From Streaming to Space: What Can News Leaders Learn From Leaders in Other Fields?
6:00PM Aug 24, 2023
Speakers:
Mark Little
Keywords:
newsrooms
journalism
organization
finance
ai
leaders
twitter
business
audience
companies
years
love
creative
understand
south philly
learned
feel
big
story
leadership
Hello Please take your seats our shows about to begin
Welcome to From streaming to space to South Philly. What can news leaders learn from leaders in other fields?
Please welcome
to the stage head of audience development at rolly Molly Stark Dean
ladies and gentlemen, Newsies and newsy sympathizers. My name is Molly Stark Dean, and it is the greatest privilege of my career to serve as the advocate for Rowley an app built by journalists for journalists. Welcome to our panel, from streaming to space. To South Philly, will King news leaders learn from leaders in other fields submit your questions in the OMA app, or the conference website. You see, the theme of this panel is learning from other industries and incorporating it into news leadership. As some of you are aware, there is an AE W pay per view this weekend. Therefore, I want to embody the spirit of this panel by evoking the great orders of professional wrestling. Our first panelist coming to the stage is not here to put smiles on people's faces. He is here to shock the universe and put tears in the eyes of children introducing Mark Littell.
Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, when she says to the moon it's not a silly tech bro brag introducing Makayla soulsby
we hate to say we hate to say we told you so. But ladies and gentleman we told you so. Now let's get down to business shall we? My client authorized me to let you know a secret. And that secret is I don't even think the online news Association wants it revealed tonight. Which is Ladies and gentleman, Shannon McKay. Is here is here. She's here
ladies and gentlemen, my name is Molly Stark Dean and I'm the one behind the one who conquered the one who thought he was the one to beat the one. She picks the A in Oma. Yesterday at journal slam. My clients conquered the leadership panel which affords me Molly Stark Dean. The opportunity to proclaim myself the advocate for the ruler of the pre line, Twitter flock. The educating conqueror though reigning, defending disputed oh when a champion of the world Nikita putao Send me your question online. Thank you
all right. Hello, everybody. Welcome. Let's give it up one more time for Molly. That was quite an introduction, the most spirited introduction. I think I've ever seen. It was wonderful. Thank you. So today, I'm thrilled to be hosting this conversation with you all today. It's basically from streaming to space to self Philly, as mentioned, and I'd be remiss if I didn't introduce myself and then I would love my esteemed panelists to do a bit more of a deeper introduction. of themselves as well. So as I mentioned, my name is Nikita Patel. And I oversee the executive program and news innovation and leadership at New Mark J school at CUNY. So As Molly mentioned, I was a former Tweep and so it was Mark actually and there are many of us here at this conference and some of the fellow tweeps are actually looking for interesting roles. Whereas some of us who have left the flock now have really great roles and new chapters in our careers and that's something we'll get into a little bit as well. So in 20 years of my journalism career, I've been so so lucky to work in local newsrooms, both print and broadcast newsrooms. I have worked for the 19th which is an amazing nonprofit newsroom. And now running this program at CUNY. My goal in life and my mission is to inspire and shape the next generation of newsletters, quite frankly. So that's really what this conversation is all about to in addition to my role at CUNY, I'm also on the board of directors for RNA. So I'm serving my fifth year now, and I'm Secretary of the national organization as well. So really happy and pleased to be here representing both organizations. So I'm now going to hand off to Shannon to introduce yourself.
Thank you. Thanks for having me. My name is Shanna Maldonado. I'm the founder and creative director of Yahweh. We started as a tiny shop seven years ago. And recently expanded into a 13 sweet boutique hotel, the shop and cafe, located at 226 South Street. It's been a dream of mine to have a hospitality space so we're very excited to be open and outside of Yahweh. I also sit on the board of Fleischer art Memorial which is near our shop, and was recently elected the secretary of the South St. Headhouse. Board, which is the neighborhood in which my shop exists. So if you're ever nearby, come say hi.
Hi, and I'm I'm Michaela SASB I'm an operations manager in NASA's Office of Communications. So I work at the intersection of finance and organizational development, supporting several science communication programs that NASA has. So something I love about working at NASA is that it's actually baked into NASA's charter to communicate to the widest practicable audience possible about science and discovery. So that's something I'm really proud to go to work every day and support. So I get to work with experts in animation, social media, video production and a variety of other functions to tell the NASA story and bring people along in our space exploration. So outside of NASA, I'm also a finance instructor. I care very deeply about lowering the barrier to entry for various leaders to participate in financial decision making and lead their organizations from a place of financial wisdom. So I've really enjoyed teaching and supporting small businesses in a pro bono capacity as well outside of my NASA work.
I'm Mark Littell. I lived my childhood dream and became a foreign correspondent. I was the foreign correspondent for Iris television for 20 years. Why because on so I then Twitter came and ruined my life persuaded me to become an entrepreneur. I set up a company called Storyful, which was the first social media news agency to still going strong. I went to work for Twitter. Then when 2016 2017 tried to address what became the major crisis of misinformation in the world, that's the foundation of a company called kinsmen, which was bringing together machine learning and human intelligence to try and spot online threats and that has led me to Spotify, which acquired kings and last year, on Spotify, I work on strategy around safety, which essentially, thank you. There we go. So that led me to Spotify, where now I'm basically advising on strategies to harness technology to actually make the platform as safe as it possibly be.
