Guide #5: Introduction to Podcasting, by Erkki Mervaala.

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About author: Erkki Mervaala is a former Program Manager and Digital Media Specialist for Media Development Investment Fund. He is also a member of the award-winning Finnish climate journalist collective Hyvän sään aikana and works as the managing editor for the climate news website of the same name. Mervaala has worked as a Central Europe foreign correspondent for several Finnish magazines and newspapers. He has also worked as a screenwriter for Yellow Film & TV, web developer and UI/UX designer. He has been a podcaster since 2008.

You can contact him via e-mail.

The guides are not designed to replace existing resources; on the contrary, they summarize current trends and approaches to critical issues in an easily understandable way and provide links to other resources – always with a strong emphasis on practical use and real-life examples. Over time, we will add a case study to each of the guides to highlight a particular approach undertaken by MDIF’s portfolio companies.

Guide #1: Practical Guide to Product Management in Digital Media, by Derrick Fountain.

This guide provides practical strategies and tactics for implementing the product management function in a media organization.

Please download and share the guide. We would love to hear from you – send any comments or suggestions to us at mas@mdif.org.

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About author: Derrick Fountain is a global product leader with deep experience of launching digital products in the US, the Middle East, Africa and Turkey. He is currently Head of Digital Products at TRT World in Istanbul. Prior to that, he was Principal Product Management Specialist at Al Jazeera Media Network, where he launched more than 50 web and mobile products. His professional career in media started in 2008 with US-based LAKANA, where he managed a network of 36 mobile web portals.

For Michael Wolff, writing in MIT Technology Review, the acceptance of Instant Articles by major players who have signed up to provide content through the feature provided yet another example of bad decision-making by the news industry. As he points out: “Netflix will pay approximately $3 billion in licensing and production fees this year to the television and film industry; Hulu is paying $192 million to license South Park; Spotify pays out 70 percent of its gross revenues to the music labels that hold the underlying rights to Spotify’s catalogue. Now here’s what Facebook is guaranteeing a variety of publishers, including the New York Times, BuzzFeed, and the Atlantic, which are posting articles in its new “instant articles” feature: $0.”

He accuses news publishers of giving away their content for free, while at the same time losing control of their branding and valuable usage data. In the Facebook deal, publishers can sell ads on their articles and keep all of the revenue, or have Facebook sell ads in exchange for 30 percent.

“In the case of these new platform distribution deals—while they all involve slightly different plays—they each mimic a standard publishing business model: syndication. That is, a publisher with access to a different audience redistributes the content of another publisher—of course paying the content owner a fair fee. In some sense, this is the basis of the media business … Content is valuable–otherwise why distribute it?”

This leads Wolff to wonder whether “republishing initiatives are digging a deeper hole for publishers or helping them get out of the one they are already in”. He sees no reason to think things will turn out well: “…publishers have largely found themselves in this dismal situation because of their past bad decisions—accepting the general free ethos, bowing to a vast catchall of casual and formal sharing and re-posting agreements, and failing to challenge an ever-expanding interpretation of fair use. It seems only logical to doubt the business acumen of people who have been singularly inept when it comes to protecting their interests in the world of digital distribution.”

Facebook’s rationale for publishers to support Instant Articles is that it will provide a better user experience and deliver bigger audiences. While true, Wolff says that publishers will lose sustainable brand-building opportunities; it’s a model that better suits content that maximizes revenue potential, in particular ‘native content’, and will further push down digital ad prices.

According to Wolff, this type of syndication arrangement represents “another step closer toward what Ken Doctor, an analyst and journalist who has closely covered the demise of the news business, calls “off news site” reading. In this, publishers effectively give up their own channels and become suppliers of content to more efficient distribution channels … In effect, the New York Times becomes a wire service–the AP, except where the AP gets paid huge licensing fees, the Times does not.”

With the collapse of traditional ad revenues, publishers have justified pushing forward with digital experimentation because others were and because they couldn’t afford not to, even though they don’t fully understand the technology. “The ultimate result was a disastrous, sheep-to-slaughter endgame scenario, in which the new, digitally focused publishers are a fraction of their analog size. And now, in the prevalent view, there is simply no turning back.”

Meanwhile, dollars are flowing into the coffers of TV, movie and sports content creators. Even music, is fighting to win back control of – or at least payment for – its product. Wolff concludes that while there are differences between entertainment and news publishing that may explain why the old rules don’t apply in the new world, “perhaps publishers are just shamefully bad businessmen”.

In Mobile Marketing Daily, Steve Smith reviews the Apple News app and what it means for the news business. He concludes that in user experience terms it’s similar to Flipboard and Zeit – aggregating content from news sites and blogs in an attractive, easy-to-use way – but his diagnosis for the publishing industry makes for grim reading: “The legitimate worry of course is that media brands further lose control of their audience, data, context – and potentially, of their advertisers. I would say “Alert the media,” but in this scenario the media are already dead men walking.”

