This presentation was first delivered at a journalism workshop in Sarajevo's Mediacentar in May 2017.

1. Alan Soon
Founder & CEO
alansoon@thesplicenewsroom.com
@alansoon
@splicenewsroom
Putting the customer at the centre of
storytelling, distribution and revenue
Sarajevo, May 2017

2. • Newsroom digital transformation
consultant
• Specialist in editorial strategy,
operations, change management
• Career journalist
• Radio, TV, newswires,
magazines, online
• ONA Singapore co-founder
About me.

3. Our mission
To help editorial newsrooms
shift from traditional
publishing models to building
sustainable, digital-first
organizations.

4. Our clients
and partners.

5. This is the problem
with media today.

6. We don’t know why
we exist.

7. Expand your mind, change your world.
Gets you talking.
Our lives, our paper.
The paper for the people.
The world’s greatest newspaper.
All the news that’s fit to print.
When The Times speaks, the World listens.
Sunday isn't Sunday without the Sunday Times.
Bild. Read the world's fastest newspaper.
Making twice the noise.
Simpler. Better. Smarter.
Your right to know.
It's thinking time.
We are local news.
Our slogans.

8. What’s the role of media today?
Why do people
read/watch/listen to you?

9. What’s the role of media today?
Why do people
read/watch/listen to you?
What do people need that only you can
provide?

10. What’s the role of media today?
Why do people
read/watch/listen to you?
What do people need that only you can
provide?
Would people notice if you weren’t
around tomorrow?

11. And why do you do what
you do?

12. Everyone can tell you what they do.
But not many can tell you why.

13. Everyone can tell you what they do.
But not many can tell you why.
What we do
We give you breaking news.
How we do it
We have journalists on the ground 24/7.
Why we do it
…

16. How important is what you do?

17. How important is what you do?

18. How useful is what you do?

19. When was the last time you asked:
What can my reader do with this
information?

20. Journalism is dead if we
don’t start thinking of
our audience differently

21. "We are coming at last to the
end of the Gutenberg Age."
— Jeff Jarvis, Director of the
Tow-Knight Center for
Entrepreneurial Journalism

22. We’re in the
age of personalized media,
not mass media.

23. How the mass media business model works
1. Create as much content as possible.
2. Sell as many as ads as possible.

24. Why are we so obsessed
about reach?

25. Here’s the problem:
Scarcity no longer exists in media.
1. Content is commoditized. Plenty to read.
2. Ad delivery is commoditized. Plenty to show.
Your audience is spending less time on
news content.

26. “The scarcest resource of
the 21st century is human
attention.”
— Les Hinton
Former publisher of WSJ

27. The average attention span today is 8
seconds (a 33% decline since 2000)
(Btw, a goldfish has 9 seconds of
attention)
17% of page views last less than 4
seconds
49% of people read less than 111
words on a web page

28. How far can we push this?
Source: kissmetrics.com

29. We’re in peak content.
Journalists are forced to
keep churning more stories
— even though there aren’t
enough eyeballs, time or
ad revenues to go around.

30. Tablets, watches, glasses, bots,
live videos, drones, AR, VR.
None of these will save the
news business.

31.
Choosing value over
volume.

32. Stop talking about people in terms
of audience demographics.
18-35.
Male.
College educated.
Mobile.

33. Think of them
as customers.

34. The answers aren’t going to
come from the industry.
So let’s learn from others.

35. “Customers are always beautifully,
wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they
report being happy and business is great.
Even when they don’t yet know it,
customers want something better, and your
desire to delight customers will drive you to
invent on their behalf.”
— Jeff Bezos, Amazon Founder & CEO, in
2016 Letter to Shareholders

36. 1. Create a customer experience map
Identify customer touch points with your product/service.
Obsessing over the customer.

37. 1. Create a customer experience map
Identify customer touch points with your product/service.
2. Identify customer outcomes
Using your customer experience map, outline what the customer
wants to accomplish at each touch point by customer segment.
Obsessing over the customer.

38. 1. Create a customer experience map
Identify customer touch points with your product/service.
2. Identify customer outcomes
Using your customer experience map, outline what the customer
wants to accomplish at each touch point by customer segment.
3. Determine the current state
Conduct customer research to validate your findings and
uncover unmet customer needs.
Obsessing over the customer.

39. Who does this well?

40. Hotels.

41. Why hotels?
• Creating products and services that people
actually want to pay for
• Investing in behavioral analytics to understand
what people want
• Obsessed about the user’s experience

46. Some of the things they
share in common:
• Prioritizing bars and social spaces for
interactions
• Free, fast internet
• Comfortable common spaces for work

47. How are you
…rewarding your users?
…building loyalty?
…creating new experiences?

50. Re-defining modern
journalism.

51. Media was never meant to reach
the most number of people.
We were meant to reach the right
people and help them.

52. Right people,
right information,
right time,
right place,
right monetization.

53. We are in a golden age of media.
For the first time, we have everything you
need to create content in your hands.
We have data to know what people
want…
how to get it to them…
on whatever platform they’re on.

54. And yet media companies
are struggling.

55. “If you’re not an entrepreneur
in journalism these days, you
should get out of journalism.”
— Kara Swisher
Founder, Recode

56. “People will continue to demand
answers to anomalies and
suspicions... If news organizations
as we know them are not delivering,
others will step in to fulfill the need.”
— Simon Holt, Brisbane Times

57. What is the role of
journalism today?

58. Email
alansoon@thesplicenewsroom.com
Twitter
@alansoon
Newsletter
http://bit.ly/splicesubscribe
Blog
http://medium.com/splicenewsroom
Stay in touch.

59. thesplicenewsroom.com
@alansoon

60. Alan Soon
alansoon@thesplicenewsroom.com
Alan Soon is Asia's leading specialist on newsroom
operations, digital transformation and the business of
media. He is the Founder & CEO of The Splice
Newsroom, an editorial consultancy that builds,
develops and transforms newsrooms.
For more than 20 years, Alan has worked in radio, TV,
news wires, magazine and online across Asia. He
started out as a reporter and grew into other
operational roles including producer, editor, newsroom
manager and eventually a business leader.
Alan led one of the largest digital news teams in the
industry as Yahoo’s Managing Editor for India and
Southeast Asia. He’s also worked at CNBC and
Bloomberg across Asia.
Alan is a regular speaker at international media
conferences and is a co-founder of the Online News
Association in Singapore.