Death by vision: Prosper in local news without predicting the future

'What is your vision for local news?' I have been asked this question several times in the past month. My interrogators seem surprised when I say I haven’t got one.

'But your start-up is doing local news! You must have a vision!'

The implicit rebuke is this: if you don’t know something no-one else knows, why the hell would you get involved in a dying industry? If I had such a secret I would not share it, but no, our primary weapon is a culture predicated upon our ignorance of 'the future'.

This approach is the obvious starting point when you acknowledge, as we all seem to, that the technology for creating and distributing news has changed repeatedly and profoundly over the past 15 years, and will continue to do so for at least the next 15 years.

No-one is capable, in this ferment, of crafting a ‘vision for news’ that would survive beyond 18 months. No incumbent envisioned Twitter, BuzzFeed, YouTube, Feedly, or even start-ups with more familiar models such as Gawker and Business Insider.

Consider this: Google cares a lot about local news and yet it has no compelling product or convincing vision for local news. Google has 50,000 employees. Most are incredibly smart and significantly better rewarded than their counterparts employed directly by the incumbent UK news organisations. So what are the odds that your organisation can ‘out vision’ them? I know where I would place my bet.

Here’s an alternative approach. Assume change is constant. Shape your organisation and your product to survive constant change. The winners will be those that maintain the greatest velocity in the evolution of their product and their model.

The key word here is 'evolution' - constant contact with the environment shaping and directing change; developing hypotheses every week, building and releasing the following week, measuring and refining the week after. This is a software mentality that we loosely call 'agile and iterative'.

It should be blindingly obvious that successful media companies need to be successful technology companies - I am not going to argue the case here. But amongst the thousands of engineers I have met, I have never met a single engineer of the highest calibre that works for a media firm (Reuters excluded).

Are incumbent media firms, large or small, competing with banks and software companies to attract the finest engineering talent? Do they recruit top-quality software (or any) engineers at the milk-round? I don’t know the answer, but if not their fate is sealed.

Here's my message to them:

Once you have engineering talent, you need to maximise its value. Galling as it may be to an industry where content generators have been the kings, engineers are probably your most expensive employees and they are the key to your future, because they are the engine that maintains velocity.

Warp the company around them to an insane degree. Provide them with the ideas and the detail so that they can release product upgrades EVERY SINGLE WEEK. This is modern software culture.

Given these remarks, which I consider neither original or contentious, why do so many seek a vision? It is because vision is EASY. Researching and constructing a ‘vision’ is FUN. Implementing vision is crank-turning: “Men out of your ditches and forwards.” Committing yourself to a long, grinding war of attrition, where neither the winning strategy or the outcome is known, is HARD.

I’ve met senior executives from the big local newspaper publishers. They are smart, friendly, knowledgeable and helpful. They understand where their businesses are. There is no naivety in this respect.

But are they up for the grinding trench warfare, and do they have the energy, focus and commitment that it will take to survive?

Over many years I have spent time in San Francisco talking to a wide variety of companies. The intensity, depth and range of conversation I enjoy there, with all levels of employee, are not matched by people I meet in news organisations in the UK. San Francisco does not enjoy a superior distribution of intelligence and ability compared to the UK, but there is a culture that makes more of it. And these are now your competitors.

The demand for local news never went away. At worst it evolved. The cost and revenue models simply slid away from the incumbent providers, and when that occurred they threw their products and heritage out the window.

Most online editions of local newspapers are the laziest, least engaging products humans are capable of producing. The organisations responsible have relinquished their right to a place in the future and lack the culture to fight for that place.

In vision, your death is assured. My alternative proposal is that you build your business around the absence of vision. This requires a model that can survive, despite its ignorance, via agility, humility, relentless focus and effort - and actually caring about the product and its relevance to and understanding of modern audiences.

Even better, build a model that prospers from industry ignorance - because in the vacuums created by the retreat of the incumbents lie the opportunities.

Jasper Westaway is founder of Borde.rs: a mobile app for telling and discovering local news. He previously founded OneDrum (acquired by Yammer/Microsoft in 2012), and he was part of the founding team at Enigmatec (acquired by iWave/EMC).

Jasper will be contributing to the BBC College of Journalism’s Revival of Local Journalism conference (supported by the Society of Editors) on 25 June. Sessions will be available to view shortly after on College of Journalism’s YouTube channel. Highlights can be followed on the day at #localjournalism