History lessons
The publishing business has gone through a major purgatory in the last decade
During this time I was a journalist, editor, web editor, executive online editor and finally a product manager for the last few years. When people start talking about digital disruption they always mention the publishing business. Poor media, look at them, barely scratching the bottom of the pan, trying to survive.
And yes, the change has been profound. If you kept up with the trends you do have a future. If not you are dead or probably doomed already.
Look at Facebook and Google and you think how great they are and how much money they have got. Think again and imagine a time when a large portion of this money was pouring into media, dispersed of course, but it was here. Internet killed the value proposition of newspapers, slowly removing classifieds, comments, local advertising, job postings and even news.
The money coming in every day from the papers was phenomenal in the good years. Imagine that every larger edition had a chance to have correspondents all over world reporting from major cities like: Rome, London, Washington, Tokio. Not to mention them having a journalist in every small town or region. Yes, the good old times.
24sata has survived until now, not only fighting to keep our jobs, but every time we break a major story that can influence an election, expose corruption and despotism that is the real reason to keep us digging and writing and giving these people. Because no one else will.
24sata was born at the very end of that period in 2005. Facebook was already a thing and Steve Jobs introduced his first iPhone the year I joined 24sata in 2007. Google started dumping digital advertising prices below anything you could build a business upon, unless you were a global giant.
After a rocky start, in the years to follow, we managed to be the best selling newspaper with an average of 180.000 copies sold daily by 2009. This was enough for the company to become a success before the global crisis.
We were the disruptors of the status quo in the industry.
The vision of our CEO was to fight on two fronts, online and offline respectively pushing each other to maximize reach on both in order to take the prize. The number one position. The strategy was working. Print was growing. Web was growing. 24sata was breaking news right away while other media though ‘this internet thing’ is just a waste of time. The others chose to put their hands to cover their eyes and pretended the ‘internet monster’ will go away.
Boris Trupčević, our Editor-in-chief, later CEO, had the vision to have a low cost, people-oriented, start-up, growth minded do-what-ever-it-takes, technology aware and, above all else, user-centered vision of the company.
After some research of the best practices in publishing at the time, the new redesigned no-scroll site was a bit strange inspired by the New York Times Reader but very well received by users and experts winning best designed site awards for two years in a row (World Editors Forum). Much like later, websites became adaptive for any screen size on mobile, this site was adaptive for desktop. The newspaper was also done in a similar way, on small paper, short and sweet reporting. It was a consistent strategy all the way.
Others were very skeptical because the site was strange, adapting to your screen in whatever resolution you had on your desktop. But many got used to it.
It was based on an idea, popularized by Apple:
Simplicity — the basic idea that was behind our first winning product. It was garnished by breaking news, no non-sense reporting and a lot fun content. All a tabloid should be. This idea, turned out to be the sassy, break the rules, in-your-face decision that was the start of product thinking in 24sata. This was differentiation, we are not like the others.
The beauty of it was that the site was done by a few people in a couple of months… not nearly the kind of investments we are doing now. It was a start-up mentality and people working there — bought the story.
So our brand values/product values were at the time stated:
Simplicity
Presentational diversity
Intelligence
The other two are also quite important to mention. Presentational diversity in all about keeping the user interested and surprised by new ways of presenting content.
Intelligence was about under-the-hood logic giving the user a better experience than just chronological ordering on sections and subsections but a mixture of the newest, most-read, most commented and best shared articles.
Sure, later in 2009/2010 we decided to move to One Page Design and scrolling because the no-scroll site became obsolete because people got used to scrolling, especially on mobile.
Also it was much due to the pressure of having to make money from digital. The no-scroll site had a significant disadvantage — all the advertising formats were non-standard and advertisers didn’t want to make their creatives just for us.
So the strategy changed, as it should whenever you have a serious roadblock, no matter how good things used to be.
Not only that. The newly established digital cohort of developers in-house made us much more flexible and strong. Our portfolio of products started growing until we had 8 verticals at one point.
In 2013 when we secured the first position on Gemius, which is the official measurement agency, and to this day we never lost that position.
We added a few more things to our winning strategy which was live 24/7 reporting whenever it was possible experimenting with live-streaming as early as 2009.
Aggregation is a strategy of combining our content with the best content available out there — competitors and international media but always with a clear statement and a link to the original source.
Community is building a large community of registered commentators which are actively involved in our product and became an important part of it. Although much was already invested in that regard, also over the years there were mistakes made. In the end we decided to keep them a part of our platform, acknowledging their contribution and not surrendering to Facebook this last direct channel we have to our most loyal readers. Registered users have become so important in the digital age for so many reasons.
2010 site gave us the flexibility and presentational diversity we needed.
In 2015 and 2016 we relaunched again with separate sites on mobile and desktop giving the site a modern look and editorial control like no other before that but eliminating the waste created by endless experimentation before that.
Then we started new experiments with machine learning — personalization, contextual and tag recommendations.
Then came the video, Joomboos and native advertising for which we have been awarded so many times it’s not easy to count.
Over the years, we have had big flops, too.
We had an idea to have cable TV news channel which didn’t work out and a web shop which we later sold off and many other ideas — but from each story you learn important lessons.
You learn what your limits are, who you can trust, which approach to take for a certain project, whether do it in-house or out-source, do it waterfall or agile…
The final result is often decided in the first few sentences when starting a project. If you got it wrong there it could all go to hell soon.
That’s why you must always test your initial hypotheses and validate quantitatively and qualitatively. Meaning validate with data and talk to users.
Have we always done so?
No, but we are getting there more and more, every day.
The point of the story is that major product values will stay in a product for a long time, but strategies will change all the time, designs will change, people will change but the values stay to tell the character of a brand recognizable to the reader, the user.
