In our era of fractional attention, the all-consuming Facebook feed, and news delivered via Amazon Alexa, there are serious challenges for established media companies trying not only to survive but grow.
And few media organizations are doing more to address those challenges than Dow Jones, part of $8 billion News Corp. Founded in 1882 by a trio of reporters, Dow Jones publishes the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and Marketwatch. (It sold the Dow Jones Index in 2010 to CME Group.) The Journal was one of the first newspapers to commit to building a subscription-based business on the web, while many other publishers hoped to rely primarily on advertising as a revenue source. Today, the Journal has more than one million digital subscribers.
But Dow Jones also recognizes that its relationship with new gatekeepers like Facebook and Google—as well as new information delivery technologies like augmented reality glasses or Amazon’s Alexa—will define its future.
“We’ve seen the growing power of the big tech platforms,” says Edward Roussel, the company’s Chief Innovation Officer, who joined Dow Jones in 2015. “The five largest companies by market cap in the US are all west coast technology firms. So their ascendancy continues to be a powerful theme, and there’s no sign of that slowing down. For a media company, one of the issues that has become more critical since I arrived here has been better defining our relationship with the likes of Facebook, Google, Snapchat, and Microsoft. What is that relationship? How do we ensure that we align our interests? That’s very much a work in progress.”
Roussel reports directly to Dow Jones CEO Will Lewis, and oversees a team of about a dozen people who work on innovation, as well as outside agencies who assist with design and prototyping. Before he joined Dow Jones in 2013, Roussel was the Executive Editor for Digital at Telegraph Media Group in the UK and a Managing Editor at Bloomberg News.
We spoke with Roussel in January 2018 about his top priorities.
The Power of the Big Tech Platforms
I’ve taken on our relationships with the big Silicon Valley companies, and trying to find points of alignment. There are [also] probably points of conflict, around topics like “fake news” and what it means to be a provider of quality news, and the impact of these platforms on the business models of publishing firms.
My job is…finding ways to work together that are beneficial for both the tech platforms and for us. We feel we’ve made some real progress with Google and Facebook, which are acknowledging the importance of high-quality content and supporting it in their platforms. In tangible terms, last September, Google in effect rescinded its first click free policy, which was a discriminatory practice against high-quality, paid content, [because it gave] better ranking and search [to free news sites.] That’s a huge step forward for a publisher like ourselves.
It is a similar story with Facebook. They are acknowledging the need to prioritize high-quality news sources versus the dross. That is easier said than done. They are [working toward] reducing the volume of news sources in the newsfeed, but increasing the quality. All of these things take time, and they’re the result of dozens of conversations. But we’re making real progress.
Embracing the Emerging Technologies Changing Media
The second area [I’ve been working on] involves embracing the technologies changing media. For the past 10 to 15 years, a legitimate criticism is [that] the media industry has been laggards. [It has been] pulled kicking and screaming to modern tech, whether it’s the web or or mobile apps. [Our mindset is] let’s be highly experimental with new technologies that are coming from these Silicon Valley companies, in order that we can really position ourselves as a leader.
Examples include doing a lot of testing with image recognition software, voice-activated systems such as Alexa and Google Home, and work with virtual reality, augmented reality, and chat messaging systems.
In practical terms, [testing emerging technologies] allows us to sort the wheat from the chaff: which will be super important, and which you can discard? Where you should invest, and where should you not waste your time? [One example is that we are] integrating image recognition into the core Wall Street Journal app, to help people scan stories [from the paper] and share them with others. With Facebook Messenger, we’ve scaled up an audience of 150,000 [users] daily who are using a chatbot we’ve built. By contrast, we’re less excited than we were 18 months ago about VR. We can’t see ways of scaling that. We’re a lot savvier about which technologies are important, and which aren’t.
[Exploring emerging technologies] matters for three reasons. It matters for the health of your product development cycle – it’s like an athlete that is training. Before you go into a big event, you need to train a lot. [This work is] helpful for the long-term health of our product roadmap. The second reason it matters is that [it enhances] our relationship with advertisers and commercial customers. The third is for retention and recruitment of staff. We are pretty much at full employment, and there is incredible competition for skills. If you are not seen as being at the forefront of these technologies, you won’t be able to retain and recruit staff.
Exploring New Business Opportunities
[Exploring emerging technologies] matters for three reasons. It matters for the health of your product development cycle – it’s like an athlete that is training. Before you go into a big event, you need to train a lot. [This work is] helpful for the long-term health of our product roadmap. The second reason it matters is that [it enhances] our relationship with advertisers and commercial customers. The third is for retention and recruitment of staff. We are pretty much at full employment, and there is incredible competition for skills. If you are not seen as being at the forefront of these technologies, you won’t be able to retain and recruit staff.
