Webinar Organizing Newsroom for Digital Publishing : Transcripted
Tommy :
Yes, good afternoon everybody from here Helsinki, Finland. We're really thrilled to have you with us today for chat. So first of all, my name is Tommy Haikonen, I am from Fiare and Fiare has been serving media companies for over 20 years and we've been an EU partner with Quintype for some time now. Today, we have with me - Jyrki Utriainen, managing editor and Arttu Romo, tech development management at Karjalainen.
Right so the talk of today, it's about change in The Newsroom of a news media company. We aim to focus now mostly on what it takes to drive the transformation of digital publishing from what it used to be before and before we start, we’ll look into a picture that Karjalainen has provided us with, so you're before we go. Any background information? What is this picture about and what do we see there?
Jyrki :
Yeah. That's a good question Tommy.
It may seem like it has nothing to do with our webinar but if you watch a little bit longer you might see why I have chosen these photos. Actually the first one on the left, is from my home landscape. And do you see any houses?
Tommy :
No, I don't. Maybe, maybe one more so.
Jyrki:
We are living in the countryside, where we published our newspaper, Karjalainen. The region, there is about 160,000 people living there, so there are many towns in Europe which are bigger than our region. So if you think about the newspaper business, over there, it's quite difficult to.
If you think about the post and distribution, how how to do it? It's very difficult and costly. So there are a few tiny difficulties in the print business.
If we think about other angles, almost every house has a good network. So there are a lot of opportunities in the future - digitally.
Tommy :
Yeah. So I can see distribution adds up the cost and whereas the digital distribution is way, way more effective. All right, that gets us started but then maybe we go there might be somebody online who is not totally familiar with your media house. So, could you tell us who Karjalainen is?
Jyrki:
Firstly, I have to say that we have now made a lot of changes since 2017, 2018 about our business to digital channels. As our editor-in Chief said 1.5 years ago, “Digital transformation is not a possibility anymore - it is the only chance for us to survive.”
So, Karjalainen newspaper as I told you, it's a regional newspaper. Our office is at North Karelia, our circulation is now about 26.4 thousand and digital only subscribers are more than 5000. To us, that’s quite big, which is good.
And everybody who has a print subscription,, they also can use websites, applications and so on, so they have access everywhere. And our print is published seven days a week. This is tradition in Finland, for example. I think in Norway, Norway and Denmark the tradition is 6 days per week, but in Finland it's still seven days.
Let's see what's happening to print, for example, next three years.
We are the second oldest newspaper or was a third? I'm not sure. I think it's 147 years old and 1st published in 1874 and we are part of the Media Division of PunaMusta media company.
We also have 6 local newspapers and one free newspaper and two radio channels, so.
Tommy :
So the starting point is that very, very heavy legacy print history and the print newspaper that Karjalainen has been. All right, that gives a very good starting point to look at the future and the change.
Jyrki :
Yeah. And I think we are quite a typical Finland media company.
Tommy :
So in the high level, the digital strategy, what has been the cornerstones of the digital strategy of Karjalainen?
Jyrki :
We have had these three points for 2 1/2 years. The first one is that we try to increase the number of these digital only subscriptions and we try to think of the first point in everything we do. Every day, every morning, whatever we do, we try to think about the point. If we do this kind of story, if we do this and this can we achieve this? This is the most important thing because if we are not going to succeed in this.
As I told you before, every print subscriber has access to to our app and website. So we try to activate to current print subscribers that “hey, you go to your summer cottage? Take your Karjalainen there through the website/app. We encourage our subscribers to use our digital channels.
And we have to also accept that there are print subscribers who will never use our app. We just have to accept that there are some parts of our main subscribers that won't use our app even if we do anything.
Arttu :
But there is also a lot of potential.
And the third one is that we try to increase the value and price of the digital subscription and maybe we are talking later how we have done this for example, through our archives.
Tommy:
Yeah, that would be interesting. All right. So that's the strategy. How do you transform print focused all business into digital business, in your words?
Jyrki :
Well, I would say that you have to change almost everything because the business model of print and business model on the web are totally different.
If you think about print subscriptions, at least at first it was that the subscriber paid once a year, the subscriptions may be January, for the whole year, and then he or she will get print to the home door or post box every morning. And that's it. And you just sent a bill and that's all. Usually the subscriber was happy. Yes, he or she could go to local news, but on the web, you have some very different contents and on your mobile phone you have a lot of different apps, if you don't have some content, some headline that would draw in the reader then you wouldn’t win the reader. It’s a daily challenge whereas for print, this is not the case.
Under this pressure, you should remember this goal everyday when you go to the office.