Writing for Fast Company, Joel Johnson points out that Apple and Facebook are just giving users what they want: a faster, less cluttered experience, compared to the slow load times and multitude of ad forms assaulting users on the sites of news publishers, who are forced into maximizing revenue by any means possible. Aggregators may provide a better – though banal – experience, “but it is unclear if most publications will be able to survive on only the revenue granted by these platform companies alone.” Apple’s attitude that “advertising is always unwelcome, unless it happens to be advertising that Apple itself lords over” is also a serious concern. “With small-to-midsize publishers already dropping like flies, things are looking perilous for readers and writers alike.”

So what is A/B testing? Simply said, A/B testing is a method which allows you to measure the effect of changes to your website on the visitors without actually making them.

Imagine as an example a web page with an article to which you make a small change – let’s say you move a picture from its current place in the right column into the center. Now comes the trick: you display the new layout version to a very small portion of your visitors. What will happen? Will visitors stay on the page for a longer or shorter time? Will a smaller or a larger percentage of readers finish reading the article?

After a few thousand views of both versions, you will be able to neatly and relatively exactly compare and determine whether the change is – or is not – an improvement. If indeed it is, you know what to do – change the picture position for everyone. If not, no problem – you can test some more.

You can test any changes this way – always on a small percentage of visitors and find out whether something works even before widely implementing it. And what is important, you are not limited to testing just one change but for example five different options. Using the same example as above, you can test positioning the photo in various places (left column, right column, top, center…) and by trial, find out where its positioning works the best.

Simply speaking, A/B testing gives you a luxury that we would probably welcome in all parts of life – the possibility of not having to make a decision every time we want to do something and then wait and worry whether we have made the right decision.

Instead, thanks to A/B testing, you have the option to choose the best solution from the multiple possibilities before making it available to all your readers.

Why should we run A/B tests?

A/B testing is one of the most practical tools for improving your website, primarily for the following reasons:

• Low cost, quick start: one of the best things about A/B testing is that, unlike using questionnaires or usability tests, you can start immediately. And if you decide to use one of the free services that are available, you won’t even incur any costs. No complicated searches for participants or long preparation times. One test idea and an observation of certain rules discussed below and you can be on your way. You don’t have to hire an expert. You can easily do it just with this article.

• The right sample: With a survey or questionnaire, you will always face questions such as “do we have the right sample of people?” or whether the group of people surveyed had been “representative”. There are no such questions in A/B testing – you know 100 percent that you have the right sample. It’s the people that come to your website, exactly those that you are improving your site for. There is no need to look for anyone elsewhere.

• Very practical: Standard questionnaire surveys often bring theoretical findings, such as people are more interested in sports news or perhaps that they would welcome more videos in articles. But what should an ideal piece of sports news look like? Where exactly should the video be in the article? A/B testing, together with usability tests, offer very practical findings, which are – as a bonus – all immediately applicable. They not only provide you with information about what to do but also how exactly to do it.

Getting started with A/B testing

So how do we do A/B testing?

1. Hypothesis. At the beginning of each test, having a “hypothesis”, i.e. a question you want answered by the test, is very important. For example – “Would visitors click more on an article if it had a larger headline?” Any new function you would like to implement on the website is also a hypothesis – e.g. will the function bring a better reaction from the visitors? You probably already have a number of ideas as to what to test. You can also find some tips below.
2. Alternate versions. The second step is the proposal of changes with which we will verify the hypothesis – let’s say the creation of alternative versions of the original website with new functionality or design. At this point, it is important not to limit yourself to just one alternative to your current site. You can come up with as many versions as you would like. This way, you can be sure that you have not missed the best solution possible. For example, if you are testing a larger headline for your article, why not include various fonts, colors and/or size? The test will let you know the best solution.
3. Test variables. Often, defining the test variables is a much underestimated step. A test variable is anything you can measure and which allows you to objectively determine which page is better. It could be the number of clicks on a certain link, the time spent on a page or even whether a visitor had completed a certain operation (confirmation of a subscription payment). People frequently measure the number of clicks, but is that always the best? Always consider carefully what to measure and test more variables. That way you can see whether your new version won’t do more harm than good (e.g. the change forces more readers to click but they leave the page immediately because they hadn’t found what they were looking for).

Which tools to use for A/B testing?

Once you have done all three things listed above, only one thing remains – deploy the test. Let’s look closely at how to do it.

Ideally, you would use one of the ready-made solutions available. There are plenty of them and some are even for free. And it is certainly simpler than having the A/B testing tool custom programmed directly for your website – a solution which is possible, but definitely not simple.

When choosing, look mainly for simple implementation (do you have a programmer at hand or will the tests be administered by someone who knows programming?). Of course, the price is also crucial. Paid tools often offer free tutorials or assistance, so free does not always equal the best.

Here is a list of some of the best known A/B testing tools:

Google Analytics is among the best known A/B testing tools. One of its main advantages when compared to competing products is the fact that it’s free. And it works in a simple way: basically, you create and add all versions of your web page to the server – if the current page is at article.php, you create article1.php, article2.php, etc.

What follows is an easy step-by-step process of implementation:

If you do not have an account in Google Analytics, create one and after registering, click “Experiments” in the “Behavior” section of your website profile. Click on “Create experiment”.

