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📮In this week’s newsletter, we offer guidance to those navigating the constantly evolving industry landscape through strategic planning and first-hand experiences of media organizations like the Rappler (the Philippines), The Kyiv Independent (Ukraine), Dennik N (Slovakia), Telex (Hungary) and Rise News (Uganda). This is the second edition of our Revenue Roadmap series on how organization can adapt, innovate, and pivot to overcome challenges and thrive.

The Challenge: Turning crisis into opportunity

Crises are a constant in the world, and we’ve all experienced the uncertainty they create in our industry. More recently, we’ve seen the troubling news of far-right riots in the UK, the devastating humanitarian toll of the war in Gaza, and protests in Bangladesh on the backdrop of an unprecedented spike in attacks on journalists worldwide. Whether your media organization is coping with conflict, suppression from authoritarian leadership, technological changes or the climate crisis, you have to adapt to grow and serve your community, while ensuring the public access to trusted information.

During the IPI WoCo MIF panel Pivot under pressure: How media innovate through crisis Veronika Munk of Denník N (Slovakia), recalls Hungarian authorities doubling-down on the systematic erosion of press freedom, driving the closure of Index. With hundreds of journalists forced to quit their jobs, it left a gap in the country’s media landscape, but sparked motivation to explore reader-supported models: “We saw people protesting in the street… and we thought that the biggest mistake would be not to stick together and create something new”. The result was Telex, a new media outlet that collected 1 million euros from their readers in the first month of their crowdfunding campaign, despite a lack of a clear strategy at the start.

Aaron Ainomugisha, journalist and the team leader of Rise News Uganda, who works on amplifying often-neglected voices and issues in the country, reaffirms this experience, where “A crisis is a necessary shock to the system to realize you have a gap”. It pushes news organizations to find their footing, but also to identify new pathways to success.

So where do you start to build your media’s resilience toolset?

Watch the full panel – Pivot under pressure: How Media Innovate Through Crisis

The Solution: Equip your team with skills for adaptation and experimentation

To future-proof your media and give it the tools to deal with the inevitable industry challenges, media leaders have to rethink the model and build foundations for the future of their organizations. In Phase 2 of the Revenue Roadmap, we look at how your media can benefit from design thinking methods to identify challenges and how strategic planning can help your team discover new opportunities to pivot.

Start with a method that publishers of any size can deliver using the basics of human-centered design and product thinking, and mainstreaming the practice inside decision-making teams. Moreover, by spending effort analyzing the challenges your organization faces in a transparent way early on, you will create more opportunities to pivot or abandon initiatives that do not fit the immediate needs of your organization. This mindset drives resilience, especially in the face of crises, which require sudden or longer-term pivots in strategy and a renewed analysis of your risk calculus.

Use Human-centered design to: 1. identify a user problem → 2. ideate solutions → 3. prototype → 4. test → 5. fit it into your business plan and build your roadmap.

A crisis often creates a renewed need to understand and shape your relationships with your audience. Human-centered design is a useful method for discovering, framing and identifying challenges and pain points in your organization. It is an audience-first approach to developing questions and building solutions for your newsroom. When you identify relevant problems to solve, your audience and their needs have to stay on the radar for your media to deliver the information they seek, when they seek it and where they seek it.
For The Kyiv Independent, which saw a massive increase in reader support at the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a crisis meant a shift in perspective: “It took me a while to realize that I did not need to save The Kyiv Independent from dying but to make it grow”, says CEO Daryna Shevchenko. The problem with that, however, is that “for part of our audience, our content is not vital. Every time something else happens in the world, the world forgets about Ukraine”. As such, The Kyiv Independent has to “rethink, rethink, and rethink”, be that through introducing new content formats or building an audience management system through engaging the expertise of outside partners and businesses.

“Alone, together” – empower your team to ideate

Rethinking is a team effort and an inclusive process. Whether working with your journalists or innovation teams, collaborative brainstorming techniques, like “alone, together” (credit to Lena Pedersen) can amplify your media’s innovation potential and empower your team to tackle new crises. Stick to the principle of creative confidence, as it is important in this stage to remain open-minded to potential solutions without pre-defined answers.

Staying open to unexpected solutions was critical for the Filipino news outlet Rappler, operating under former president Rodrigo Duterte’s regime. Rappler was slapped with a dozen legal cases and its journalists were repeatedly threatened online.

As Don Kevin Hapal, the Head of Data and Innovation at Rappler underlines, what helped them survive was persistence, keeping up with the best journalism, being fast at acknowledging the crisis at hand, and trying new ways of work. For their team, such innovative ideation oftentimes came through 🍝 “Just throwing spaghetti on the wall and checking what works”, says Hapal. Some of the things “accidentally” found through the crisis, became part of the current Rappler strategy and allowed the media to look forward.

Knowing when to pivot

Although strategic planning is key for your organization’s long-term development, it’s equally as important to recognize when to deviate from the initial plan. Your media’s adaptability is critical in responding to new contexts and seizing new opportunities as they come up.

“We create a roadmap every year… and follow the plan as much as we can. But we cannot afford to just sit around and be super cautious about launching products. We launch something, it doesn’t work, we close it. If we kept waiting for our chance, we would not do anything. We have to innovate to grow”, says Shevchenko.

After all, innovation is not an end goal in itself. It requires additional skills such as refining decision-making processes and establishing objectives and key results that fit your organization’s long-term mission and business goals. It is equally important to keep good journalism at the forefront and to create a setting in which “journalists are empowered to do their job, but also open their minds”, says Ainomugisha.

Next Step Forward

Find out how your team can prototype → test → fit ideas into your business plan and build a roadmap to future-proof your media. 

Get the full guide and let us know what you think.

The Revenue Roadmap is a guidebook by IPI’s Ryan Powel and Ava Seave.

 

Innovation Deck

Last week to apply for the Transition Accelerator

📍Europe & candidate countries

Grow your media, faster! 🚀Apply by August 18, 23:59 CEST.

Join a vibrant European cohort of media innovators! ✍️ Learning from the past 15 participating newsrooms, one of the main benefits of the programme was finding peers and partners.

“Being able to meet other independent magazines and newspapers from across Europe as part of the accelerator, and sharing our experiences with them, gave us great strength and energy”, says the team of the previous beneficiary Press Freedom Foundation in Serbia.

Other opportunities:

Science Misinformation: Journalism in the Age of Truth Decay

Virtual Reporting Fellowships to the UNCBD (COP16) and UNFCCC (COP29)

Magmatic School of Environmental Journalism
📍Worldwide, apply on a rolling basis 📍Worldwide, apply by 15 August 2024 📍Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Malta, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, Greece, Cyprus and Turkey
Apply by  August 30, 2024

Share your thoughts, reach out to the Media Innovation team and help us shape our media support programmes! Say hi – [email protected].