What digital product owners can learn from the newspaper industry

Lessons about product, publishing and perseverance from an industry that’s been at it for centuries.

Lessons about product, publishing and perseverance from an industry that’s been at it for centuries.

by Matt Kelly, Digital Director, Local World

It is, and has been for a decade or more, fashionable to patronise the newspaper industry. A friend of mine, a barrister, tells a great story about a judge explaining a piece of jurisprudence to a not‐very‐bright defendant, and then pausing to say: “I don’t mean to patronise you… you do know what patronise means, don’t you?”

That’s how it feels sometimes when you confess to being from the world of print. For the past ten years my sole focus has been the development and growth of mass market digital media within legacy businesses; first with the Daily Mirror in the UK, then with a number of Latin American news organisations — especially Argentina’s Grupo Clarin — and now with Local World, a major group of more than 70 news brands in the UK.

Colleagues from the tech community, digital, entrepreneurs and even other legacy media (TV in particular — and don’t worry my friends; your time is coming) look upon those of us from and in the newspaper trade with a degree of semi‐interested curiosity. The way we gaze at white rhinos in a safari park.

The skills that make the daily miracle of newspaper creation a reality are just as valuable in the creation of digital products.

Sometimes, out of politeness, they ask a few questions. But never the right questions. “Where do all the stories come from?” (newspapers have things called reporters who are paid to find and write them) “Is it true they’ve got a safe at The Sun with pictures of so and so doing something unspeakable with an Alsatian?” (so I hear) and “Is Piers Morgan really such an arse?” (no, he’s an extraordinarily decent and funny guy).

Some of the questions they should be asking — you know, just on the off chance they could actually learn something from the tree‐killers — include the following:

What are the production processes that enable you to create an entire newspaper from scratch, every day, without fail?

Like the world of digital development, newspapers also employ an agile process. Except in the case of newspapers, this agile process is actually agile. The production and distribution of a mass market national newspaper is a science that has been perfected over generations and is founded on the principle of close collaboration between groups with clearly demarcated responsibilities all working towards a common goal — the deadline.

Intrinsic in this process is a high tolerance of errors. Kelvin McKenzie, a well-known former tabloid editor (and, interestingly enough, a very successful digital entrepreneur these days) once told me that any day he got 7 out of 1o editorial decisions right was a great day. Getting everything right in a daily newspaper is not the point. Getting the newspaper to the point of sale on time is the point.

How do you iterate your product so the newspaper in your hands can feel both modern and yet recognisably the same product your father brought home with him in the 1970s?

Newspapers evolve constantly. Change is structuralised into the workflow. The very production of a newspaper is designed to accommodate day-to-day iterative improvements which will deliver a commercial advantage but won’t scare the readers. And they are brilliant at it. Over time, the product evolves piecemeal, never seeking or desiring a state of stasis. Silicon Valley thinks they invented the concept of permanent beta. They didn’t; they just gave it a name.

How have you managed to maintain a business for decades that consistently manages millions of micro‐ transactions on a daily basis?

Every single day, millions of people walk into a newsagent or supermarket and pick up a newspaper WITHOUT EVEN THINKING ABOUT IT! Name me an app that would survive a month if you had to go to a shop to manually renew the subscription. Even a week?

Newspapers are brilliant at creating loyalty because they are dependable — managing to combine both predictability and surprise. “Shock and amaze on every page” used to be the mantra for tabloids in the UK in the 70s. And they did. But they did so within a consistent framework allied to consistent values.

Steve Jobs liked to bang on about understanding the ‘why’ of Apple’s products. Newspapers know their ‘why’ inside out — sometimes they know it so well they can’t even articulate it, but just feel it instead — and when they breach those values (and I watched 5% of loyal Daily Mirror readers walk away for good when we printed hoax photographs from the Gulf War) the readership feel a sense of outrage that can only be felt about something you care about deeply. Tell me an app that people care about that much. How do they achieve this? Newspapers are built in their readers’ image. Not the other way round.

How did the newspaper industry manage to adapt and thrive throughout wave after wave of cyclical and structural existential threat?

Radio, TV, teletext, the internet — they were all supposed to kill newspapers. And yet… (well, ok, perhaps the internet will finally see them off — but not any time soon) they survive. Not through pivots, but through perseverance.

The skills that make the daily miracle of newspaper creation a reality are just as valuable in the creation of digital products. It’s just that the digital community doesn’t always appreciate that. Nor, sadly, does the newspaper business itself.