Type in the URL of the website you want to test (in our example, it’s article.php) and select the measured variable – for example average visit duration, revenue, etc. Decide the percentage of your users you want to include in the experiment – determine the number according to the number of users that usually visit your site – if you have a lot of visitors, you can test the page on 1% of your visitors. If, however, you have few visitors, you could wait for the results from a 1% sample for a long time.

Then you just add the URLs of the changed pages to be tested. The last step is to add a special JavaScript code to each one. The code will determine which page is shown to which user.

And that’s all. You can find more details on how to do A/B testing with Google Analytics here.

Optimizely.com is one of the best known paid tools for A/B testing. Other paid tools mentioned below all work in a similar way. Compared to Google Analytics, they all have one significant advantage – you do not need a programmer to run the test – it’s enough to include in the page one very simple JavaScript code. Everything else can be “clicked” and selected without needing to know the source code. It’s almost as if you were editing text in Word or some other text editor – you can play around and change the text, the font size, anything. You choose the percentage of visitors to which you’ll display the tested version and select the measured variables. The tool saves the changes and, after starting the test, it will display your altered pages to random visitors.

Other popular A/B testing tools include Unbounce.com or VisualWebsiteOptimizer.com. Choose the one that suits you best. An overview of the best known tools is here.

Understanding the results

Most of the split testing tools offer results as you go along and even calculate which version has the highest chance of winning the test. At the same time, the tool helps to determine the right sample. At this point in the process, you don’t need to do anything else.

This, however, can become a double-edged sword. Despite the simplicity of A/B testing, it can be spoiled (just like anything in life). Watch out for these common mistakes:

• One variable, one hypothesis – one of the most common mistakes in A/B testing is that we want to test too many things at the same time. An example would be two completely different article visuals (each has a completely different layout, ordering, as well as elements). Remember: one A/B test, one hypothesis you are testing, one change. This is a way to avoid potential problems of not being able to understand what actually brought the change when reading the test result. Was it the background color? Or omission of a large ad space? Always change only one thing. Then test it.

• Attention – sample size too small. The second most common error is impatience. Frequently, one of the tested versions can have much better results very early on. Do not stop the test! Continue to the end of the test – it can often have very different results at the end than it seemed at the beginning. Contemporary A/B testing tools contain a function which automatically calculates the number of users you need to test in order to ensure the test is right. Here you can find a calculator which helps you to find out the approximate sample size even before running the test. If you are testing a large number of versions, it pays off to wait a little longer for results. Also, you may want to repeat the test one more time – test fewer versions the second time (e.g. original vs. winner and runner-up from the first test).

• Poorly chosen metrics. Even if you manage all of the above well, there is still a chance you are failing in the selection of the metrics with which you’ll be measuring the effect of your changes. Is the version that gets more clicks really better for you? Or are you more interested in whether visitors, after they click, subscribe to your publication? Number of clicks tends to be an alpha and omega for online media so pay attention to other criteria that may prove significant for you.

Testing tips

You surely have many ideas on what to test. A/B testing is practical any time you want to introduce something new and you discuss in your team how to proceed the best way. Don’t limit yourself to new functions you’d like to add to your site though. Think about things already present on your site, especially:

• Things that seem self-evident to you (if you hear someone say “people love xxx”, “the best way to do this is xxx” without having A/B test results to prove it, don’t just believe the statement – try it).

• Things on your site you think are done really well (this link has many clicks, the ad in the right corner works beautifully) – what if these things can be done even better? Don’t forget that every hundredth of a conversion counts!

• Things you think don’t matter (font color, font size, or moving an ad box 10 px more to the right). If you test a lot, you’ll find out that many of the results may not make much sense to you, yet they work. Do not rely on your rational criteria only and do not think that minute details don’t matter. They do – test everything.

Here are a few tips for tests you can run right now:

• A correct looking lead on the home page – is a smaller headline, full-width photo and no lead, or a larger headline, smaller photo and more text better? Or should it be altogether different? Come up with all different possibilities and find out what users prefer.

• Ad formats – you know that when there are too many, they don’t work; when there are only a few, conversion is higher but revenue smaller – so what is the right ratio? Try out different ad distribution on your page and select the best one.

• Homepage layout – there’s an everlasting fight within online media about the homepage. Each service, each journalist wants to see his or her article there, yet they cannot all be there. What is the right number of articles for visitors to still click? Which section is better suited for the right column and which will do better in the middle? The simplest way to find out is trying it.

• Test the wording of all buttons on your page. Compare “Enter the article discussion” to “Discuss the article now” for example. Test what works best and you may be surprised.

You can find lots of ideas and inspiration for A/B testing at www.abtests.com. It includes a number of case studies, so you can see the findings right away. Many of you may be surprised by them.

Still not enough? Suggested reading about A/B testing includes Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer. Although recommendations related to the implementation of Google Analytics experiments (the tool was formerly known as Website Optimizer) have become obsolete, the book offers hundreds of ideas and ways to improve your web site.
So what are you waiting for? Dive into A/B testing now!