Tommy:
Yeah. So by the way, how does it feel, is there sort of like an increased pressure on activity, how would you manage the pace of the work for digital?
Jyrki:
Yes, it has. And of course, change happens little by little. Not, not just like one day. Yeah, but it's it's, it's happening and of course there are challenges, but I think nowadays for example, most of our editorial staff, they understand why we have done these things and why we are thinking more and more how we do our contents for the website. Yes, I think almost everybody or everybody understands this.
Tommy:
All right. So here we have some points, but maybe do we want to dig deeper into this or are we? We have the contents, you have the E papers, you have the digital archive.
Jyrki:
Well, I would say that as I said, we have changed almost everything after 2018, we have changed our app, our eBay per our website. We have built, as I say, our infrastructure, market, marketplace, market automation, our archive and so on and so on. Everything has changed.
Tommy:
OK. So when would you say that the decision was made that you will be digital first?
Jyrki:
I would say it was year 2017, 2018. That was the point.
Tommy:
All right. And then to me, almost one of the most intriguing questions is that, if you've been going into media conferences, it's more than 10 years at least, when the only headline has been “you have to go digital or you die”. And for many, many years you didn't see a lot of action. You heard a lot of talk. And now, at least if we look at the regional news media here in Finland, and I know it applies to many other places as well, now carry learning is actually among the first movers to really execute effectively now.
First question is why is the change happening now, if that has been the talk of the town for a long, long time.
Jyrki:
Yeah. I would like to say that the media companies didn't die. Yeah, so business went quite well for many years, but I think that the past two years, three years the print subscriptions have gone down. Actually, it has gone down since 1991. It was first very slow and now it goes faster and faster. I think that we had come to a point where we have to do it before it's too late.
Tommy:
Okay. And so, you notice that print is going more rapidly down whereas the digital bit is increasing so now it feels natural, right? That's interesting. All right, let me just turn to Arttu a little bit. So the editorial team is your customer. So what was the assignment from them to you?
In terms of, you know, the systems and what to do on the IT side of things.
Arttu:
Yeah, I think their basic requirement was that we need to do something different. We have been doing stuff on the web pretty much in the same way for the last 10 years. And there have been some additions, new kinds of paywalls, new kinds of integrated systems and that kind of stuff, but the basic editorial process for our editors have pretty much stayed same and it has been always - print 1st and the digital is the kind of a secondary product of the content that was originally meant for print.
As we started checking the new kind of approach for this. The main reason and the main requirement was that we can't rely on the same kind of system and same kind of way to do things. We need to give more freedom for our editors in the world of Internet and do not have the same kind of leashes that have been around their wrists.
Tommy:
OK so you need to free the journalists!
Arttu:
In a way, yes, in a way. Give the same kind of possibilities to do the content in the website also.
Tommy:
OK well if we talk about the editorial team, their work has been organized in a certain way for a long time. 140 something years, yeah. So you had your print deadlines and everybody knew that by this time you need to have your articles created and ready to call for print and so forth. So now when you went and introduced chains, how was it perceived? I mean, human beings quite often don't like change by default.
Jyrki:
Yeah, that's true. But little by little, as I thought before, it's not a quick change. It takes time. We’ve been making small changes for the last few years. We have been changing a lot and last winter we also changed our organization of our editorial staff, we built brand new teams and the question was that how, how would we organize our editorial staff?
If we have a clean table and our strategy, the first point - growing digital subscriptions, how we are organizing these people in a new way? And don’t think about print, think about how we can be stronger on the web. Yes and that's what we did together with our employees.
And since last winter, our people knew that there was a print deadline somewhere and so on.
The journalists know that now, my story is going to be published on our web, for example, tomorrow morning at 8:00 o'clock and we don't know when it is going to print. And we have only one list and that's the publishing list to the web for clarity.
Tommy:
Could you, on a practical level, give us an example of how there may be different working hours for journalists. Do they work in different times or is it sort of like less people at one time at the news desk or?
Jyrki :
The first change four years ago was that our first journalist came to the news desk, maybe it was eight o'clock 8:00 AM and we changed it and our first journalist comes to the news desk nowadays at 5:30 AM because the morning time is prime time. We can see from our analytics that even E-paper to readers are coming after 4:00 AM and between 5:00 and 6:00 AM there are a lot of people reading our E paper OK and the same thing is on our website. So if there is something to the news in the morning, I mean, if something happened at night time, we need to tell it.