Amazing. Thank you all so much. So selfishly, one of the biggest reasons why I wanted to host this discussion today was that if you know me, then I like real talk and lots of it. And I want to have a real honest conversation. about sort of the state of journalism as it relates to the business side of things, and the finance side of things. So I'd love to hear from all of your perspectives, you know, why is it that you know, companies, newsrooms and companies are large, you know, why should they be focused on the business side? And sort of why is understanding finance and balance sheets so important? However,
I think that the pandemic was the first time that I had to really take a step back and look at my business from the hard numbers for the previous four years, we were kind of a glorified art project. And then all of a sudden, we didn't have a physical space, which was the main means in which we engage with clients and guests and made money so I immediately knew that we had to understand how the business function behind the scenes. I also think for us being a small Britain, Philadelphia, it's so important for us to continue to build relationships with journalists and people on national publications, and understand how that ecosystem works. That was something I really learned in the last five years was how to get to know journalists and get them to understand that covering our space and engaging with our brand, would speak to a larger audience and that it made sense to be a part of a bigger story.
And I think for public service oriented organizations, especially, you know, our ambitions are always going to be bigger than our budgets. And that's a really a testament to our ability to continually envision a brighter future are in our capacity to dream. And so as leaders in not just the media industry, but leaders in general our challenge is to find ways to reconcile those dreams with the reality of finite resources. And so especially when we're experiencing budget pressure, you know, leaders need to approach their financial decision making in a way that protects you know, their organization's creative soul. And so to do that, we really have to focus on finance in terms of how it intersects with our organization's strategy and our culture. And we have to make sure our finance supports a culture of optimism. So when we do experience hard times, you know the culture, we get back up and we say, Okay, let's try this again. We experiment and we learn and we scale along the way. And finance really isn't just about the number crunching either it's it's a lot more than that. It's, it's about how we make some of come together and make some of our hardest decisions. It's about who and what gets the easiest access to resources in our organization. And so when we talk about the importance of finance, especially, especially today, it's needed now more than ever because it can help us navigate. It's a tool for helping us navigate uncertainty and we're increasingly, as we're increasingly facing harder decisions. We can rely on finance as a tool to help us explore many possible futures.
Yeah, picking up on that point. I mean, I think if I was to look back over the past 20 years, and you were to diagnose a single fundamental failure for journalism, it's his inability to understand the workings of the audience that it's trying to engage. And so I don't know about most people here, but I grew up in journalism thinking we were the fourth estate we were this institution that had been given by God this perfect right, to speak to the masses and understand what they needed and we didn't want to see what's on the business side of the equation. We didn't want to know but the technologies we didn't want to deal with the people who are coming along like the startups and the big tech platforms, and that fundamental lack of ability to handle it the insecurity the fear, the what's happened to us over the past 10 years. I think stems for our inability to understand the workings of the business. And you can redefine it don't have a business for a moment. Think about just the audience, understanding the data points that tell you as an organization, you are serving your community deeply. Like that really is what we're talking about here to engage with an audience that's willing to give you money to find a business model that is aligned with your purpose. You know, you can call it anything you want, but that fundamentally is what we're talking about today. If you can't understand your business, you are forever destined to live in fear. And for me personally, it's not you know that I live in the country song about you know, scared money never wins. Because we're operating from a point of fear. We can never make the progress we need underway to conquer the fear is to understand the balance sheet to understand the business model to understand the difference between leadership and management, and to start actually looking into other areas, and other businesses that can be inspirational to tell you how that might be done. But again, I think it is about conquering our fear, by understanding the mechanics of our connection to the audience that we serve, rather than sitting on high and thinking we have a God given right to be there. That will be my sense.
I love that mark. And that was actually the perfect segue into my next question, which, you know, I manage this Executive Leadership Program at CUNY, which is like a journalism MBA. And I think it's it's such a needed program, because if there's anything we can do to instill knowledge about the business of journalism into current and future news leaders, then I feel like that will help me sleep at night when I think about the sustainability of the business and something you just mentioned. You know, this comes up in class a lot. And by the way, Mikayla is one of our instructors. Her finance, fundamental classes are phenomenal, shameless plug there. I knew I had to do it because my boss is sitting in the front row. But we we often talk about the differences between leading and managing. So I'd love to hear each of your perspectives on those two things and how you define them.
Second Yeah, I love this. I love this question. So I think, for me, I when I think about management, that's I picture that as being much more focused on oneself. Whereas leadership, I think, is primarily it demands that we focus our energies on others. And so leadership is much more likely to ask, okay, what should we do and to create the space for the team to truly participate in that conversation? And so from a financial perspective, I think we have a lot of financial management out there. But what I think what I think we need now is financial leadership. So I think a lot about I started my career in journalism working in local news and on a lot of different audience engagement and community development initiatives. And one of the things that really has stuck with me is how much the audience engagement movement has really revolutionized the way that we report on and with our communities and their stories and so I think what's needed now is sort of a similar internal financial revolution. So thinking about the way that we can actually invite our journalists and our storytellers into financial conversations and decision making it's really not enough anymore to do finance in a vacuum or do it solo and I'd argue that you can't really do it effectively that way. At all we need lots of people with a variety of different types of expertise at the table to be able to to lead and to serve our organizations financially. And so, I think that, for me, leadership really is about making sure that finance because it is a form of such a power. It's a form of organizational power inside any any organization that people who know how the money flows inside the organization and how those decisions are made. That's an enormous form of power. And so leaders are much more likely to work to distribute that power fairly and to bring people in where I as I think that financial management is much more likely to perhaps hold those decisions more closely.