We’re a diversified media group. We have advertising, subscriptions, conferences. As a B-to-B business that serves Wall Street customers, you need to be constantly planting new seeds of future growth. That’s a real discipline. It’s easy not to do that when business is reasonably good. [But today,] we’re being far more exploratory about looking at new opportunities.
In our innovation unit, we’ve launched a business called Radical, to help investors find the best performing startups in a sector. [We created another product called Signal,] designed to avoid information overload for Wall Street firms.
…We want to be a company where you can create new businesses, and where our staff can be entrepreneurs. We’re about to launch an entrepreneurship program, a 10-part series for our employees.
We’ve [also] launched these week-long workshops; [one we held in February was] called “The Wall Street Journal as Your Chief of Staff.” We think of the Wall Street Journal as news, but when we talk to readers and ask, “Why have you been reading the Journal,” the insight you’ll get may be that “the Journal helps me accelerate my career.” So we’re taking that idea to the next step. What are the other ways we can help Wall Street Journal subscribers advance their careers? News is one way, but there may be others. This idea came about as the result of a talk that we hosted [with] Kevin Systrom, [the co-founder of] Instagram. One thing he said was, “The best ideas never come from you, they come from other people.”
We’ll have 16 people from around Dow Jones, as well as external speakers, working in a very structured way, using an incubator called PreHype. We’re going to surface a whole bunch of ideas about how we can better help Wall Street Journal members and subscribers, and see if we can move forward with one or two of those.
…One of the mistakes I’ve made since 2015 [is that] I hadn’t anticipated adequately the follow-through [required after] these workshops. You have this very intense week, which almost always surfaces a lot of great ideas and working prototypes of these great ideas. Then you’ve got the challenge of follow-through, as people go back to their busy lives.
We’re partnering with departments [to change that]. …We will figure out which individual is the best person to follow through. We’d be disappointed if we didn’t come up with one or two outstanding ideas, and determine who’s best placed to move forward with it.
The price [of participating in the workshops] is you have to give up a week. People freak out and their bosses freak out. But once you get them in the room – it’s a bit like disconnecting people from their smartphones–they’re grateful to you. Getting people to focus for more than five mins is hard work, but it’s really good for them, and it’s good for the organization. Unless you do that, you will not innovate.
The image recognition idea I mentioned earlier came out of a workshop out of innovating print. Print isn’t dead; we have [930,000] subscribers to the print edition of the Wall Street Journal. One hundred percent of print readers have a smart phone, 80 percent have an iOS phone. In the old world you’d tear out [an interesting] article. In the new world, you press [a button on an app that does] image recognition of the headline, and that [app] immediately associates it with the digital edition of that story. You can share it, save it, or look up more background reading. Or if you’re reading the New York Times [and you scan something], you can get the Wall Street Journal take on that story. It’s an early-stage experiment, but I can see a lot of potential over time.
Ties to the Rest of the Business
We’re trying really hard to break down barriers in general. Departmental barriers can be very harmful in terms of creativity. The best [colleagues in any organization] are those who don’t see barriers where they don’t exist, and get excited about certain projects. It’s a job that’s never done, breaking down barriers.
Our job is not to come up with all these great ideas—our job is to persuade our colleagues that they’re the ones with great ideas, [and that customers have great ideas as well.] The best ideas are definitely not going to come from the Dow Jones innovation unit.
Our tech team doesn’t report to me, but we have a great relationship with them. We often ask ourselves, “How can we help them?” And they’re often asking me the same question. With Signal, the AI project addressing the issue of information overload on Wall Street—the CTO of the company is personally helping me out.
Encouraging Entrepreneurial Thinking
Five years ago, if you had said, “I want to set up a new company in the news business and it does X,” the response would be, “Good luck and goodbye. Today, the response is, “Good luck and how can we help?” It isn’t necessarily a conflict with you staying at Dow Jones. I think the way forward is to create a culture where people can feel not only that it’s OK to be an entrepreneur—but that you can apply that entrepreneurial thinking to your day job, or you can apply that entrepreneurial thinking to a charity.
The key for trad organizations is to feel like entrepreneurialism is good…talented people perform well when they feel their creativity is tapped, when they’re being pushed close to their limit in terms of their creative abilities. They feel responsibility and accountability for the work that they do.
That may mean that [they] take training courses on being a better presenter, [or participate in] a 10-part series on entrepreneurialism.
[But the key is] giving people a sense that testing new business ideas, and prototyping things [is encouraged.] If people think it will end in failure for them, then there’s no incentive to try things.