1. Know Your Exit Plan Before You Buy

This is a big, often-overlooked issue and one software providers often don’t like to address. You need to know what file format your data will be when you receive it back. The more standardized the file format, the better. Packages that operate in Microsoft SQL are the best because SQL is widespread and you will find an abundance of programmers to prepare your files for your next package, should you ever have to leave. Most, but not all, large providers use SQL, but smaller providers may use various kinds of freeware or proprietary database structures that are not easily converted to other formats. Always ask what file format your data would be returned in and also ask if there would be any charge to return your data. Some providers make it as difficult as possible to leave and do everything from charging a high fee to return your data to giving it to you in a format which is so archaic that your next software installation is likely to fail. Know your exit plan, before you buy! Don’t assume that software marriages last forever. You may outgrow it down the road or find it just wasn’t the right product for you.

2. Find Out What Kinds Of Support Packages Are Available

If you are buying a package that is worth its salt, it is powerful enough, complicated enough and customizable enough that your use, expansion and improvements in your processes will require ongoing support. Nobody who buys software wants to hear this. Software sales reps want to minimize the cost of the product, and buyers want to hear that it’s turnkey once purchased, but it’s not. Systems that run your business can be tweaked, customized and adjusted to continually improve your business. It’s not a static process. You should find out what kind of ongoing consulting packages are available, and meet regularly (preferably monthly) with your software provider, to address business systems that you find time-consuming or less than optimal. By improving and evolving your systems on a monthly basis, you’ll make your consulting fees back tenfold. Your employee costs will always be your main company costs, not your software costs, so focus on ways of improving efficiency, saving man hours and reducing labor costs and you’ll make a lot more money in the end. Buyers who go into a software relationship on the cheap have high failure rates, don’t fully utilize systems, and never achieve the kind of economic efficiency they can have if they continuously attack inefficient processes within their companies.

3. Drill Down Into The Details

The smartest companies draft up an RFP outlining what features they are hoping to have in their software package and they have the vendors fill them out. The best companies look forward to this comparison and the weaker vendors will not.

4. Require Your Potential Providers To Rank Their Competitors

The good vendors usually know the market and know what they are good at and what they are not good at. Ask them to name their competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. You’ll find out pretty quickly which competitors they respect and those they genuinely think are weak competitors.

5. How Long, How Big and How Many?

Find out how long the vendors have been around. It’s very hard to start a software company and compete with companies with mature products. The mature products have a decade or more of a head start and usually ten million dollars or more in development. Find out how many clients your vendors serve. The ones with the broadest customer base will have larger development staffs and tend to race ahead while other vendors can’t due to their small size. Find out how many full time employees each vendor has. If the answer if five, you should think twice. It’s almost impossible to provide any sort of support and development process with so few employees.

6. Touch The Product

Ask the vendors to use an actual copy of the software. There is no safer way to evaluate than to get your hands dirty and really experiment with the actual product.

7. Don’t Be Sold By “We don’t have that feature, but we’ll throw in custom development of that feature if you’ll sign right here”.

This is what companies that don’t have robust products do to try and get a deal done. Many clients are fooled into thinking that company A is more helpful than company B. But its fool’s gold. Any software company that becomes tied up in custom work for each client won’t be focused on developing new features that serve its overall client base. Custom work adds to maintenance costs of the overall software package and the best companies will focus their efforts on making their software package customizable by you, not trying to create custom reports and features for you. You may be the focus while they are trying to get you to sign on the dotted line, but they’ll move onto the next custom project once you are on board, and you’ll notice that your future needs are not being met because the company’s development staff is doing custom work for the new client. It’s a slippery slope that the best software companies don’t go down.

So, do features matter? Yes, but don’t fail to realize all of the other important considerations when investing in software for your publishing company.

• The Seminar presented the following topics:“Technology Platforms & Decision Criteria”.  The presentation outlined the key decisions involved in selecting and maintaining web platforms.  The presenter discussed the pros and cons of in-house versus outsourced development as well as proprietary versus open source software.  Detailed decision criteria are recommended.  Because of the importance of the Content Management System, the presentation closes with a comparison of the three open source CMS platforms – Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla.
KB Seminars: Working with Technology – Platforms; 10/13 from MDIF
• “Product Management Roles and Responsibilities”.  The presentation focused on the role of product management as a ‘translator’ between the needs of users and technology’s ability to deliver web products to meet these needs.  In particular, the seminar outlined key elements in a business plan and product specification.  Examples of online and software products used to support the product development and bug tracking processes are also included.
KB Seminars: Working with Technology – Product Management; 10/13 from MDIF
• “Opportunities in Online Advertising”.  The presenter detailed the elements of online advertising standards including pixel dimensions, file size and other graphic requirements.  The discussion outlined new trends in online advertising targeting including behavioral and contextual targeting.  The rapid emergence of real-time bidding or programmatic buying and its key components is also introduced with specific examples and a summary of companies working in the Russian/Ukrainian market.
KB Seminars: Working with Technology – Advertising; 10/13 from MDIF
• “Development Metrics: Measuring Your Site for Improvement”.  This section presented a model for online metrics including examples of data sources and calculations.  Three types of metrics are discussed.  Foundation metrics provide basic audience behavior (visits, page views) and audience descriptions (location, gender, etc.). Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) are discussed in terms of developing measures that assist in making business and content decisions to optimize websites for traffic or revenue.  Finally, tactical measures like A/B testing and heat maps are introduced as techniques to acquire specific information to make tactical decisions about a website.
KB Seminars: Working with Technology – Metrics; 10/13 from MDIF
• “Website Hosting Fundamentals”.  The Seminar presented the key types of hosting, their different uses and recommended criteria for selecting hosting methods and vendors.