Yeah, I think that word distribution or decentralization is the way I think about it. So the classic formulation of this is, you know, a good manager. When you walk into a room, that's the person in charge. And the good leader is the person leaves everybody in that room knowing that they're in charge of something, that there's something given to the person in the room by a leader to go off and experiment. And I think it's connected to a second really big part of leadership, which is giving people permission to fail. And so this is something that's not talked about in journalism where failure is not an option. survivals everything we don't like to make mistakes, but But great organizations and great leaders, find something that someone cares about deeply and gives them permission to go and make a mistake, get a data point, that the project shouldn't be big enough that will take down the entire company, but something small, where you have the ability to fail and learn and get a data point and get better. And it's for example, like a beat reporter B reporter wants to connect with their audience in a deeper way through some form some channel and it's fine at the product person to help them find the data point and saying go and do it. And giving them essentially some tools like I find agile management which I've learned through exposure to product development which is you know, short Sprint's of two weeks, try something do it it's always bounded experimentation. But that's practical for me leadership when an organization has enough people who can decentralize power over something small that can show the path forward. Still a need for a leader with a vision the Northstar with the guardian of the culture, to make sure everyone knows where they're headed. There's still a need for good management in times of strife particularly and just to make things get shit done. Like very few businesses succeed because of the quality of the idea. They succeed because of the quality of the execution. So this is a bit of a symphony, but the leadership part is undervalued. I think in journalism because we fear failure so much, and we don't have structures that allow us to flourish in that way.
Yeah, no, I agree with all of those points are super invaluable. And then also thinking about to Mark's point, how you give ownership to the team, I think has been huge for us, like making sure everyone knows that even though you know I'm at the top and leading the brand, that they have projects that they're invested in that they have ways to move the company forward. That they feel as much ownership as as much as possible as I do to feel like they're a part of the conversation versus just managing their tasks or the things that they have to get done that we're all thinking bigger and thinking of how to move things forward. So I think that's what I've been focusing on is becoming a new leader for this now larger spaces. How do we bring the business and the brand forward through leaning on the team and not just everything being on one person being the manager or the kind of delegator of tasks and things?
Yeah, I love that. And, Shannon, I want to ask you this next question. Next question, because you've gone from being sort of working for like, major global retailers to becoming this incredible entrepreneur, like right here in South Philly and so it was really important for me to have somebody from here represented on this panel, who is an incredible leader. And what I'd love to know from you is a what is it like to be a sort of entrepreneur at this stage in your career and then also, like when we had sort of pre huddle, you mentioned working with, you know, artists and creators and that kind of thing, and I would just love to hear a little bit more about that. Sure.
So I didn't share it in my bio, but my background is actually in fashion design. So that's what I did for over a decade before launching my brand in 2016. At that time, I was designing outerwear and denim and it was my dream. But I had hit a wall where I had wanted to find other ways to work with other creative people outside of a corporate setting and to be able to tap into different things that I was interested in copywriting business strategy photography. You're not really allowed to do that as a fashion designer. So we started the brand, very small with just 12 products. We then did pop ups had a storefront and all along the way. We've just been kind of rolling down a hill collecting different learnings, different people collaborators, we've collaborated with larger brands like Nordstrom and CB two, but really the core of what we do is a community of artists and makers and people that just love design. That's how the brand has thrived. So being an entrepreneur was not something I ever planned to do. I thought I was going to work for larger companies for my entire career. But at some point, I felt like it was time for me to branch out and that I learned as much as I possibly could in that moment from the spaces that I worked. I think what the most rewarding part is I didn't realize how much our space would mean to people South Street is an area that's going through many changes. It's had many issues and challenges and we really want to be an anchor and a beacon for people to see what a small space can do for our community. Our cafe that's attached to the hotel is today when I left there was about 12 people of all different ages and backgrounds. Just hanging out in sharing space. And that's very important to me. So I think when I left my full time career, I was looking to have an impact in my community that I didn't feel like I was getting working in a corporate setting of corporate fashion setting at the time and I've gotten way more than I could have bargained for seven years later, but every day is a challenge. I'm still learning every day. I'm still meeting new people that are going to push me through this journey, but I wouldn't change any of it even the hard parts.
I love that. And while folks are here in Philly, please do go to Yahweh and check out the space and hang out. Definitely come by. Amazing. Alright, so my next question is from Makayla. So we've talked about the business of journalism and finance and whatnot. But I want to I want to go a bit deeper than that because I cannot stress how important it is that news leaders and leaders in general really do take the time to learn the nuts and bolts of how to run a business sustain it like that is the only way that news leaders can make decisions about resources. headcounts, when you have to say no to specific projects when you have to prioritize things. And that's been a big lesson for my career. So Michaela tell me what do you think the most pressing things are that news leaders need to know? Like, you know, when you think of balance sheets and financial statements, seems kind of boring, right? But it's incredibly important to be familiar with those things, right?
