Weeknotes, 26th April

I’ve been on holiday, but eased myself back into work this week with a couple of days at Substrakt’s Digital Works conference in Leeds.

So this weeknotes post is a small number of highlights from the copious notes I jotted down over the two days, plus some little thoughts I had along the way.

On the theme of curiosity…

The theme of the event – curiosity – is close to my heart (I used to run a little conference called Curio). I nodded along to Ash Mann’s intro where he talked about the importance of curiosity and curious people. I love working with people who have a lot of curiosity about what they do and about the world: reading a lot, going the extra mile to pursue an interesting idea, finding out why something was the way it was, or exploring new/unfamiliar ideas.

I used to get frustrated by people who I saw as uncurious. I’ve changed my mind a lot on this though. I don’t see curiosity as a personal responsibility – I see it as an organisational one. If curiosity is critical to the success of a team or organisation (and it almost certainly is) it’s down to leaders to create a culture where there’s time, space and encouragement for curiosity. I’ve definitely seen leaders who expect curiosity from their team, even though workloads and pressure are so high that there’s no room for it at work. Curiosity can’t be a personal responsibility, and it can’t be expected as an extracurricular activity. Not everyone has the time, energy or resources to dedicate their time outside work to professional curiosity. (Please do not come at me with: ‘We all have the same 24 hours in the day’ – it’s not true.)

Aled John, FT Strategies…

…gave talk distilling a 15-year transformation at the the FT from from being reliant on ad revenue to being reliant of digital subscriptions. The big lessons for the FT were:

  1. If you do nothing else, do your best to align your organisation
  2. Build direct relationships with your audience
  3. Choose the customer you can rely on for the future
  4. Break transformation into phases
  5. Great journalism (and art) matters

I think these apply far more broadly, and I also appreciated someone showing a realistic timeline for a big transformation.

Nick Wyness from the Tank Museum…

…gave an account of the value of creating an audience that may never visit your institution in person. The Tank Museum orginally thought that its digital content and social channels were to drive IRL visits. But over time, it realised that providing online content that’s highly relevant to a group of people with a niche interest could be its own revenue stream through subscriptions. (This reminded me of this interview I did with Alice White, Digital Editor at the Wellcome Collection: ‘From very early on, we took the view that the website is the organisation, not just a way of funnelling people to the physical organisation. Otherwise why would we digitise our collections? Why would we do anything other than provide information that gets people through the doors?’ Read the full interview with Alice.)

Shani Dhanda…

…called the audience in and asked us to put more focus on accessibility, saying ‘Disability is what we do to one another’. This one is going to stick with me.

Daniel Alcorn, Priyjah Paramasivam and Nicola Pace…

…this panel on designing for impact got me thinking about why the digital product never looks as good as the initial brand presentation (and omg, the work Priyjah and Nicola showed looked so good!), and about all the disconnects between how the brand is conceived and how it’s then executed and interpreted through the lenses of usability, accessibility, development, content, platforms, etc.

Zosia Poulter, Matt Locke, Danny Birchall and Chris Sullivan…

…and finally, I loved the panel Zosia Poulter moderated with Matt Locke, Danny Birchall and Chris Sullivan on thinking like a publisher. One big thing worth sharing was Matt’s reminder of just how hard it is to grow a digital audience around an editorial proposition, and just how long it can take (years, not months). I also appreciated that Danny talked about the value of pair writing with subject matter experts – one of my favourite methods that I’m still baffled is not more widespread.

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