The Seminar aimed to provide media managers with decision-making and management techniques for working with technology including content management, advertising and ad serving, and metrics systems.

Location: Moscow, Russia

Dates: 9 – 10 October 2013

Attending:  Russian and Ukrainian Technology, Product and Commercial Managers

Building the right kind of sensibility means building the right kind of brand that resonates. In a crowded media sector these days, the white space to create anything unique is non-existent, or at best narrow, which is why content-based startups take a longer time to gestate and build up.

Hiring and building a team present peculiar challenges for a media startup compared to any other kind of software or consumer product startup. Cultural fit becomes the driving criteria above almost any other criteria, particularly at the early stage.

Having been a student of media and media startups all my life — and now a year into building my second — I’ve learned a bunch of lessons along the way on building the right kind of teams in lean content-driven environments.

Different stages in a company require different strategies, and for this article I am focusing on the early stage, where the focus is on building editorial, product and distribution. Call it my year-one guide to hiring in a media startup.

General culture and companywide skills:

• Bringing negative energy into the company is not worth any kind of talent. This is true for co-founders, employees and even investors. Because in a daily ideas driven startup, the flow of energy back and forth matters a lot more, any negative people in the company suck up all available energy in the company. This may sound esoteric and hard to quantify, but if you’ve done this long enough, you know this matters.
• The product in a media startup changes every day, unlike any other product startup. The front entrance of your flagship product changes many times a day, and the people you hire need to understand the manic-ness that goes into doing this day in, day out.
• Product thinking: Typically media startups have been stuck in “post thinking,” as in a blog post, a story post, etc. In a multi-platform environment, product-led thinking that continually tweaks to keep the brand fresh in digital becomes the driving force. Iterate, test and build; a thinking in mainstream consumer startups, has to come to media startups as well. Hire people who get it.
• Visual and multi-platform thinking: Anyone you hire — from editor to developer to social media manager to sales to business development — has to understand the visual nature of media these days, especially in a social media-driven, multi-platform world. This is easier said than done, but people with varied and non-traditional career paths tend to get this the most.
• Living in a Google Analytics stream: Or in other words, data thinking. These days, data skills for anyone you hire across any function in the company — from editorial intern to social media manager to founders — is not an optional skill. That’s true for any startup, but for media startups that live and die in Google Analytics (and most use that at early stage, because it is free), it means making sure everyone in the company understands it, uses it, and makes decisions that are informed from it. Baking it in at the hiring stage will ensure you make it pervasive across the company as it scales.

Editorial team:

• The 4 S’s of Content: be Smart, Sharp,Surgical and Strategic. With a small team in the beginning, can the editorial talent you hire be nimble enough to understand this, and execute against it?
• Because part of the talent you will hire will likely have come from existing old-school media companies, one of the things you are looking for is how much can they unlearn what they’ve learned before. Especially if the editorial product and the voice you are trying to create is something the industry has not seen before.
• This is my personal favourite: No journalism circle jerk or moralising media people. Get the basics of reporting right, keep the future of journalism prognosticators out.
• Related to above: Avoid scenesters, above all else. Media tends to attract a lot of those because it comes with the high profile of a byline and public presence. These days with the amplification of social, people love the idea of working in high profile places and would do anything to flatter you. It will take some trial and error, but you’ll learn the necessary skill of avoiding these people.
• Curation thinking: This is another critical hiring and company culture parameter. No media startup can survive doing just original content, it has to be a mix, of original, of curated or aggregated, of licensed if that is an option. It means hiring people who have the ability to mix content types, and not be moral about it. You’ll be surprised at how many journalists look down upon curation. In a small team, curation thinking also means learning to do a lot more with lot less.

Developers:

• This is hard in the best of times, and for media startups that may not seemingly be solving rocket science tech problems, your options of how and what to attract developers with are lower. In most cases media startups are about execution, and that requires a slightly different kind of developer than a software or product company would need.
• Look to the pool of journalists turned developers, or dual majors in journalism and computer science, of which there is an increasing pool. They generally tend to get ignored by other high-profile consumer startups, and present an attractive pool to target for hiring.
• This is especially true if you are trying to create media-derived data products, and there are a lot of cross-dependencies that somebody with the media background would understand better than a regular developer.
• Developers with media background tend to understand presentation of data and information in right formats.

Cross functional agile product manager:

• Agile development, a methodology that came out of the software world, is increasingly being implemented across other parts of companies as well, especially as a buzzword by marketers. For a media startup, agile would translate into building quick, fast and dirty, with few resources, whether it is edit, business, sales, and of course tech development. That means a cross-functional product manager who is almost a junior COO, working with founders to keep everything running and launching on time, amidst the requisite amount of chaos.