Yes, I love that. So I think first beginning this journey into trying to understand finance, something I always recommend for journalists or especially is to know that you're you're incredibly well equipped already to take on your organization's financial challenges. So I started my career in journalism, I realized how badly I wanted to understand the business workings of our organizations. And when I when I started my education in business, I signed up for as many finance classes as I could because I was just I had this feeling that finance was just going to be my kryptonite. And for a little while, it really was. But then like, it just started to click like I was just talking with Mark about kind of the joy of when you when you can put together a spreadsheet and it finally clicks for you and it's kind of this spark of joy. Like I'm not kidding. It's really like a little bit of joy and you get to see how this works. And it's rewarding. But something I realized was that my journalism background gave me so many tools to be good at finance already. So I think about what makes a great finance professional is being a critical thinker, being very curious being able to see multiple potential future scenarios. It's also having empathy, it's being able to see the real impact of the resource decisions that you're making in your organization. And it's being a storyteller, it's being able to explain and bring other people along, as you learn things about about your organization's finances and I think that in my experience, that's also been a pretty reliable formula for an amazing journalist as well. So I think I would recommend starting with just some introspection and letting go of, you know, I've worked with entrepreneurs and and leaders of large organizations and across the board there when we're getting into the nuts and bolts of finance, or we're starting to talk about have that conversation. There's always just this little bit of shame, at least because it's like, it's like, there's this feeling that like, oh, I should know this already. And that's certainly how i i came to this too. And we really have to acknowledge that feeling and ultimately move through it and move past it so that we can immerse ourselves in some of our most pressing business challenges. And then after that introspection takes place I would recommend if you're looking for a tangible place to start I'd recommend exploring the difference between profit and cash flow and learning a lot about cash because that difference cash, being able to manage your cash that's going to help you in the short term survive in the short term and it's going to help you thrive in the long term. If you know how to manage your cash. So that's a great place to start as well.
Yeah, I learned that too late as an entrepreneur, like I was two and a half years in and I was telling people we have like 80 grand revenue a month and they were like, Yeah, but you got no cash. And the difference between the two, believe me it's a big difference. We had to raise money at a down on as they call it. So like I got burned by that. But I'm struck by the concept telling the story like I'm a terrible economics student. My father was an accountant I was phobic about following in his footsteps went into entrepreneurship, my first pitch to an investor and they say give me your three year three year model for your revenue and your your your revenues. And costs. And I looked at him and he looked at me and we kind of I knew he was bullshitting me and I was pushing him and didn't matter. He said, I'm only asking you to sit down and think about the model you're gonna give me tomorrow morning. So I went back I did this model in an Excel spreadsheet and I got that spark. I'm telling a story. In three years time, people will be so loyal to my vision to this vision, they will come in this numbers, and that will transfer into this revenue and we'll have this many staff and this is what it will look like. And literally in three dimensions, this new newsroom emerged in my brain because I had worked the numbers and it was like an out of body experience. I mean, that was just a lightbulb moment for me and I wish every journalist that go through it, because it's storytelling, and that's I think the key
was love that. So Mark, I'm gonna throw it back to you. So as we mentioned, both of us worked for the platform formerly known as Twitter. Good Old Days. Exactly. But you've had such an interesting career because you've like founded companies, and they've been acquired by other impressive companies. And and you've I know you've lived in New York, but you're from Dublin, and you're back home now. And tell me what was it like working for Twitter at the time, even though they're headquartered in SF, and then, of course, now Spotify, one of my favorite favorite companies and apps out there that is based in Stockholm, right and you just went to Stockholm as well like how has that been when you know, when the HQ is literally in another country?
Yeah, I mean, I remember Twitter discovering almost like the Wizard of Oz that like the Wizard of Oz, actually, behind the curtain. Nobody knew what was going on. And the biggest indicator of that, for me was I used to go around and my job as a media partnership director, go to football teams, the Queen of England, you know, publishers and say, get on Twitter because 80% of our audience are outside the United States. And we will go out I go to Turkey and I go to Africa, and I'd be telling people we are the global platform. And then one day someone took me aside and said the reason we're not investing in Africa Turkey because no revenue there 80% of revenues in the US for Twitter. And I suddenly realized the big lie, the Silicon Valley platform talking about being global, but actually deep down its business model was counter to the values that it was positioning itself around that I can only last very that can last very long. And Elon Musk is just the culmination of in Twitter, I think a dysfunction that comes from promoting the Silicon Valley feeling of changing the world, but deep down its business economics are not aligned with its mission. Whereas obviously for my current employer, it's about lifetime value. It's about over time building up the connection, the deep connection through creativity, and everything about it is aligned and I think that's what for me is one of the biggest factors. Finally the global thing you know, like I think one of the blind spots, for particularly I have to say for the American media industry is it's extremely US centric. And that's important for two reasons, obviously, number one, because some new folks here will have global ambitions. But what's happening in other countries right now in India, in Myanmar in Africa, is going to impact what happens here very, very quickly because we live in an age of exponential change, the cycles of development are speeding up. So here we are on the working for a company that was set up in a in a flat in an apartment in a greedy suburb of Stockholm 15 years ago by a guy called Daniel Eck. And it's now this incredible platform if we do not understand the rest of the world. We will continually fail to anticipate change. And that for me, I think broadly is one of journalism's problems we have to understand the forces like for example, in India, you know, voice is such a powerful mechanism because it crosses over the many dialects and the many languages it's the communication. It's not text based, so the way people communicate in places like Nigeria, the most diverse country in earth, is an incubator for ideas that will change the lives of your kids and our businesses. If you don't understand the world, you are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the people like Twitter's and the Musk's and the Zuckerberg so I think that's one of the things I've learned.
