By Lok Bing Hong
“After a week in an office with 80 people asking me what to do, I thought – ‘Oh my gosh, this is the worst mistake I’ve ever made,’ ” said Rianne Roggema, founder and OKR Consultant of strategy organisation Practic, during WAN-IFRA’s Asian Media Leaders Summit in Singapore.
Roggema’s journey into leadership began with the founding of Irie Digital, a digital marketing agency in Myanmar specialising in social media.
The agency’s acquisition by Duwun, a Myanmar-based online media platform under publishing giant Ringier, marked a turning point. The merger propelled her into the role of CEO, overseeing a team that had quadrupled overnight.
Faced with this rapid growth, Roggema had to reassess her approach. “What do I want to achieve with this company? What changes does it need?” she reflected.
For her, the answer lay in data.
As a new CEO with ambitious goals, Roggema leaned on data to define her media outlet’s position in the competitive online media landscape and to inform her strategic decisions.
“We realised smaller outlets and influencers had surpassed us – we were no longer number one and overly reliant on Facebook,” she said.
Data revealed their dependence on Facebook left many articles unread. The solution? OKRs – objectives and key results – a framework Roggema adopted from her startup experience to refocus her newsroom.
“OKRs clarify your goals and keep you on track,” she said. “That year, everything was aimed at reclaiming our number one position.”
Cutting distractions to stay focused
OKRs not only track progress but also require the discipline to “kill” initiatives that don’t align with immediate goals, Roggema pointed out.
Whether in editorial, sales, or website management, knowing what to achieve is only half the battle – the other half is cutting out distractions, no matter how promising they seem.
“Anything unrelated to the basic performance of our website – fancy election tools, for example – had to go. If the site takes 10 seconds to load, it makes no sense to focus on flashy features,” she cited as an example of her company attempting to increase the website performance.
“Media companies often love drafting OKRs, but then insist on adding everything under the sun to them,” Roggema said. “We say no – because if you try to do everything, you’ll achieve nothing. Start saying no.”
While setting clear goals is essential, Roggema acknowledged it’s easier said than done.
Once objectives are defined, the focus must shift from endless strategising to execution. Her approach? Minimise distractions like presentations.
“We only had one presentation the entire year, and that’s what my team worked from,” she said.
The key, she said, is clarity.
“If we know where we want to go, the questions are simple: What are we going to do, and who is responsible? Be explicit – this is the result we’re aiming for, this is who will achieve it, and this is how.”
Equally critical is maintaining a constant dialogue about goals.
“It’s not about measuring data every week,” she said. “It’s about keeping your business goals at the forefront and focusing on execution week by week.”
Engagement metrics take centre stage
Nitin Chandelia, Managing Director and Partner, India Head – Technology, Media and Telecommunications Practice at Boston Consulting Group, spoke at the same session, joining virtually.
Chandelia highlighted the challenges of measuring progress in evolving newsrooms where departments often pursue different goals.
(L-R) Kavita Chandran, Journalism Trainer and Content Consultant, who moderated the session, Nitin Chandelia and Rianne Roggema at our Asian Media Leaders Summit in Singapore.
Traditionally, newsroom performance has relied on qualitative assessments, with little emphasis on productivity metrics, he noted. This lack of quantifiable measures has hindered efforts to evaluate individual performance and drive improvements.
What has become critical is content engagement is the kind of views or time being spent, which is essentially a proxy for engagement, Chandelia said.
He emphasised the importance of collaboration across teams like data and SEO, focusing on parameters such as A/B testing of headlines and SEO performance.
“The goal is to identify what works and continuously improve outcomes across news desks,” Chandelia said.
The rise of AI is reshaping how editorial organisations operate, he pointed out.
“From identifying trends in large datasets to generating articles and creating efficient layouts, AI streamlines editorial processes. It starts with content planning driven by real-time trends, followed by data-informed creation and AI-assisted editing and proofreading,” he continued.
“As organisations adopt these tools, the impact on productivity and engagement metrics will become increasingly visible,” Chandelia added.
WAN-IFRA’s Neha Gupta edited this report.
About the author: Lok Bing Hong is a penultimate communications student from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Still figuring out his way, he hopes to foray into business journalism in the near future. He’s had stints in The Straits Times and The New Paper, and is a writer for NTU-based student news site Soapbox. Currently, he’s an editorial writer for lifestyle paper 88Bamboo, as well as the co-founder/editorial head for Fullout!Sg, a new multimedia site covering the street dance scene in Singapore.
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