Content marketing & partnerships:

• The social media editor is dead, the engagement manager has arrived. Call it whatever you want, beyond the buzzwords it means marketing your content is a full time function, and is multivariate, multi-service and multi-platform. The skills required then becomes a lot more complex than just someone who tweets and “engages” with community. It is a mix of being natively good at social, ability to focus on various social networks in different ways that those platforms require, in different formats of media. It means seeding various sites, forums and platforms beyond social; it also means part traditional business development functions of maintaining and seeding existing content partnerships.

Sales:

• The first sales hire at any media startup is a crucial and scary step. Hiring someone who can just sell banner and boxes, even if lots of them, won’t cut it. The first sales hire has to be strategic enough to think big picture, understand what the nascent brand stands for, and be on top of emerging trends in content market, native advertising and digital branding. And as digital has enabled the rise of early adopters, fanboys and prosumers across various industries, a sales hire should typically have both B2B and B2C experience to understand how companies market to various constituencies in different ways.

Caveat:

This is an early stage template. Beyond year two and beyond seed stage, the hiring guidelines and skill sets needed will evolve as product, business and strategy evolves — even if philosophies and operating principles stay rooted in founders vision.

(I have used the words “news”, “media” and “content” interchangeably here, to cast a wider net. Don’t get tripped up in the semantics of the words, larger lessons apply to any kind of content-driven startup.)

This article originally appeared on LinkedIn, and it has been republished here with the kind permission of the author. 

It has proven to be a powerful and flexible platform for news organisations attracting major publishers including the New York Times, CNN, Forbes, Reuters and the Wall Street Journal.

WordPress has a host of features, and if a feature isn’t part of its core functionality, there are literally thousands of plug-ins that can deliver the editorial features you require. The challenge isn’t finding a plug-in or theme to suit your needs but finding the right ones amongst the thousands of choices. To help speed the search for the plug-ins you require, we’ll look at a few key ones that are frequently used by news outletswhich use WordPress.

Define your editorial needs first

When choosing a CMS, the first thing you will want to do before even thinking about which CMS to use is to outline your editorial requirements. You might be able to do everything you want, but it is important that your editorial strategy drives your technical choices rather than thinking about the technology first.

Armed with your editorial requirements, you can then look for plug-ins that deliver these features. While you can have several plug-ins, don’t get carried away. Too many plug-ins can slow down the performance of your site, and you will want to make sure that the plug-ins work well together. That’s a key thing to ask your developer or development contractor to evaluate.

Useful plug-ins for news organisations

EditFlow – WordPress began as a blogging, a personal publishing, platform, and what works for an individual or a small group focused on self-publishing doesn’t meet the needs of an editorial organisation that has a workflow and a process to ensure that what is published meets its editorial standards.

EditFlow is an excellent plug-in that adds many elements of a traditional editorial workflow to WordPress. It adds custom article statuses such as pitch, pending review and subbed that allow you to track where stories are in the editorial process. It adds editorial comments so that journalists and editors working on stories can leave feedback and questions on a story, and the system can email journalists or copy editors when the status of a story changes.

It also adds an editorial calendar to give editors the ability to plan what content is going to be published to the site and when, and also to add to your future planning. You can also see upcoming stories in a story budget view to take to planning meetings. It’s an excellent, almost essential, addition to WordPress for news organisations.

Liveblog – The liveblog format has become a popular way for news organisations to cover rolling news events live on their sites. The format is not only popular with news businesses, but is also popular with audiences. When an earthquake and tsunami devastated parts of Japan while half a world away the events of the Arab Spring were reshaping Middle Eastern governments, Al Jazeera English was at one point running four live blogs, and it accounted for a quarter of the traffic to the site. Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has developed a Liveblog plugin that delivers a lot of functionality such as the ability to easily update the article as well as auto-refresh of the article for your audience so they always have the most up-to-date content.

Co-authors plus – Another plug-in from the developers of EditFlow is Co-Authors plus. Blogging software didn’t anticipate that articles could be written by more than one person or that you might have guest contributors who aren’t on staff. Co-authors plus allows you to have multiple authors for a story and it also allows you to create guest contributors without having to create a user account for a contributor who might only write one article.

Category order – Categories can be an easy way to add site navigation to a WordPress site, but originally, categories were only ordered alphabetically on simple blogging sites. The category order plug-in allows you to easily reorder categories simply by dragging and dropping them.

Google Analytics for WordPress – Knowing your audience is key to sustaining your news organisation. It will sharpen your editorial focus and allow you to more effectively market yourself to advertisers. Google Analytics is just one tool to measure your audience and learn more about them. This plug-in allows you to easily add Google Analytics to your site.

That’s just the start. There are plugins to manage advertising, sudden bursts of traffic and the security of your site. For those of you using WordPress, what plug-ins have you found most useful? Were there any plug-ins that you used, but looking back you wish you hadn’t?