So insightful. I think, Mark and I could have a fireside chat just literally about our time at Twitter. I think both of us have PTSD from that chapter in our lives. Alright, so during my time, like working in various news organizations, platforms and now in academia, sort of change and change management, right is often this really daunting, massive, overarching kind of thing. And it's some companies it's you know, rolling out big initiatives or new products and pivoting has gone well and others it hasn't, you know, so I'd love to hear from each of you about your experiences with change management, as a leader and then sort of in terms of managing to actually
I think we've all at this point, especially post or we're still in the pandemic, but pandemic beast, we have to be agile and we have to be open to change. There's no day now that's the same. There's always new things coming down the pipeline. So I think the biggest one of the biggest things I try to employ is respect and sharing that information as quickly as I can or communicating as clearly as I can. Because I'm okay to those changes, but my team is sometimes a little frazzled, you know, by changes, so I just want to make sure I'm being respectful of what they have to do and communicating those differences and just being ready for anything. I mean, as a small business. Every week, I was like, are we going to make it during the pandemic every week? I was like, what is going to happen next? And I just learned to be open to pivoting and not think that pivoting means that the end of anything, it's maybe a new change or a new learning that we can take on to the next chapter of what we're going to do. But I think agility and communication are two of the biggest things that I've taken with me as far as change management and it's it's not over I mean, there's still changes to be done. And then evening, try to think like omni channel, you know how we communicate. Every day. There's a new platform in which we can talk to our audience or find new customers like we always just have to be open to what's coming next.
But I think two experiences for me will taught me everything. It's in the cauldron of the fire. And the first thing is well as a foreign correspondent as a war correspondent as good Iraqi and Afghanistan. And my job is to survive the end of the day, and come home hopefully, like have my arms and limbs attached and tell my stories to friends over drink, and that was survival. And then it got to a startup and every day is shit. Every day you get a kick in the head, and you can look ahead five years and go, I've got to be okay with this. And over time, then you start getting these muscles developing where you've survived something like this last week, and I'm sure you know the pivot. You're told when the curation you're talking about, and we got over it, we got through it. And that's resilience. So you're trying to build that muscle in your organization. So not surviving every day. It's going to be tough. The second thing I realized when I had my first terrible experience of having to lay off friends, I had to layoff someone I'd known for 14 years because of my mismanagement, actually. And I had to own that. And then I realized, well, I wasn't transparent because I was soaking up the anxiety of all the people around me and not telling them how close we were to disaster and then having to tell them and after that, I realized I just got to be totally transparent about the way we look as a business. And they've got to own that as well. And then I share that discomfort. And I got I was a better leader as a constant because I wasn't constantly fearing can I make pay next week. And the third day I went to Twitter and I got up my first day as the managing director of Twitter, Dublin and my job was to tell everyone how great things were. I get off so I'm super excited for the challenge ahead and I think our stock price tanked that morning and a guy took me aside and said, Don't ever make that speech again. He said go aside talk to that learning development people and work at a speech that's sustainable. And so what I learned was go in a time of change and obviously strife and say, Do you believe in the vision of this organization? Do you have faith in someone on your team? And do you know your role and the lever that you pull in this business? If you can say yes to two out of three of those things, stick with us. If you don't if you can't say that we can find ways for you to move on to a better job a better position or you may not feel stay around and been able to get up every week and go on Hey everyone here still believe the vision and gave people their own sort of internal GPS. And then he didn't stay in, you know, Twitter, high turnovers but it felt really authentic. And I think that transparency, decentralizing that responsibility to other people, and focusing on things that make you more resilient, not just surviving sequential crises. I mean, those things together had been my learned experience, because I didn't read them in a book.
Yeah, and I would say when I first started in my role at NASA, our challenge was, you know, NASA is discovering and exploring amazing things all the time. So there's there's an, there's also an enormous volume of communications work to be done. Because we want to share all of that with the world. And so our challenge as a team was how do we, how do we do all of that sustainably, considering our budgets considering our workforce capacity, and our infrastructure, and so one of the first things my team and I did is we, we really broadened our definition of success. So success is yes, it's our communicate how well we we achieve our communications goals and objectives. And it's also how we do the work so how we do the work is just as important as the work that we're we're doing. So if we're excelling at all of our communications goals, but we're continually extending beyond our budgets. You know, that's not the ultimate success. If we're continually, you know, achieving all of this amazing work. With amazing projects, but we're all exhausted all the time. That's not the ultimate success. So success is communication, strategy and resources, being in harmony, and it's a forever work in progress. And it's a transformational change that's going on all the time. And what I realized really quickly in my role is like I am responsible for financial outcomes in our organization. But I learned really quickly that I couldn't just be the person all the time, who was like, Okay, we need to reduce costs here, here and here because that was not going to earn me any trust and you need trust. In order to lead and perform a transformation of an organization. So that trust is vital. And so I'll one one thing I realized was that when, when we're seeking to incorporate and build this kind of balance in our organizations, I had to start by building that balance very intentionally. into my own role. So I'm responsible for financial planning. And I also facilitate design sprints and creative workshops with our team to create space for new ideas. I you know, I worked on the budget worked with the team on the budget for our our first asteroid, NASA's first asteroid sample return mission. Which I'm very excited about happening next month. So we worked on that communications budget together. And I'm also going out to Utah with them to make sure they're working in a in a safe and effective environment, making sure they have the resources that that they need. So, for me, it's been really important to be responsible and to embrace a diverse set of objectives. So not just being responsible for one thing, but but many things that sometimes seem like they may be compete with one another so that when leading change, I just think it's really important that leaders embrace trade offs and they embrace a variety of objectives that are difficult but necessary to to consider all at the same time.
