8 BuzzFeed lessons for the media industry

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Short , snappy takeouts with cool memes are the way journalism is done in the social generation, so here’s how the INMA World Congress in San Francisco went down.

  1. The print-to-digital transition.



    Very probably, winter has been here for at least the past five years. But the motto of House Stark (of “Game of Thrones” fame) is a telling warning to us all – it could still get worse. Heads could end up on pikes if we don’t play the game properly.  So be prepared.

  2. Be where the audience is.


Because fabulous content delivered to the wrong audience – or just one audience – is just pointless (and impossible to monetise).

  1. It’s all about Big Data.


If your advertising client information is separate from your subscriber information, is separate from your readership information, is separate from your invoicing information, turn off the lights and put out the cat. (Or get a data expert in pronto.)

  1. What would the Vikings do?


When peeps from Scandinavian climes see a stretch of unchartered water, they fearlessly jump in their longboats and pillage the sucker. There is much we could learn from the approach.

  1. Fail early and pivot.


Not every plan is going to work. That does not mean you should embrace the obviously stupid ones, but it does mean that those ventures where you stretch your knowledge and learn valuable new things are not complete failures, even if the plan doesn’t go exactly as expected.

  1. Legacy can be a liability.


In the movie “Gravity,” Sandra Bullock had to cut herself free from her spacecraft in order to survive. Sounds counter-intuitive. Surely she was safest inside the structure built to protect her, right? Wrong. The moral of the story: Trying to keep everything from your past can often limit your future options and threaten your survival.

  1. Nostalgia belongs in the pub.



    Tell your staff members who complain that things aren’t like they used to be that they should cry into their beers, not their keyboards.

  2. Don’t worry, the future is going to be AWESOME!



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