With more than 500 journalists and correspondents around the world, Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) is one of Germany’s largest news publishers. SZ introduced an online paywall in 2015, and by the end of 2023, it had 285,000 digital subscribers.
As a business it was actually doing fairly well (see link below), but as Fabian Heckenberger, Süddeutsche’s Managing Editor and Senior Editor for AI, recently noted, their general outlook was about the same as the view from their Munich headquarters on an overcast day (see image below).
“Kind of cloudy, a bit foggy, no clear view. We didn’t see the horizon, and we didn’t know exactly where we were going,” Heckenberger told participants at WAN-IFRA’s Newsroom Summit conference in Zurich recently.
See also: Süddeutsche Zeitung: How can you drive change when you are still doing quite well?
In addition, Süddeutsche “had too many unanswered questions: We had no clear journalistic vision. We had no real orientation. Our organisation wasn’t really united,” he continued.
One major reason: they still had two very separate teams, one focused on print and another for digital, Heckenberger said.
Changing their mindset, culture and workflows wasn’t easy, but they started small, with minor changes to build a foundation that was fundamentally sound and aimed at preparing them for today’s challenges as well as those to come.
Focusing on layers, rather than steps, has helped Süddeutsche Zeitung build a foundation for its future.
Making subscribers the central focus
More specifically, Heckenberger described his team as being something of a mixture of think-tank, strategic office and project office, which is also closely connected to SZ’s executive editors.
“We try to push our transformation projects from within, from the editorial side, but of course closely connected to the c-level executives and to the product teams,” he said.
As they started into the transformation process, they could tell there was much work to be done.
“We had no clear business perspective: we were still in between trying to maximise reach and maximise the advertising business serving our subscribers, so there were too many questions for a clear orientation,” Heckenberger said.
This resulted in kind of an identity crisis, he added.
Finding answers that will work for everyone, not individual teams
To address this, a core team of 10 people was formed that spent about three months considering where they were at that time, in 2019, and where Süddeutsche Zeitung fit within the German-speaking media world. Then taking those outcomes and using them to determine their perspective and strategic vision.
These 10 people were in-house experts from the newsroom as well as some of their business teams and came together in a windowless “war room.” They discussed, debated and put lots of notes on the walls.
“The main point was, we didn’t try to find answers that fit for maybe one or two teams, and other teams would get different answers. We tried to unite our executive editors and our C-level executives and make them discuss all these answers we figured out in this war room together,” Heckenberger said.
They chose a focal point that was difficult to argue against: subscribers and their needs. As a result, they stopped trying to have something for everyone. They also sought solutions that would work for the entire organisation.
“We stopped serving two gods: reach and advertising on the one hand and subscriber business on the other hand. We focused on subscribers first and the digital revenue business,” Heckenberger said. This also provided greater clarity for SZ’s journalistic vision.
This year’s Newsroom Summit drew about 130 participants to Tamedia’s headquarters during the two-day conference in Zurich in late October.
Making change measurable through metrics
After getting executive-level buy-in for their vision, the team went into the newsroom with some concrete plans.
Thus began a switch from “gut feelings” to north star metrics, a focus on the subscriber business model and the user-needs model and serving the audience and developing metrics to make it all measurable and bringing it into their daily working lives, Heckenberger said.
Part of this meant updating their CMS architecture. In the process, the SZ team discovered that it was much more than just being a technical issue. In reality, it was “closely connected to identity and culture and the transformation as well,” Heckenberger said.
The hundreds of journalists in their newsrooms had previously been using a variety of tools that worked for any given individual journalist, such as Word files or Google docs.
SZ developed their own “simple, plain browser based editor that included all the metadata that we needed for our digital and our online distribution business, but on the other hand let journalists do what they wanted to do to write good texts in the most simple way possible,” Heckenberger said.
Initially the implementation of the tool felt a bit like going to the dentist, he said. However, ultimately, it achieved a positive response from staff: ‘Wow, this is a very cool tool because it helps me in my daily life,’ he said.
How can we change culture for the better? – start with the meeting room
The cultural changes were more complicated. After all, as Hannes Vollmuth, Senior Editor for Digital Strategy and Innovation, Süddeutsche Zeitung, who was co-presenting with Heckenberger noted, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast and transformation for lunch,” as the saying goes.
Culture is complicated Vollmuth said “because it’s a big, big thing and you have to start somewhere. And we work in a big glass tower, and this is culture as well.”
This structure had literally helped to create a silo effect, “and everybody was living in his or her own universe in one floor.” There was a central meeting room on the top floor with a long table that had a fixed seating arrangement.
“When we thought about ‘How can we change the culture for the better?’ we did this one thing, the start of this small thing. We moved the meeting room down to the news desk,” Vollmuth said.
They also got rid of the table and assigned seating to allow people to sit wherever they wanted (see above image).
“It’s more like a school gym atmosphere, which is good. Why do I give you this example? We started small, and this is something that comes quite unnatural to a legacy organisation: to start small, because we always have the waterfall approach,” Vollmuth said.
“We want to have big projects to change everything in one take, but you have to start small,” Vollmuth said.
He said these changes came about after asking staff what they needed. They asked for a new way of meeting that would help them to “have different discussions, different conversations. ”
“I would encourage everybody who’s thinking about culture also as a design to start small,” he added.
Rearranged and reinventing the meeting room also lead to other changes. For example, the long-standing “print wall,” came down because they needed space. This, in turn, helped usher in a new layer of focus, on SZ’s audience, Vollmuth said.
‘It’s always about the audience’
Today, the audience plays a major role in their daily work, he said.
“When we do experiments, it’s always about the audience: the assumptions, hypotheses that we test. When we do split tests on our homepage, A-B-C, it’s about our audience.”
How they talk has also changed.
“I always use the term ‘meaningful language.’ I try not to talk about ‘SEO’ and ‘KPIs’ and such because I think it’s not tied to the audience, to the real audience, so we changed the way we talk about our journalism,” Vollmuth said.
“We think about what we want to achieve in terms of a specific segment, and our new north star is really becoming audience focused. We’re not doing something for everyone anymore, it’s all about focus and priorities,” he added.
“It’s not a step-by-step approach, but layers that are built upon each other. And we are not done. We are not done at all,” he said.
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