Amazing also, how cool is that? Yeah, I love it. All right. So I just have one question left for you all and then we will take some questions from the audience. So as mentioned, you can submit questions through Oakland A's website and through the app. So please get your questions in. This sort of major theme of this conference has obviously been AI right. And AI is not new, right? It didn't just show up and all of that, but it there is so much attention on it. And there's so much energy and obviously development around it too. So I'd be remiss if I didn't ask about that and just kind of what your thoughts are in terms of like, how AI has been currently used in your organizations and industries and then how you think that's all gonna play out in the future as well. And by the way, this is a wild card question. I didn't tell them I was going to ask this question, because I love being cheeky like that. Whichever one of you wants to take that.
I guess I'll start. So I find AI wildly fascinating and wildly terrifying at the same time. The first week that I started using the journey, I was fully addicted to it. I just thought it was one of the craziest things I've ever seen. But now like, you know, months later, I'm like, how can we use it as a tool in what we do? Every day? So currently at my space we use it for to help with copywriting for the website. So at any given point we have over 300 objects that we have to describe and make them sound very sexy. I'm not a copywriter my team are not copywriters, so if we help it use it, it creates like kind of a prompt for us to then write better copy. We do not use anything that says verbatim but we do use it as a kind of a starting point. And it's been very helpful for my team. I don't know in the future, what other ways we would use it. But for now that is one that's actually genuinely helpful to us. But I do see just even like I think there was a story on like the fake the fake photo of the Pope. I was like this is so scary, like just the misinformation that we just know is going to come from it pitches on a day to day that's so far the way we've harnessed it for good and for actual helpful thing in our organization.
I would say generally our communications team really leans into a lot of new technologies, but I will cede my time to mark because we actually don't we have restrictions around generative AI
for you too. I think there's so many shamans centered around like a mantra in life with AI and be working with now in different forms for maybe seven or eight years. You know, if you're not scared, you're not paying attention. If you're not absolutely intoxicated, you have no imagination. Like I think about the impact of my children's education are the idea of personalized curriculums. I think of kids who have been ignored because they had a knee that was not identified by a teacher being served on progressed and nourished I think of all the experiences in medical diagnostics. You know, I think for example, about the prediction that there will be no you know, medical diagnostics, people that left anymore because they have replaced them. There's never been a bigger demand because what AI is doing is creating a marketplace for people who uniquely understand emotional intelligence. So you think about emotional intelligence, which I think is a core of leadership, which is you know, vision, self regulation, self awareness, communication. Empathy. These are the things AI will never replace. And the combination of those very human skills with the power of the co pilot in the form of the AI, correctly balanced is going to be a revolutionary force for good in society. Now, having said all that, there is an arms race and I see it in the field of work that I have do so with AI obviously there is the power now over the next year there'll be more elections next year than in the history of the internet. In those elections, we will start to see the emergence of AI generated disinformation, misinformation and campaigns, undermining democracy, equally work that we are doing with MLMs to spot patterns of behavior that we can see as dangerous, creating actual harm is accelerating at a mind boggling rate in a very positive way. So this this kind of arms race, and I think the way we should think about AI is can we tip the balance a little bit on the plausible futures here so that it's favoring the positive outcome? And that's why I think in journalism, particularly first of all, make sure that your own introduction of AI is set very clearly within a certain ethical framework, respect, nourish value, put a big ring fence around all your data, because the dirty secret of this business right now is that these AI companies are getting millions from a deck, but they're all looking for data to train the models on and that's where journalism has, I think a secret asset in the future going forward. So it is a cognitive dissonance, be scared, be very, very afraid. But at the same time, if you cannot see the potential for human progress in this, if we can push that balance down with the emotional intelligence that should be the characteristic of our craft of journalism, that I think we're failing future generations. So anyway, I'm seeing this in a kind of a mind boggling way. The speed of change is what scares me. Used to take what you know, 10 years for a piece of technology to become mass produced. In the space of what 10 days, we had 100 million users of Chachi PT, so the pace and the exponential quickening. So we now have, you know, 20th century institutions being outstripped by 21st century technology. And we have primeval brains in all of that and that's where I think there is the biggest fear is that we won't find a way to properly regulate in a way that pushes the accelerant on the good stuff, but equally gives us an ability to win that arms race.
So fascinating. And so my POV is basically it's very similar, like, obviously, you know, there is a lot of fear, but I always look for the positive and I look for opportunity gaps, you know, and I think that, you know, as leaders, all of us, it's, we have a responsibility to kind of think about the quality of our work. And our products. And when you look at AI from that lens, I think the future is really bright because if there are going to be infinite tools that can help do so much of the grunt work and manual things and take away some of that then, hopefully we're left with really agile, creative employees that can hopefully help the company keep innovating as well. So it's kind of like a double edged sword. All right, do we have questions from the audience?
We have one question. If you want to submit I'm going to not evoke all Haman anymore because my voice will be dead by the end of the day. And I have to do own a board Meet and Greet vote for me. I have one question from Carla from the Boston Globe. She asks, Mark mentioned transparency and communication. Can the panelists speak on data slash visibility, health of the business? Should newsroom leaders share as much digital subscriptions and growth metrics as possible? Or should they find a middle ground?
