Written by Jonathan Este

ONE thing we regularly bash on about is that news executives must remember that their future is intimately bound up with that of their staff.

To put it another way: a media company’s greatest asset is its journalists.

Tech Crunch’s Mike Arrington wrote this piece the other day, highlighting that AOL is quietly hiring journalists and building up a distributed newsroom with upwards of 1500 writers.

He also speculates about what might happen if the top 10 per cent of the New York Times’ reporters were to leave the Grey Lady and start up their own operation. He says they would soon attract venture capital, perhaps from the likes of Marc Andreessen, the founder of Ning, who already supports Talking Points Memo and Alley Insider.

Arrington also references Politico, which was set up by a two former Washington Post reporters in 2008 and, with about 100 staff, is already attracting 7 million monthly visitors.

The site is punctilious about branding its staff – they realise that in building big names they will attract credibility and, hence, attention. Michael Wolff profiled Politico in Vanity Fair recently: it’s written by wonks for wonks – but this largely bears out John Hartigan’s assertion in the Olle lecture a couple of years ago that news will increasingly be written by specialists.

News Ltd has plans to attract the “fanatical five per cent” – in other words the most engaged of its audience, who are willing perhaps to pay a little extra for certain aspects of its coverage: the chance to chinwag online with Paul Kelly, perhaps.

Or a limited-edition podcast from Paul Toohey in Jakarta, wine advice from Max Allen, one of Iain Shedden’s terrific music interviews: content that can’t be reproduced elsewhere.

I had a very pleasant time at the weekend speaking to a group of senior citizens in Terrey Hills, many of whom had made the trek into the city to Politics in the Pub the night before to listen to Paul McGeough speak about his experiences as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East.
There is no shortage of demand for this “premium” or “enhanced” news and news-related content. Part of the job for news organisations will be building, and educating its networks, about its brands.

Of course, News has divested itself of some of its most valuable brands by making them redundant. As an old Australian staffer, it’s the national broadsheet I know best and I know of prize-winning photographers who will no longer be taking pictures for The Oz – despite the general acceptance that one of the most attractive multi-media features on a newspaper’s website is thought to be slideshows.

Any news organisation that is thinking straight will be busily building the brand value of its top writers and photographers. But why stop there? The most successful of the news sites are those that create their own brands from nowhere. If there is a fanatical five per cent who are interested in sport, politics or business, how hard is it to identify a fanatical five per cent who are interested across a range of other topics.

Motoring. Humour. Book and film reviews. Travel. Food and drink. Fashion. And how many of these lend themselves to multi-media presentation?
Yet how much of this are we seeing? Where is the investment in these brands? It may be that there is an intransigence on the part of the staff (but I doubt it – most of the journos I know are only too aware of the difficulties under which they are working and would welcome some investment, even at the cost of working harder, for a while anyway, with scant extra reward. They at least know that we are all in this together).

But these are all still examples of the old media model of journalism as lecture. The news experience as a one-way street with the journalists as the smartest guys in the room and the audience as the people that shut up and listen to what they are told.

It’s also a model that undervalues anyone whose fizzog is not in front of a camera or on a photo-byline.

What our news organisations have yet to come to grips with is the importance of engaging with the audience. If we’re going to build a premium content “club”, the potential members are going to want a richer experience. It’s a truism in the union business that your members love you more when they are doing things for you than when you are doing things for them and I think this holds as true for news organisations.

In February, Meg Pickard, the head of social media development at The Guardian, spoke to Fairfax’s Changing Media conference in Sydney about some of the things the paper was doing to attract more people to the website. This, remember, is a newspaper that has a print circulation of about 350,000 and has 30 million unique visitors a month – so it’s doing something right.

Pickard described a couple of ideas: Grufts – the paper’s version of the UK dog show Crufts, which the paper hosted on Flickr and to which thousands of people sent pictures of their dogs, with a bit of a story. It generated a huge amount of traffic and, of course, a very cute front page with the winning hound: “Britain’s favourite liberal dog,” they called it.

The day after Obama won the US election, Pickard went on, a gang of them was trying to think of different ways to mark the event. One of the things they came up with was to get readers to send in phone pics with messages to the new president-elect.

People wrote on their hands, stuck post-it notes to their babies’ heads, you name it. Once again it was hosted on a third-party site and brought in loads of traffic.

The two ideas had this in common: they cost The Guardian nothing and came about as a result of a bit of brainstorming by rank and file journalists.
There’s another truism about journalists and their employers: we love them more when we are doing something for them. It makes us feel needed and valued when we are busy, when our ideas are listened to and when we feel like we are an integral part of the team.

Cameron Stewart stood up at the Quill Awards and urged news managers everywhere to hold their nerve and invest in their journalists.

He’s right – news organisations shouldn’t see their staff as a cost centre, but as the engine room for their next brilliant idea. Rather than constantly looking to trim costs, managers should be looking at how best to extract the best possible value out of their clever, loyal and hardworking people.

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