Our audiences don’t care that we are trying
“We’re working on that.” “We’re actively lobbying to make that happen.” “That’s the next big thing we hope to do.” “That’s definitely something we want to improve.”
If you have been in digital media for more than a minute, you will know too well the pain of how long it can take to ship even a single new feature, to say nothing of new products or services. Sprints might be measured in months, and years-long delays are common.
These kinds of timelines do something strange to you as a person, as a product manager, as the reporter or editor who has been promised a feature for so long that your carefully-labelled Gmail threads about it are longer than the tenure of several well-paid executives who all promised to “make things faster around here.”

One of the side-effects created by the internal psychodrama of shipping media products is an external defensiveness.
We come to believe that if our audiences only knew how hard we were working to Fix All The Things While Staying In Business they wouldn’t be so grumpy when we make them wait a mobile infinity to render our pages.
We tell ourselves, and sometimes our audiences if they catch us at a bad time on Twitter, that our real jobs are Saving The World Through Journalism (aka winning Pulitzers) and not product development and also Could You Stop With The Parasitic Ad-Blocking Already?

And we come to believe that the crankiness of our (non)subscribers is a function of interesting choices we make about who we hire for our op-ed pages and not that it took several minutes and some determined swiping past sponsored content to get to the article everyone was mad about that day.
But we are working on all that. These are things that are top of mind for us right now. We hear the complaints, and we’ve flagged them with our tech teams. We repeat these phrases like sacred incantations that have the power to overcome resource constraints, the siren song of video, economic realities, and organizational inertia.
We repeat these phrases like we are not rapidly running out of time.
We are out of time.
I spent the 2016–17 academic year as a JSK Stanford Fellow doing a deep dive into how newsrooms serve (or often, fail to serve) their mobile audiences. Along the way, I spoke to dozens and dozens of people in journalism — reporters, editors, educators and students, devs and product managers, designers, folks in bizdev, advertising, and sales. Thank you to everyone who helped and asked questions along the way. If you’re interested in mobile+news, find me on Twitter @s_m_i.