I'll get a start and I this is such a great question. So I like I mentioned earlier I I really believe there's so much potential if our organizations can more intentionally invite people storytellers and creatives inside the organization to participate in financial decision making. And we also have to find the right the right amount of information to provide so we we can run the risk of sharing too much and creating a situation of overwhelm if our teams don't feel that they have the tools to be able to address the problem that's being presented to them. But we can hit a sweet spot if we are presenting them with the right amount of information such that it's relevant to their role, and they can help solve the problem. So what I see a lot of is if we're not sharing any, you know, financial information or position information with our teams, we run the risk of having too few people at the table who are not equipped to solve the actual problems that need to be solved. So we need to bring people with a variety of different expertise is into that. That conversation in order and I generally find that in my experience, if we can do that if we do that, as leaders and we ask people, you know, how would you address this problem or we show them the financial information that's relevant to them, they'll point out the solutions for you. But if we keep all that information behind closed doors, and when we try to do finance in this, you know, in this little vacuum of just a couple of people who aren't close to the work, that's where we run the risk of solving the wrong problem or solving it the entirely the wrong way. So the job of the finance professional is to figure out what is the right amount of information. By sharing this piece of information, how is that going to influence our culture? How is that going to affect our team emotionally? Are we giving them the tools to prop to understand the information also, or are we presenting it in a way that's, that's, you know, going to be kind of indecipherable for them. So it's it's making the information accessible, and sharing the right information at the right time with the right people? I love that.
Yeah. And I think the right information is critical. Right? Give you if you're only giving significance to one metric, it becomes the significant thing in the newsroom, but it may not be the significant thing. So you can choose like me and think about all the people here who grew up with Chartbeat monitors in newsrooms like looking at the clicks, being told what to do, and that was literally it. It was a dictatorship of that data point. And I think that'll lead us down a terrible path. So choosing your metric, I think something that aligns with something you can talk about in human contexts like loyalty. I always think like retention is a word we hear and churn and, but actually, it's really about loyalty. It's about people coming back to you because you're giving them something of value. And that metric is so powerful, for example, for a subscription business, but also with advertising and brands. I mean, we're going to period over the next year where advertising I think will become more and more important. So things like content, marketing studios and engagements. So metrics around the way you're diversifying. Your business, I think are super important. It all leads to a phrase that I hear again, and again from also people I work with, you know, we're not data driven. We're data informed. And I think that the difference that what that really means is, you know, give us the data that we need and I think to feel empowered, as individual members of this team to do something like build more loyalty because I'm the person who covers this beat. And I'm going to do better. And I'm going to write a newsletter every day. And I'm going to get the open rates and the open rate doesn't become a data point anymore becomes an expression of the loyalty and the interest in the way I'm serving my community and if you can start telling those stories expect to the point. We're all telling you how to be better storytellers are advising at least, and data should play that role if it's becoming a dictatorship in your newsroom and something has gone wrong,
I think. Yeah, I completely agree. I think you know, newsrooms need to have a sort of culture of transparency because that will lead to a culture of trust, and hopefully an exchange of ideas. Right. And that I think, is one of the most important missing things in certain newsrooms, where you've got rigid leaders who are not open to listening to ideas. There are no feedback loops, right? That's incredibly critical that that happens in companies now and even doing retros after different product launches and going back and iterating on things like, you know, so many newsrooms just launched something. And if it doesn't work, then they're done. And that's not great product development iteration. cycles, anyway, but But I fully agree that like, there just has to be this level of like, sharing the right metrics at the right time, and then contextualizing them to and when you think of something like subscription data, like I've worked in newsrooms, where and luckily they do a lot of focus groups and there's a lot of interaction with the audience. It's, you know, more like, it's like the collective we're not just us and them and that that has to be the next iteration of subscription growth, like really understanding your audience like creating personas, really interacting with them, really listening to them, then and then only will newsrooms and especially leaders understand how to serve those audiences effectively, right?
With just one story. I remember in Germany, I was responsible for helping to grow Twitter in Germany, and we couldn't understand why Germans didn't like the app, the Twitter app and we thought was the length of words in German are so long they soak it all up or whatever. And I think the final one that we settled on was the fact that the Twitter upset, what's happening. Question mark. And German culture is just you don't ask people that you don't directly ask them to share their life with you. And I remember thinking like that was the answer to the lack of the data problem we had was a very human like, but you I don't have to tell you what's happening. And it was so fascinating that it became the end the data point, came down to a really fundamental human issue and I love those metrics on Twitter. I used to gather them in Japan, because language is so tight and compact, it was usually popular so you know, I think trying to find those metrics that speak to the human quality of your business. I mean, they're just Goldust.
I have one more question for the panel. This one's from anonymous. Oh, I have two more questions for the panel. Look at that. from an outsider's perspective. What new revenue opportunities do you see in the future for journalism? We're in the age of ad exhaustion and our relay of relying on ad revenue currently, what is even sustainable?
I think that's a really good question. Also, I love the term adsorption. Me too. Like that's brilliant, and it's accurate. Yeah. I am of the train of thought that newsrooms no matter what size right, big, big massive news organizations, nonprofit newsrooms, independent newsrooms have to have a really diversified revenue, many, many revenue streams, right. And that's easier said than done when you have small teams but I think you know, it's, we've got to just move away from display ads and things like that and think of newsletters as a way to engage with your audience and obviously make some money from that. events as a business, right? We're seeing tons of news organizations, really, really crafting and doing amazing events. That are just beacons for their community and that engagement is so invaluable. I'm a bit biased because I live in Atlanta. But the AJC has lately been doing some phenomenal events around that sort of connecting the history of Atlanta to their the makeup of their audience. And it's been truly outstanding to go to these events in person and feel like I am part of this like amazing culture. The city of Atlanta is changing rapidly. And that's really fascinating. I'm sure you feel that way about the South Philly right and the changes here as well. So, so yeah, many of you want to respond to that.
