5 lessons news organizations can learn from Amazon.com
Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million, and while we don’t know how much the paper will start to resemble the online shopping giant (“Customers who read ‘Doubts about a nuclear deal with Iran’ also clicked on ‘Which celebrity dog are you?’”), many of Amazon’s defining practices can be applied to the news business and the demands of real-time journalism online.
Love it or hate it (and many people seem to do both), Amazon is a phenomenon at once empowering for customers and terrifying for competitors, and has come to dominate the world of online retail. Big Media could learn some valuable lessons from the structure of the company and its founder, examined in Brad Stone’s excellent book about Amazon, The Everything Store.
1. Set the flywheel going
A recurring theme in explaining Amazon’s success is the concept of the flywheel: Bezos realized that Prime — the program that offers free 2-day shipping on all orders for a flat annual fee — would get more people in the door and lead them to buy more and across more categories to get the most value out of their Prime fee.
Along with this was the realization that not all customers will use Prime the same way, so it shouldn’t be just an expedited shipping service. Add features and bring them all in; some will use it for free shipping, some will use it for streaming, but it will all cross-pollinate and feed other parts of the business.
Application to news: There is no direct equivalent to news consumers getting more “bang for their buck” (you can’t really amortize a subscription fee by reading more articles) but there is a parallel in getting people in the door, and giving them a variety of options once they’re in.
For news websites, the Prime member is the visitor who is also signed up to newsletters and news alerts. If a reader invites you into their inbox or pocket, saving you from simply waiting for them to find you on Twitter or come to your homepage, then half the work is done. Promoting and facilitating signups for newsletters, mobile push notifications and email news alerts should be among a news organization’s highest priorities.
Even more important, of course, is what you offer them once they’re in the door. Your main newsletters should cover diverse subjects to show readers the range of quality content they can find on your website. Remember that news consumers are people, and they should be seen as entertainment consumers, quiz consumers, politics consumers, health consumers, video consumers. A curated newsletter can ensure that once people are in the door, they consume more, and the flywheel keeps spinning.
2. Justify everything to the customer
Jeff Bezos implemented a rule inside Amazon banning PowerPoint presentations, arguing that it is too easy to hide between bullet points. Instead, executives who want to launch new features or change existing ones must write the idea and the reasoning behind it in a two-page public press release: Why are we doing it and how does it benefit the customer?
Application to news: Plenty of news organizations, especially in the transition to digital, organize their websites and put resources into sections and features because of inertia. If it was a section in print, it should be a vertical online. If we’ve had this blog for a few years, we should continue feeding it for a few more.
But every vertical, every blog on a news website must be justified by its value to the user, and editors should be able to articulate that value clearly. Every special project, every interactive graphic, anything that requires time and effort to build must have a user-facing reason for being.
3. Become a platform
Bezos realized early on that Amazon was more a shopping platform than a retail store. It was good at connecting buyers and sellers — whether those sellers be people getting rid of used textbooks or major brands promoting new products — and it was good at fulfilling and shipping orders. By enabling regular people to sell used books led to a considerable blowback from publishers who didn’t want to compete with their own used products, but those that stopped selling on Amazon in protest realized they couldn’t afford not to be there and quickly came back.
Bezos found that the things the company was good at could be applied across the company to feed other parts of the business.
Application to news: Figure out what you are good at and apply it to different content areas. If your Web staff is good at writing search-friendly headlines that people want to click on, do it for every single content type and every category. If your graphics desk is great at illustrations and data visualization, bring them into articles and projects across all areas as early as possible. If your columnists are good at getting deeper into a story than your competitors, broaden what they cover (see the NYTimes’ coverage of #AlexFromTarget for a good example).
A news organization can’t be good at everything, and it doesn’t need to be. It just needs to use its competitive advantage in one area to stand out from the noise and show what it can bring to its coverage that nobody else can.
4. Reward employees for the values of the company, not the numbers
Despite being a strong leader with a big personality, Jeff Bezos knows that praise can be at least as strong as punishment, and through a series of prizes he rewards people for taking initiative to solve problems. One of the best known, his “Just Do It” award, gives an old Nike sneaker to an employee who finds a solution to a problem, whether it applies to his or her department or not. For Amazon employees, that old shoe is a big deal.
Application to news: Some news organizations have gotten flack for rewarding employees based on the page views their content gets, and rightfully so. Much more important than rewarding metrics goals is rewarding the values that will get you to those goals on a regular basis.
That can mean acting fast to jump on breaking news or trending topics, taking ownership of a story and staying with it if competitors have better content, trying a new way to visualize data, working across departments on an expanded story package. Whatever you want your newsroom to look like, reinforce the values that will get you there and the numbers will follow.
5. The people closest to the problem are the best positioned to solve it
Bezos created small working groups called “two-pizza teams” to eliminate friction and tackle the biggest issues the company was facing. Small groups of only the key players who, if working late on a problem, can be fed with just two pizzas. Those working groups would come up with the best solution to the issue and bring it to executives, eliminating the need to get input from everyone through multiple rounds of feedback, and recognizing that the people intimately responsible for the issue were the ones who would figure out the best way to solve it.
Application to news: Layers of editors are a structure of old-school newsroom quality control that can be hard to loosen, but media companies need to embrace nimble, start-up culture and avoid hierarchical decision-making. That means letting reporters and producers loose to experiment and find the best ways to serve their audiences.
If the problem is “how do we cover elections in a new and unique way” then put a politics reporter, a designer and a video person together to figure it out. If the problem is load time on the mobile app, then a developer, metrics person, UI specialist should attack it. If the problem is people unsubscribing from your newsletter, put a content person (Web producer), a marketing person, a designer on it. If it’s a declining audience in your health section, put your health reporter, metrics person and homepage producer on it.
As Lara Setrakian, founder of News Deeply, said about her company’s approach, “let reporters play.”
There are many different ways to run a newsroom, and everyone’s audience is different, but media companies need to take a critical look at how they are organized from the inside out to make sure their technology, workflow and internal structure are oriented to best serve their readers.
News consumers are becoming more sophisticated every day, and are changing their behavior with each new device and social platform they adopt. Newsrooms must adapt accordingly, because they are always at a disadvantage compared to the startups who can design it all from scratch.
