Driving digital transformation through newsroom integration and innovation Driving digital transformation through newsroom integration and innovation

A Kenyan media group wanted to optimise its newsroom operations. Together, we embarked on a year-long digital transformation journey to ensure the long-term sustainability of its business by integrating its print, digital and broadcast newsrooms; establishing a premium content strategy in preparation for the relaunch of its online paywall; and developing best practice workflows for digital-first working.

Over the course of a twelve-month engagement, FT Strategies provided strategic and tactical support to transform the structure and operations across its newsrooms.

First, FT Strategies conducted a comprehensive diagnostic to evaluate the client's existing performance and identify key themes, challenges and opportunities to grow their digital revenue. Building on these insights, we then worked with the leadership team to define a North Star strategy for the entire organisation, culminating in an ambitious goal for digital growth.

Next, we embarked on a programme to design a future operating model for an integrated newsroom and redefine a premium content strategy approach, further enabling the organisation to deliver on these strategic initiatives. Key outcomes from this phase included:

• Redesigning newsroom workflows to optimise content production, reduce duplication and improve insights sharing across the organisation’s portfolio of brands
• Creating new multimedia editorial leadership roles to deliver on the digital-first transformation and restructuring the organisation through all levels of reporting

In the final phase of the engagement, FT Strategies then worked closely with the newly appointed editorial leadership at the media group to accelerate the pace of the transformation and empower them to bring the new ways of working and content strategy to life.

Leveraging expert insight from across the Financial Times, we provided regular support and coaching to advise the leadership on their new roles across a number of areas, such as how to communicate and cascade the North Star strategy down reporting lines and across departments; how to build an audience-focused, data-led and experiment-driven newsroom culture; and how to instil accountability through feedback, performance processes and key metric reporting.

We further brought these topics to life across the whole of the management team through a series of weekly meetings and hands-on workshops, designed to optimise their daily editorial production and drive meaningful results. These sessions culminated in a series of newsroom experiments that transformed their ways of working, as well as a suite of digital tools that will give the team the practical means required to continue driving their editorial production into the future.

Key deliverables from this engagement included:

• An ambitious North Star goal, coupled with corresponding outcomes, hypotheses and an established governance committee to actively report on progress towards it
• A comprehensive analysis of the client's online content and audiences, culminating in recommendations for an overhaul and renewal of their reader revenue strategy
• The design and introduction of a holistic newsroom integration programme to bring the print, digital and broadcast teams together, as well as new workflows to cover planned news events and daily breaking news in an efficient manner
• Support in appointing the newly integrated editorial leadership, such as bespoke 1:1 coaching with subject-matter experts from the Financial Times
• The creation of an editorial charter to codify the team’s values, principles, governance mechanisms and journalistic standards
• Operational tools, such as an internal website and reporting templates, to drive the transformation on a day-to-day basis
• A competency framework for performance management in the newsroom