I was gonna say something similar about kind of coming off the page through events through in person interact, activations, and then also as a reader, I love interactive stories that mix photo and audio. I think the New York Times is in a really beautiful job of bringing more interactive stories off of the page that make me want to engage beyond the story and almost like research more after I read the story. So I think really merging visuals outside of, you know, a place to photograph and adding an audio component to me is the future of the journalism I've been consuming.
I would put one bet. And that's we're gonna see the hyper localization of journalism, where journalism brands will become less like institutions like banks, and more like talent agencies. And so for example, I'm thinking about like South Philly, I'm aware South Philly creative place not got a ton of people who can find a way to monetize at a local level through events, newsletters, podcasts that are perhaps nourished and flourished through the support of a bigger organization. Because if you think about it, the whole idea of local news is such a myth, right? If I live beside somebody in the same street, and I got three kids in the car, and I work in a tech company, and next door to a single person, University Drive rides a bike, our definitions of news are so different, but we're serving one thing to them and I think what I'm seeing a lot in culture, one thing I'm noticing, for example, that in music, people predicted that the universal ethic of music would cut off local music, it's the opposite. You look at Europe now. The Big Top 10 hits in Europe are all in a local language 10 years ago, it was all coming out of the United States. And this idea of like an intense focus on your identity and your person, you're placing your profession and finding ways to be served by people like you. And that's where trust comes from. So I think it will become a lot more about organizations not focusing on everything coming to them on their platform, but actually trying to go out and look for people who may not look like journalists. May not be journalists, but are telling stories that are vital to communities creativity and survival, and finding ways to then to use the lowering unit economics of content creation, and the blurring of lines between TV, radio, and print. Because I don't think they're relevant anymore. I certainly don't think a 1920 year old creative person who's launching some form of creative creativity experience is thinking radio, or print, you know, they're not doing that. And I feel that top top down model is dying with the rise of a creative economy. But the role of journalism organizations, being that talent agency for a community I think there's something special there. I don't know what the economics look like yet. But I do feel that authentic voice of a community as well, we all aspire to be and we should use the force of technology as a multiplier rather than fight against it.
I love that. I also think like there's such a huge missed opportunity or untapped opportunity, should I say with regards to, like really creative partnerships. Like I love this trend over the last decade or so that many newsrooms are partnering together, right. And like, really thinking about the scope of resources and the quality of reporting and able to work on massive global projects like that together. It's been so inspiring to see that I want to see more of that kind of innovation between a myriad of different companies though, and so another example that comes to mind. It's another New York Times one but like, They recently launched a partnership with subtext where you can I think you can text them like emojis, and then you'll get recipes back from what those emojis are, like, a that's genius, and be like that is just so engaging in an audience sort of growth way. And of course, NYT cooking is a business for them, right. That's a separate app and subscription and everything else. Like I think that's really smart, thoughtful, creative experimentation as someone that is a big foodie, and I cook a lot too. So I'd like to see a lot more of that kind of creativity coming out of newsrooms, because when you think about it, there are so many different products and so many different ways in which you're touching your audience from things like recipes to sports scores and information. And I think that's where newsrooms need to get creative, to generate revenue to support the good quality journalism and storytelling that everyone aspires to do.
So I have one last question from Eric from the Alliance for trust in media for Mark factchecking Trust and Safety seem to be in retrograde, at least on the largest social media platforms have accuracy and truth lost the war against disinformation on social media.
The answer is no. And I would say that myself, I think what we're seeing is evolution of what is correctly call us at the trust and safety space. I mean, back in 2016 2017. This was a field that in all honesty, when I was at Twitter, I remember the children's safety department was like, in the boondocks, you know, way away from the central decision making of what was going on. I think what we started to see over the past couple of years is more and more the work of the people who are working on safety, becoming part of every part of the organization. And so a philosophy that's guiding a lot of us is safety by design, which is every time you design a new feature, you start with the question What could go wrong, rather than trying later to do this whack amole approach to content moderation. So I think there is why like I see you know, in certain companies, there's definitely been a dereliction of the safety issue. But I think broadly now across these content platforms, out of sight is a much more sophisticated approach to making sure your product is safe and the very point of inception, so that you're not later on having to, you know, retrospectively try and decrease safety. I also think the balance between creative expression and safety is now much more of a spectrum. It's not a binary choice. Do I take this down or leave it up? But I do think there's an approach now to recommendation systems being safer using these AI MLMs to start spotting patterns of behavior that are toxic a lot of great work, I'd actually commend other platforms as well, not just ones I work for tick tock is in a very good job of making sure that particularly vulnerable groups are protected while not affecting the overall aggregate experience of the platform. So there's some real innovation happening that, you know, to be fair has to happen sometimes out of sight of the world's population, because these are trial and error sometimes. So I would say yes, there are certain parts of the industry where there has been a step backwards, but broadly, I'm seeing people consent connect with safety in all areas of the organization at an earlier stage. So in my experience, we've moved a long way forward. And in all honesty, we're also coming to terms with the idea that we have balances here rights and creative expression. Sometimes what you find offensive and I find offensive or different. striking that balance I think is delicate, but it's it's a job worth doing. So I do agree the characterization of Exxon, but there's a lot more work going on under the hood that I feel very inspired by.
All right, great. Well, we have run a few minutes over. So I want to thank you all for joining me here today and thank you for coming to this session. That's a wrap Thank you