What’s on our minds these days? 

If you talk to editorial leaders (as I do almost daily), here are some common themes that keep popping up and on which I plan to share knowledge and insights through Webinars and newsletters throughout the year.

Which AI use cases are actually paying off? 

Most news organisations have run dozens of pilots by now and dedicated resources to evaluating experiments. Where is the juice actually worth the squeeze?

As one editorial leader said: “We’re putting a lot of resources into something that maybe drives innovation, but it doesn’t drive value.” (You can read about some newsrooms’ past experiments here, and I’m going to be writing about them in this newsletter as well going forward.)

Bring our audiences to our Web sites and apps

Many news brands are successfully reaching younger audiences and women on TikTok and Instagram.

How can we translate this into brand loyalty so we are less reliant on external platforms and more likely to build a direct relationship with our audience? How can we draw people to our owned-and-operated platforms and make visiting us a habit?

Innovation beyond AI

As one European newsroom strategy leader said, we can’t always say, “‘OK we need more technology.’ We need more information on what we can do with our newsrooms ourselves without the need of technology. I’m completely convinced that we still can do a lot on the field we already have instead of building a new stadium. We don’t need a new stadium to play better football.”

AI scaling and adoption

How do we get our newsrooms excited about using AI tools? Many organisations have newsrooms in different cities far away, and having constant conversations to engage hundreds of reporters is hard.

Introducing new workflows is challenging. What are the new roles that go along with that process? How do we do this well?

Alignment on innovation

Whether it is on AI or on other issues, how do we align editorial, product, and technology teams so they are all pulling in the same direction? 

News fatigue and avoidance

What are some clever ways to overcome news fatigue and news avoidance, to bring new audiences into the fold or to bring old news consumers back?

I see a number of experiments under way that are focused on positive, constructive journalism, and I’m excited to share them with you in this newsletter and on our Webinars in the year ahead.

Audience engagement

Sure, this topic is a couple of decades old, but the solutions to tackling the challenge are often brand new and easier to implement than ever before.

We are seeing all kinds of creative solutions — many of them aimed at building community and all of them underscoring authenticity and connection. Watch this space.

Metrics and data

Let’s face it: Data is always looking backwards.

As we struggle to provide personalised experiences to our news consumers, how do we read the signals in our numbers? How can we design our content strategy to facilitate the collection of first-party data effectively to make metrics more meaningful?

New formats

How do we find resources for new formats? Vertical video, for example, is a hot trend.

How do we go about building an editorial team for that without committing massive resources to something that may not work?

If you’d like to subscribe to my bi-weekly newsletter, INMA members can do so here.

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