How data can deliver cultural change

Scholars commonly credit the ancient Romans with publishing the first newspaper,?Acta Diurna, or?daily doings, in 59 BCE. Although no copies of this paper have survived, it is widely believed to have published chronicles of events, assemblies, births, deaths, and daily gossip.

In 1566, another ancestor of the modern newspaper appeared in Venice, Italy. These?avisi, or gazettes, were handwritten and focused on politics and military conflicts.? However, the absence of printing-press technology greatly limited the circulation for both the?Acta Diurna?and the Venetian papers.

The game changer came when Johannes Gutenberg’s invented a movable-type press that permitted the high-quality reproduction of printed materials at a rate of nearly 4,000 pages per day, or 1,000 times more than could be done by a scribe by hand.? This innovation drove down the price of printed materials and, for the first time, made them accessible to a mass market. Overnight, the new printing press transformed the scope and reach of the newspaper, paving the way for modern-day journalism.

The first weekly newspapers to employ Gutenberg’s press emerged in 1609. German language papers, Relations: Aller Furnemmen, and?Aviso Relations over Zeitung, were a success, and newspapers quickly spread throughout Central Europe. Over the next 5 years, weeklies popped up in Basel, Frankfurt, Vienna, Hamburg, Berlin, and Amsterdam. In 1621, England printed its first paper under the title?Corante, or weekely newes from Italy, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Bohemia, France and the Low Countreys. By 1641, a newspaper was printed in almost every country in Europe as publication spread to France, Italy, and Spain.

But printed newspapers have been in decline for many years now.?

The newspaper industry has always been cyclical, and the industry has weathered previous troughs. Television's arrival in the 1950s began the decline of newspapers as most people's source of daily news. But the explosion of the Internet in the 1990s increased the range of media choices available to the average reader while further cutting into newspapers' dominance as the source of news.

Press baron Rupert Murdoch once described the profits flowing from his stable of newspapers as "rivers of gold", but several years later said, "sometimes rivers dry up." "Simply put", wrote The Buffalo News owner Warren Buffett, "if cable and satellite broadcasting, as well as the Internet, had come along first, newspapers as we know them probably would never have existed."

Ironically, these dilemmas facing the newspaper industry come as its product has never been more sought-after.

As the demand for news has exploded, so have consumers of the output of newspapers.

Naturally, therefore, newspapers have needed to undergo their own form of transformation to compete in the modern world.? Some are succeeding. Others not so.? Indeed, a 2023 Department for Culture, Media and Sport committee report revealed that over 300 local newspaper titles closed between 2009 and 2019, and that those who remain are having to compete with fewer resources and journalists against online news providers.

In January 2024, Jim Mullen, the boss of Reach plc who owns several national newspapers including the Daily Express and Daily Mirror as well as several local titles such as the Manchester Evening News warned that the print newspaper business could become loss-making within 5 years.

So, is anyone fighting back and winning?

Well, in spite of all those stories about failed transformations, the New York Times is certainly putting up a good fight. They have made the challenge of moving a business from legacy to digital almost look easy (put up an early paywall, launch podcasts, hire armies of the best people (one of Pulitzer-prize-worthy millennial journalists, and another of product people), and have the leadership spend every Friday afternoon on strategy). But a full digital pivot is an anomaly, and successful examples, while they have important things to teach, are far from simple.

Drawing from Tolstoy, every legacy organisation that has succeeded in a digital transformation has done it in its own way and often this is not about technology. The common theme derived from the countless interviews we ourselves have held with leading transformation practitioners is that it is the internal changes to how an organisation operates that prove critical to success. The culture, leadership, talent and the many micro changes in how people make decisions and interact on a daily basis and win Hearts and Minds.

Indeed, similarly to the New York Times, the Guardian in the UK led a digital pivot that has clearly transformed their business and their trajectory.? And much in tune with what Tolstoy mentions above about unique factors, theirs has been brought about through the use of data. An analytics tool, in fact, named Ophan.

Ophan has been credited with providing visibility of a level of data and analytics that no other newsroom was able to boast. With a dashboard that displayed to the nth degree page views, attention time, social referrers, the breakdown of readership, where they have come from, where they went to next, who were the biggest Twitter/X influencers, we could go on, Ophan became a peerless example of disruptive technology emerging from within a legacy newsroom going on to change the fabric of the entire organisation.

And, whilst this pioneering work is well known in the sector, the cultural dimensions perhaps less so.

The starting point was one person’s goal of improving the readership of articles when they moved from print to digital. But of course, like in many change projects, progress was difficult. Entrenched cultural values were blocking change – and data emerged as a solution.

The first data tool was a morning email, which was initially distributed to just four top people, out of a concern that that data insights might skew journalists away from serious subjects. It showed what worked yesterday and what didn’t.? The next step was to introduce data insights in a very limited way into the morning meeting allowing the team to build on this and push certain messages.

By this time, the data was clearly leading the organisation to understand that it needed to grow traffic.? And linking this back to the theme of this newsletter, maybe this was one of those realisation moments that print really was on its way out and that online readership had to be the future. Who really knows, but it was clear that the next step was to set up a system to review headlines before they went digital. But here was the next problem, culture didn’t allow someone to say, ‘you’re writing the wrong headline’ as it couldn’t be proved, and the very limited system providing the data insights clearly wasn’t scalable.

Within 24 hours, one of the developers had hacked up the SEO dashboard, as it was then called, which showed everything that had happened on the Guardian site in the previous 3 minutes. And so Ophan was born.

As this data analysis dashboard grew, so was the organisation’s ability to nudge the culture.? A little tweak here, a little tweak there and people became enthused, empowered and started to see the real value in the data. Which articles worked (e.g. by readership numbers, or how long they stayed on an article), and which headlines didn’t. And a critical nudge came when a benchmark was set for minimum readership. If it doesn’t meet X page views, do we really care about it? And, if we do, what went wrong?

The point here is that, as Tolstoy says, change is delivered by a number of means. Each legacy organisation that has pulled off a digital transformation has done it in its own way. It has found its own levers.? In the case of the Guardian, it was data interventions that have proven to be the catalyst to deliver both cultural change and strategic change. But there is a proviso, and that is that there needs to be clarity around what needs to be delivered from the start.?

“My job was to take what we did in print and put it online”. And it worked.