Other resources:

• Using WordPress as a news website v2 by Einar Thorsen
• Eight More WordPress Plugins For Newsrooms by Lauren Rabaino at 10,000 Words
• WordPress.org users can now turn any post into a liveblog with Automattic’s new plugin by Harrison Weber at The Next Web
• Useful WordPress plugins for journalists and news websites by Matt C. A. Smith

Since the days of the Dead Sea Scrolls, it has been about finding the best and most effective system for production and distribution of content. Gutenberg simplified the work but the digital revolution has opened a world of new possibilities.

In my eyes, too many of our colleagues listen too much to the companies that are trying to sell a product based on old ideas, instead of using some energy to figure out what they really need.

If you’re planning to start a war, it would probably be smart to invest in an aircraft carrier. But if you’re only interested in checking out the local waters or doing a spot of fishing, you’d be better off with a small speedboat or a canoe.

If you are a TV-station, a radio station or a newspaper with a tight budget, I would go for the speedboat. It is fast when needed, easy to manoeuvre and has small operating costs.

Go open source – unless you’re building the Eiffel Tower

I have worked with online media for about 15 years and haven’t seen many products that I really like. Very few of the CMS companies have shown a real interest in the needs of news organisations. I have seen a lot of great engineering, but we’re not looking to build another Eiffel Tower. We just need a publishing system that reporters can easily learn to operate and which gives us the ability to publish quickly to a (hopefully) fast-growing audience on smart phones and computers.  If it also is scalable and open to modern thinking, even better.

As a grumpy old man  I’m not even a big fan of WordPress, but I love the idea of WordPress being open source and it’s the first place to look. Second in line is Drupal, which is preferred in some markets – like Russia – because it is easier to find programmers.  Though there are some competitors emerging in the open source world, for now in most markets it will be wise to go for WordPress.

When I strongly recommend open source, it is – among many other things – about money. If you can save costs on technical investment and instead hire one or two people with technical skills to work with you in the newsroom, you’ve got a much better chance of seeing the kind of development you’re dreaming of.

Another good reason for choosing open source is that thousands of people are working for you; when they develop plugins for Drupal or WordPress, you can also use them.

A last point: choosing open source will also save you a lot of time. Instead of spending time on negotiating with a company that is trying to sell you more than you need, you can just start working.

The commercial option

If you insist on something more specialised for news production and with a higher possibility of finding help or support at all times of the day, there are companies that can deliver decent products. The stand-out reason for choosing a commercial CMS is guaranteed support.  However, while that might feel good, it can be expensive and rarely necessary.

The worst result of choosing a commercial CMS is that you will be lagging behind in development. Because you spend so much money to buy it, you probably won’t be able to afford to hire technically skilled employees, which means you will be stuck with a system that normally is not very flexible or open to new ideas.

It is when we can go outside the borders of a CMS that we can create the journalism of the future though, to be realistic, at least 90 per cent of our content will for years to come be produced and published inside the safe confines of a CMS.

Don’t build your own

The only thing you never should do is build it on your own. Some clever developers might explain that they can build something better than the CMS’s that are already out there. They might be right, but you don’t have the time and money for that. And you don’t want a system that is built so only one person knows how it really works, and only one person can maintain it.

What I’m looking for is more or less a blank piece of paper the reporters can fill with words, images and hopefully something that shows you are a website, not a newspaper or a TV station. If you do that wisely, including smart tagging your content, and are able to present the content on a nice front page or gain traffic through social media, you are well on your way.

It’s as simple as that. Later, if you can see that it works, that traffic is growing and ad sales or a paywall are creating good revenue, you can consider going to the next level and invest a little more in your software and hardware.

Change comes slowly to the print business

I have worked  30 years in the newspaper business. It is surprising how slowly it has developed, even if the technical evolution or revolution made many changes possible years ago.

It is a bit depressing to see that newspaper companies with a serious decline  in circulation and a nicely growing online business still spend more resources on discussing the situation of the declining  part of the industry, rather than discussing what to do with the growing part.

Luckily, in some areas of the world we can see growing newspaper circulation, but even there it looks like the future will be digital.  As they say, the future is already here, and digital means probably mobile.

From mobile, for mobile

Start thinking how you can best produce content for the mobile platform. Figure out how you can publish text, photos and video from mobile for mobile, instead of thinking how you can forward the content from today’s paper – that was written yesterday – to digital platforms.

Soon we will all be working in digital because that’s where the biggest growth will be. Even if the old media platforms are still providing a better business now, it looks like we will see digital growth for many years to come and we need to focus our efforts on the digital arena to see how we can build a viable business for the future.

And maybe we might even strengthen today’s core business and core products by spending more energy on digital development.

But there is no reason to over-invest in technical solutions. It is better to spend money on programmers and reporters, instead of paying for a product you only use a part of.

I had the pleasure to meet a group of Arabic reporters in Egypt a few years ago. I discussed web-TV with brave women, some with veils and some in smart European clothing,  and men, both in jellabiya and with a casual Western look. After a great day of journalistic work, some wanted advice on what camera they should buy, which editing system they should choose and which videoplayer to invest  in for their website.

I believe that’s the wrong place to start. You can make decent quality video with an old cell phone and fantastic video with a new smartphone without a lot of investment. You can edit it with freeware and you can publish it with YouTube and embed it on your site. Some of the reporters looked a little bit disappointed with my answer, but there is no point in investing heavily until you can see that there is growing interest. If you see that your users are enjoying it, you can move to the next level. Maybe buy a microphone and FinalCut or Adobe Premiere for the editing.