But this last year I think we’ve noticed that our journalists and editors are coming to the office at the same time because now we all know what we’re doing, our individual tasks. We have different teams and jobs. So that if something is breaking-news worthy, we can react accordingly. But anyways, most of our editorial staff is working from Monday to Friday at the same time because we know our contents and what they are doing.
But anyways, it's also very important that we are able to react to different situations and we have to be online when it's happening, also what our analytics and our data tells us.
Tommy:
OK, interesting. So if we still think about the editorial team, what kind of counter arguments have you heard? I mean or has there been any sort of resistance for the digital first approach. So as they're as they're in something sets that you know would be. We shouldn't do this because of this and that reason?
Jyrki:
Yes actually. One of them being “are we going to forget our print subscribers?” But that's not what's happening. Because if we think more and more about how we make this story interesting on the web, it also will be an interesting story in print, and that’s it. But I also hear nowadays that OK, we just have 5000 digital only subscribers, that's quite a lot for us and also we get pretty much EUR from subscriptions and ads nowadays.
And we have to also remember that when we are thinking about the print. I mean newspaper, you have to print it and you have to organize this distribution and it's about 50% of our costs.
Tommy:
That's significant, yeah.
Jyrki:
Yeah. But uh, I think, as I said, that most of our people nowadays understand why we are doing this change and I think that they just try to think about what we should do today? For our subscribers and audience.
Tommy:
How was it by the way in the sales department, I mean like in the advertisement sales into print, magazine, paper is done in a certain way whereas digital is a little bit different. So how have they perceived this kind of change?
Web advertising is not the question, they have experience. But for our app, we had new modules there. The question is also about views and then subscriptions. At first, when we had 200-300 subscriptions, that’s nothing. Then it grew to 5000.
Tommy:
Do you have subscriber goals?
Jyrki :
Actually 5000 was our dream. Which is amazing to think of now. Now ofcourse that’ll expand as well. Maybe 10,000 now. We’ll just have to try harder and harder.
Tommy:
Has this digital journey affected all of them? Some of them, not so many of them?
Arttu:
When talking about systems, there are many systems, there are also new systems and legacy systems and all of those need to be thought through. Sometimes when you can use the legacy systems. You can integrate those two new systems and sometimes you have to think that could there also be a chance for a change? And that's one of the big development processes.
Also considering, could there be more efficient systems integrated together compared to the current ones or the old old ones that we already have? Could there also be a possibility to maybe reduce costs? Perhaps even get some workforce free to do something more productive than before. So that's an ongoing process and whenever we're taking some new systems into use we also have to think how this and that system work together with you and the other systems.
Tommy:
Now, on this digital journey, for Karjalainen, to go live with Bolt CMS system now earlier this year. So in that digital journey, was that sort of a big milestone? So did that change a lot or was it a minor thing?
Jyrki:
Yeah, that's that was very big day for us because we changed everything. We tried to find a system that also our journalist photographers did, our graphic designers could use - the web system. They are writing to the digital website and doing the story straight on the web with the tools. We needed a solution that could guide them to do this. I think the biggest reason why we chose Bold CMS was because of this, it was our kind of system.
Our news desk has been using Bold since June. Our sports journalists are going to learn to use the Bold editor soon. So by next winter the whole editorial team will know how to work around the platform. So they can abandon the old print system for good and we’re counting on it.
Tommy:
Who all did you need to convince on the road? I'm referring to things like the management of the company, the board, maybe even owners and the different stakeholders that you had in place. Was there something specific in there that was there somebody who was not really happy about the change coming or?
Jyrki :
Well, I think that most of them also understood the big picture - what's happening to the print. Slowly. For example, our archive project, which is one of the biggest investments we have done in the past year to our digital channels. We suddenly had an opportunity to do it. It had to be a quick decision and there were team meetings and huddles and we discussed the price and all. After discussing with the editor-in-chief and everyone we realized this was something that had to be done. And everyone was on board because we shared that understanding.
Tommy:
Yes. All right. That's still about Karjalainen's journey. So now I think you have gone far already. There's more to do in the future but you are already quite far. So now looking back knowing what you know today, if you knew all, knew all of this in the beginning of the journey, what would you do differently? Or would you do something differently?
Jyrki:
Yeah, I think we should have done everything much quicker, OK. So it's half time. Maybe some projects could have been planned a little bit. For example buying our analytic project from outside. Thinking about it now, we should have hired someone for it. Typically you would not outsource things that are in the core of your business. But it can be good.
Tommy:
True, yeah. So that's interesting, that's probably a good learning for many people and the audiences as well. How about if we put Karjalainen and a little bit of foresight and think about the industry in general?
