Too many ex-journos and not enough techies in management, warns former ACP boss
Morrison: Content needs to be more valuable
Management at most business publishers is overly dominated by journalists at the expense of tech specialists, the former boss of Australia’s biggest magazine company has claimed.
Speaking at the B2B Media Strategies conference in London, Colin Morrison – who was CEO of ACP, now part of Bauer Media, from 1995 to 1999 – suggested that publishers need to look to digital culture instead of that driven by former journalists who have risen through the management ranks.
Speaking about changing the “print-centric” B2B business model, Morrison told the audience of publishing executives that they needed to invest far more into digital research and development – and also get back to the creation of valuable exclusive content. He said: “Most companies don’t have that many people in development. Most B2B companies don’t have nearly enough tech people. You should benchmark against digital-only operators.
Hard to see why journalists can’t deliver good content businesses and tech folk deliver good tech. Very hard to see why tech people would be superior.
The big issue is whether journalists really accept that value is in the users view. By which I mean that a lot of journalism is second rate opinion.
A key skill for successful media executives is the ability to get right brained content producers who don’t much care about technology to collaborate with left brained techies who don’t much care what content their kit is carrying.