I mostly use an Android smartphone with a standard built-in video camera, but I have also seen impressive videos filmed and edited on an iPhone, published on YouTube and then embedded in articles.

This will unfortunately not give you the possibility of selling your own pre-rolls on the video, but you can move to that when you can see that your audience likes what you’re doing.

So, the same thinking applies to video or web-TV as to a CMS. Start simple and move forward to more complicated and more expensive products only when you feel the time – and money – is right.

What about the newspaper?

Many newspaper guys rolls their eyes when I complain about the old fashioned newspaper CMS. I get a lecture on the importance of stability, history, importance of archive systems and the danger of simplifying too much.

Well, it’s really just about writing and editing articles, storing them in a secure place and placing the articles and pictures on templated or designed pages so they can be printed, distributed and hopefully sold and read.

If you can use your online CMS  for all text-based content production, it should be possible to export it to a page-making system, maybe a cheaper variation of Adobe InDesign.

If we look a few years ahead, I’m pretty sure this will be the way we will all work. But then we will need old guys like me in media houses to forget about how things used to be and try to imagine how it might be in the future.

One good test is to ask yourself what you would do if you were starting in the news business tomorrow. That answer will probably be pretty far from how you are organised and how your technical set-up looks today.

Could your organization use Google docs for content production and storage, instead of something that comes with a multimillion cost? I know some have tried it and I know it worked out on some smaller projects. One of the best examples is Bangor News in Maine, USA. A very small Norwegian newspaper is now trying to copy the use of Google docs for writing, WordPress for publishing online and InDesign for the paper production.

Here is one early article on the project in Bangor News  and a search for Bangor, WordPress and Google docs will give you more inspiration and information, such as this article from the developer who helped create the system.

 In summary:

• Don’t ask the multimillion dollar CMS industry what they would like to sell you.
• Ask yourselves what you need and try to find cheap or free products that meet your requirements.
• Spend the money you save on programmers and reporters – and ad sales!
• Start simple and move on if you can see your traffic and business growing.
• Forget what is nice to have until you need to have it.

Remember that relevant content, published at the right moment and presented in a way that gets people interested is much more important than the technical solution. But remember that the content has no value if your site is unstable, so don’t take it too easy.

And you should still try to figure out how you would organize your business and what kind of hardware and software you would like to have if you were starting your media company tomorrow.

You can’t change from reality to your dream in a week, but you will be better off if you start moving in that direction.

To put it simply, a good CMS will help you more easily and efficiently publish and manage text, images and audio-visual content to your website. Modern CMSs also make it easier to update and modify the design of your site to keep it fresh, and many CMSs also have packages to manage ads and to make sure that your site looks good and loads quickly, regardless of whether your audience is viewing the site on a desktop, a laptop, a tablet or a mobile phone.

Here are the top ten reasons why a news organisation should use a web CMS:

• A modern CMS allows journalists to focus on content instead of learning code. Writing a story will be instantly familiar to any journalist who has used a word processing programme such as Microsoft Word, and with a little training, adding images and even videos is not difficult.
• You don’t have to go to an expensive web developer every time you want to make a minor change to your site. With a good CMS, most updates can be handled by editorial, not technical staff, which means you own your digital presence.
• CMSs have or can be adapted to have a workflow that mirrors how newsrooms work. This will make it easier to fit the CMS into your current workflow. Content management systems also have different classes of users or roles so that you can more easily manage who has the ability to technically administer the site and you can allow external contributors or freelance staff to submit content for your review without being able to publish live to your site.
• Most modern CMSs use flexible design elements that can be easily changed. They use style sheets, meaning that a handful of files control the overall design of the site. You can change fonts, spacing and other navigation simply by making changes to these few files rather than having to update the thousands of articles you have already created. Building on style sheets, design themes allow you to quickly change the overall look of your site with just a few clicks of a mouse.
• For open-source CMSs such as Drupal, Joomla and WordPress, if it doesn’t have a feature you require, they often have an extension or plug-in that will deliver the feature or function you want.
• A good CMS will integrate well with ad networks and ad management platforms. For open-source platforms such as WordPress, they often support plug-ins from major web and mobile ad networks.
• With the rise of mobile, popular CMSs often make having a mobile website as simple as installing a plug-in or using an appropriate design theme. For open-source CMSs, there are often mobile-ready themes that you can adapt.
• A good CMS can easily be integrated with social media and other external web services, allowing you to take full advantage of fast-changing social media platforms.
• A commercial or open-source CMS can be less expensive in the long run. You shouldn’t require a full-time developer to maintain your site.
• It will free up any development staff you do have to do editorially focused work that will differentiate you from your competitors.

When you’re choosing a CMS, you will want your CMS to empower, rather than frustrate, you and your staff. No CMS is perfect or infinitely flexible, and you will have to prioritise your requirements when choosing one. However, a smartly chosen modern CMS will save you time and money and deliver a platform that will help you keep pace with digital developments in your market.