Tag Archives: managing the crisis 2009

Anna Kirah: Every news org CEO needs a mentor aged 18-22 (audio)

Last week at the WAN-IFRA ‘Managing the Crisis’ conference, Anna Kirah, design anthropologist and vice-president of CPH Design, argued that reader/user habit surveys were useless (unsurprisingly, she advocated an ethnographic approach) and suggested that every newspaper exec get themselves a young mentor, aged 18-22…

Here she is talking to Journalism.co.uk:

“I think we are living in a revolution gap; it’s not a generation gap. We’ve always had generation gaps where the older people think differently from the younger people and there are all sorts of tensions there.

“This is a revolution gap: it’s between the industrial revolution way of thinking, and a new way of thinking that has developed through interconnectivity.

“Whether we call them the net generation, or digital natives, or Gen Y, it doesn’t matter. But these people think differently, act differently, behave differently, experience the world in completely different ways and newspapers have taken far too long to realise the potential there.

“I think the best way to do that as a CEO is hiring a mentor who is between the ages of 18 and 22, who sits with them and explains what they are doing.

“It will require the CEO to be humble and not put value judgement on it. But learn what the excitement is about; what it gives to these people. What it gives them has filtered into other generations now.”

MTC09: Moritz Wuttke – Don’t rely on Google and develop your own AdSense

Publishers shouldn’t automatically give over everything to Google, said Moritz Wuttke, founder of NextMediaInitiatives, based in Switzerland and China, at a WAN-IFRA industry gathering today.

Wuttke, who advises media and advertising companies how to earn revenue online, suggested that newspaper publishers make advertisers work far too hard when it comes to buying adverts. It should be possible within three clicks, he said.

The New York Times’ self-service advertising model was a good development, but much more needed to be done by organisations, he said.

Who has tried to develop their own AdSense? Wuttke didn’t suggest that newspapers develop their own technology, but look to services outside of Google, he said. “Google is not bad – use them but don’t be abused,” he said. If Google offers to host everything for free, think twice, he advised.

“Work with Ad Clicks,” he said. “Start your own contextual advertising.”

Using evidence from Asia, he showed where profits were being made: the Chinese instant messaging service for example: QQ IM with its 70 per cent profit margin.

Newspaper site advertising needs to be more flexible, he said. Understand that 15 seconds might be too long for a user to watch a advertising video – five seconds might even be too long, he added. “The best thing is to meet user groups and find out what is annoying,” he said.

Finally, he said: “Don’t fire the young guys. Hire the young guys – who will even work for free. Suck their brains. Empower them.”