Journalism culture must change and old school hacks must ‘get over it’, says Guardian exec
Pilhofer
Traditional media companies, and the culture of journalism and newsrooms within them, must fundamentally change to become more data driven in order to keep pace with the digital world, a senior Guardian executive has said.
Aron Pilhofer, who oversees the newspaper’s digital operations, urged old school journalists who don’t like the prospect to “get over it” and “have an open mind” to change.
Pilhofer told a conference today that organisations must stop obsessing about the home page, and begin to think more scientifically about how, where and when its content is delivered.
Too many media firms still adopt a “publish and pray” approach where content is written, sent or posted online “in the hope that someone finds it”.
“Those are not really strategies, those are tactics that sometimes work and sometimes don’t,” Pilhofer told delegates at the Walkley’s Storyology conference. “It’s pretty awful.”
“I used to work at the New York Times and we published our most impactful journalism on Saturday afternoon because it was in the Sunday papers and we were terrified, terrified, that publishing it earlier would somehow hurt the Sunday paper, which is nonsense. It used to drive me crazy.
“The overlap of digital and print was pretty low – 18 to 20 per cent – but in the end, who cares?
“We need to put that piece up when it has best opportunity to find the audience that wants to find it. We should not be beholden to our print legacy. We have got to get away from thinking that everything begins and end with the homepage.”
Pilhofer said he agreed with Buzzfeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith, who earlier told the conference its editorial policy is “shaped by how the story will travel”.
The future will be more data driven, the Guardian editor said, adding the way traditional firms currently measure success is questionable. He cited Total Reading Time, a measurement adopted by blog publishing platform Medium, as far more meaningful than page impressions.
“We think about page views or unique visitors and those are ok proxies, but total reading time is a meta metric. Medium don’t care if it’s one page view or 100, they want to know if people are really engaged,” he said,
“Traditional news organisations use unique visitors and page impressions but they don’t really measure what we want to measure which is whether our journalism is really helping people understand issues better.”
The Guardian executive said newsrooms in digital start-up publishing companies now include a host of non-traditional titles such as user experience specialist, database cartographer and content development analyst. Journalists, and traditional newsrooms in general, must adapt to this changing world, Pilhofer said.
“Our jobs, like it or not, will fundamentally change,” he said. “These are not typical newsroom positions and that’s the way we need to all start moving. We need to start thinking who we need to bring into the newsrooms, what skills do we need, how we interact with the business, how we start thinking about collaboration, because frankly our competitors are doing that.
“Buzzfeed has people who do all these things, the Guardian does not.”
“Our jobs are going to change, the culture of journalism is going to change. It means that we are going to have to go to meetings, we’re going to have to hang out with people who wear suits and with people who point at flip charts.”
While old school journalists may not like the prospect Pilhofer told them to “get over it”
“It’s just the way things are going to be. It’s to our advantage to get involved in these conversations. We need to have an open mind.”
Steve Jones
It’s a shame some of the old school journos have quit or have been monstered out of the business. I’m thinking about the reporters and subs from multi-edition afternoon papers who could turn around great stories in a very short time and publish them accurately. A lot of the so-called hot shots I’ve seen recently may be quick, but accuracy is going out the window. At the end of the day, the news sites that survive and prosper will be those that can be trusted to deliver content that is well written, factual and timely.
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@BD 100%. The ever increasing emphasis on data and engagement discourages ‘real’ journalism ever being pursued as too risky, this instead turns ‘news’ into recycled click-bait articles or sensationalism at best. Irrespective of whether you’re at Buzzfeed or The Guardian the outcome is the same.
The only way real journalism can survive is to go down the subscription model route. Only by not being beholden to metrics like “user engagement” or advertisers will real journalism survive.
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Amusing that this guy thinks this is novel. News wires have done it forever. People don’t buy news wires.
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After reading Buzzfeed for too long,10 types of brainfog swept in. Now looking for 6 types of news writing that may clear brainfog. 8 oldschool journalists please apply.
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BD 10000%. Had you heard my talk (and I’m wondering if the reporter here did), you would have taken exactly that from it. Sorry this piece gives the impression I said otherwise. But, what can you do?
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I wonder if the metric: how we pay the bills; ever occurs to anyone at the guardian? Talk about la la land!
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Hi Aron
Just to be clear, I was at your presentation at the Storyology conference. And I stand by my story which clearly reflects the main thrust of your observations – that the culture of journalism and newsrooms at traditional media companies need to change. I think we can all agree that trusted sites and publications with great, well written content will prosper. My story does not suggest you have a different view to that. It articulates your belief that times have changed for journalists and that our approach to the job also needs to evolve.
Cheers
Steve Jones – chief reporter, Mumbrella
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Hi Steve,
Not here to pick a fight, but we’re just going to have to agree to disagree. The piece you wrote here is about a talk I did not give, tonally anyway.
By embellishing words I did use with a loaded, pejorative term I absolutely didn’t — “old school” — you’ve changed the narrative and subtext to something it wasn’t without technically misquoting me. I’m an old school journalist. Been in this business now 20-plus years. I know this isn’t accidental.
It’s too bad, and actually somewhat ironic, because the thrust of my talk couldn’t have been more the opposite of that. It was an upbeat message of inclusion. It was about how journalists — all of us, even old schoolers like me — need to come together and take ownership of our collective digital future, and how we can do that.
My second to last slide was “Our future is a team sport” for god’s sake.
The “get over it” line you quote twice, and I said only once, had less to do with newsroom culture than organizational culture. What I actually said was that we (all of us) need to “get over” our reluctance to engage with the business side and start working more like our native digital competitors.
We need to do that because the business model supporting the institutions we love is crumbling, and we simply need to start building better digital things. That can’t happen unless editorial is a full partner, and not a passenger.
I wasn’t addressing old school journalists or new school journalists, who, by the way, are just as reluctant. I was addressing journalists.
I’d say maybe it was me — maybe I wasn’t clear, or maybe I misspoke. But based on the Twitter stream, questions in the room and comments from people afterwards, I don’t think it was me. The Walkley student blog got it right, and I’d encourage people to seek that out if they would like to read about the talk I actually gave.
Sorry for being so critical. Normally, I would shrug something like this off. But if you knew me you’d know I am the very last person on earth to stand on a podium, wag my finger at “old school hacks” and lecture them about getting with the program or getting out of the way. In part, as I said, because I am one. But also because I’ve spent a good chunk of the last ten years or trying so hard to build bridges — see: Hacks & Hackers — rather than creating divisions.
You can imagine, given that, how it feels now to have people tweeting and retweeting this piece, effectively attributing your words to me.
Just kind of a bummer is all.
aron
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I was at the talk and agree with Aron. Steve’s report might have been factually correct (for the most part) but he got the tone of Aron’s speech completely wrong. Aron very clearly conveyed that traditional journalism skills are at the heart of everything that journos do and will do — no matter how much technology may evolve.
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