald, and NZME as a whole, views errors as something to learn from.

They also have a few primary key learnings: a clear and digestible strategy, progress over perfection, making space for speculation and innovation, dividing their focus on stories into big stories first, then moderate stories followed by smaller ones, and finally focusing on common metrics to help provide a broader context for the company.

NZME has substantially increased their profits and have grown as a company by a wide margin, especially since they began to develop into the digital sphere.

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