We meet a lot of population houses, publishing companies at Fiare. And when we have these conversations we hear pretty much the same scenario in each conversation. Everybody thinks that digital is the future and you have to go there. But then there are some companies that take actions and then there are some companies that just talk about it. Could you think of a reason where the change comes from?
Jyrki:
I think the biggest thing is this, such a long history and this culture of print. It’s in people’s DNA. So its difficult to make big changes to it quickly. And also that this change takes too long because we talk about it for too long but it’s definitely time now. We must act now.
Tommy:
And I know in Finland, on the regional news media, I know Karjalainen has been looked up to because of being first mover to digital and it’s firm strategy.
Jyrki:
That's nice to hear, but we still have a lot to do.
Tommy:
All right. So, uh, do we have any questions from the audience yet?
First one - how would you attract people to get a digital subscription? What are the best strategies? So how do you sell them digital subscriptions?
Jyrki:
Something from the past, when we were talking about this at Karjalainen, our marketing team said that we print ads and we put them as posts for people to promote our digital website. We learned that doesn’t work. We needed a marketplace on the web to promote our website content. We started with some special offers sometimes. You have to be careful there, we shouldn’t move the same things to the digital marketplace as print. You lean into discounts. Digital subscriptions have to be sold on web, special offers, focus on social media as well, that’s how we do it.
Arttu:
And we should also think about the future, it's not just one kind of subscription. We need to develop some new kind of subscription models and products that we can sell online as a digital market.
Tommy:
That is an interesting topic by the way. So do you have something, an example in your mind of what that would be?
Jyrki:
That’s true, we have to test new models and I hope we will test for example next year our sports page. So if someone really wants to be updated with Sports, they can subscribe to just that. We should explore that soon. We need to test subscription models to find the one that works best for us.
Tommy:
Now there’s a question about coupling digital with print subscriptions. How have you done this?
Jyrki:
To sell digital and print well, of course we are still selling print subscriptions and digital. All our print subscribers have access to our digital channels as well. The digital is the priority.
Tommy:
Is the European market ready to go digital?
Jyrki :
I’ve visited Norway, they seem ready. And if they are, why not the rest of us? Because we’re similar countries.
Tommy:
The first movers are on their journey already and others are slowly joining it. This is why we have many interesting conversations in different parts of Europe.
OK, so another question is how hard or easy it was to bring authors to Bold?
Jyrki:
Authors, assuming that it means the journalists. For example, our news desk, I think it was surprisingly easy.
Arttu:
We have been bringing new systems to our editors for some years now, and every now and then there's been lots of complaints about things not working like they would like and that kind of thing but with Bold I think maybe the the biggest reason it was so well perceived was that we pretty much talked with our journalists from the start of the project when we were going through different kind of candidates of the systems, there were lots of different systems that we went through and I went to some of the the best of those through with the journalists and we checked them out and I asked how how they feel about this and that and would that work, how do you think that would sit in our strategy and and so on. When we came up with Bold they were very receiving because the editor part of Bold is such an excellent tool to create content compared to lots of the other systems, so they were pretty much, quickly, familiar with the Bold system and they were pretty much instantly creating content with the editor that was quite an easy, easy one to take into use.
Jyrki:
Yes, and we will see next week, next month, how the whole of our editorial staff takes it.
Tommy:
So I think from Fiare’s standpoint we've been working with a few projects in the history with media companies and I think you can divide them into two categories. There are IT driven projects where IT introduces new tools and such for the editorial team. And then there are editorial lead projects and this clearly was run by the editorial team. And of course then you don't need to do this internal selling for the people who actually ask for the change.
Arttu :
And it was pretty easy to sell the system when I had the list of the features that were requested, yes, that the new system should have. And I could show them Bold and they would see the features in use already. So here is the feature that you have been asking for and there's also this other feature that you have been complaining about that doesn't work in the current system, but here it is in the new system and it's working and I think that was also one of the selling points.
Tommy:
OK, alright, I think we're a little short on time.Let's take one last question from the audience that says that given that the transition to digital is happening soon, how do you think this affects print ads revenue of publishing and do you think print ads can ever be replaced, can print that be replaced? That's a good question.
Jyrki:
Yes. I'm not sure if I'm the right person to talk about this but they are not replaced as we know the situation. We have also seen in past years that when subscriptions go down and down, of course ads and revenues are going little by little, down as well.
I would say that we are in the situation that we need to focus on content. We need to have more and more of those digital subscribers and when we have success there, I would say that we will also have success with ads and marketing.
Tommy:
Yeah. So, if you are successful enough on digital, then the print at revenue becomes less relevant.
Thank you so much everyone for joining in, thank you.