“Being a square in the organisational chart is never enough in a newsroom,” Heimgartner said. “Every day, you have to prove that you’re worthy of being there.”
“Don’t be scared to get your hands dirty, work and lead as an example. If you are a kind person, don’t be scared to show that trait. Don’t try to copy male behaviour – it’s not authentic and people will not listen to you. Simply, be yourself, and speak the language of the business and the newsroom.”
Heimgartner, who was also elected as WAN-IFRA’s first female president in May, joined our Newsroom Summit in Zurich and answered key questions about leadership in today’s newsroom, her journey in media, and how news organisations need to secure their footprint on a number of fronts.
Below is a slightly edited version of the conversation between Heimgartner and Rianne Roggema, OKR-Expert, Podcast and Event Host, Founder of Practic, Netherlands, who moderated the event.
Rianna Roggema: You started your career as a journalist. Do you remember when you began thinking more about the business side of media companies?
Ladina Heimgartner: I spent 13 years working at Swiss Broadcasting Corporation SRG. When you’re in public broadcasting, you don’t think much about business models. When I joined Ringier five years ago, I realised very quickly how hard it is to earn every cent. Content is still important, but there’s so many other things that become crucial, too – like distribution, managing growth, marketing.
Iconic media brands – like Blick – have been well-known across markets. We didn’t need marketing. We were marketing! Now, all of a sudden, younger generations do not know these brands anymore. This is a new experience for many managers of legacy brands. Like any other B2C industry we need to start using marketing tools. We are becoming an industry like others. And that’s quite a paradigm shift.
Do you face the challenge of convincing journalists to make the newsroom their business?
Not really. But to be clear: I’m not talking about mixing the commercial and the editorial part. We keep that distinction. At the same time it is healthy to have the entrepreneurial mindset across the departments.
That said, journalists do not have to close sales deals of course. But: They have to keep on trying to sustainably reach and engage the audience as much as possible.
As soon as we have the audience, and they engage with content, then we have a business model.
Five years ago when you joined Ringier, you did so as the Head of Corporate Centre. Within six months, you became the CEO of Blick. What were some of your first observations?
I’ve always worked in the media. Joining Ringier as the Head of Corporate Centre was quite an active decision. For once in my life, I wanted to change the environment a bit, because working with journalists is not always easy. They’re very intelligent people and they actively question your actions and decisions. If you’re not used to this kind of being challenged at all times, you run! (laughs) But I always thought that this keeps me down to earth and improves the quality of my decisions. For once, I still wanted to change and experience another working environment. But after six months, I was back in the line of journalists. Apparently, it seems to be my destiny.
When you joined Blick, what key areas stood out to you as priorities for driving the business forward?
I had to learn and grow into it. It took me five years because there’s so much happening, and the conversation around products kept me on my toes. Initially, I experienced quite some fights between the product department and the editorial teams. We found an interesting solution to bridge that gap by bringing counterparts into the newsroom. So, there’s always someone in the newsroom that links with a counterpart outside of the newsroom, like AI for example. This way, it works.
What I also realised: Often things can be changed through simple semantics. In the beginning, our Audience Development department was simply called “Marketing.” But, in the newsroom, there was some scepticism towards Marketing. So, we started calling it “growth management” or “audience development,” and it works for us.
You mentioned you drive change by putting someone inside the newsroom. Do you have more tips for people trying to push their organisations forward?
AI is the best example I can cite right now. When we started with GenAI, from Day 1, we always implemented those features directly into the CMS, for instance. So people at Ringier don’t have to go to some other site to look for the tool, because that’s already an extra step. You need to make it as convenient as possible.
Innovation needs to be convenient and the quick wins have to be seen immediately. If it helps you to become a better journalist, and reach more people, in that case, everybody is open to innovation. Success feels greater, and it’s nicer to go home with such a feeling at night. You cannot expect people to spend hours figuring out how to navigate these things. It has to be there, and it has to be very easy to use. Then, I think, you can evolve quite well.
Recently you made another switch, now you are the CEO of Ringier Media Switzerland. How do you manage a team of some 1000 people?
It’s not so different managing a team, to be honest. The most stressful times in my life were when I had to manage an editorial team – because you’re so close to the product and the daily routines.
I don’t feel that I’m leading a thousand people every day. I have my team I lead directly, but when the organisation gets bigger, you have to manage dynamics. That’s the difference.
So, the thousand is easier than the 10, somehow?
Somehow, yes, because in that case, you can delegate and have people supporting you. If you have a team of 10, it’s just you.
I want to talk a little more about adopting technologies. Are other technologies out there, other than AI, we should be keeping an eye out for? Or is AI the main focus right now?
I was astonished how quickly the media adapted to generative AI. As an industry we didn’t take the onset of digital media seriously enough, calling it a “phase,” thinking print will remain. We missed that train, and it hit us hard. The same happened with social media: “It’s an interesting thing, but it will go away,” And it didn’t. And with smartphones, the same thing.
With the advent of GenAI, I think media companies jumped in. We realised it’s an interesting technology to boost productivity, but we haven’t found the Holy Grail yet, when it comes to the top line – how to earn big money with AI.
An interesting thing to see will be the emerging AI (search) experience. That might be a game-changer, again. Content will shift from a destination game to a distribution game. Gatekeeping of content probably becomes a question of three or four global companies.
What’s your vision for the space between AI developers, like OpenAI, and media companies? How do you see them working together in a perfect world?
It has been and is a lively discussion within the media industry. Some publishers want to sue the big AI companies, some want to strike deals with them, and most of them want both.
Now, in the media, we tend to always say what should be, and that hasn’t helped a lot lately. We are probably better off if we think about what is likely to be. So, will OpenAI disappear? I don’t think so.
We should accept the fact that big players will be there, and we have to cope with them. And that they’re stronger than we are. How can we protect what we are? I think we can because they will never hire journalists to report on what’s happening today. They will never invest in people to bridge that gap from today to tomorrow – simply because the margin isn’t interesting; but they need that! Because the LLMs are not up-to-date, they’ll always have “old” information, and the same goes for Search. Therefore, we need humans to bridge that gap – that will be our USP, but it needs to come with a price and then, I think, we can find an ecosystem.
As I said, I think it will be much more about distribution than destination. Our brands might lose importance going forwards, we might move towards content distributors, and we need to ensure we have good models for this way of doing business as well.
This brings to mind what happened with the rise of social media. Initially, it seemed like a win-win: publishers could share their content with a broader audience than ever before. But as we saw, it was not a win-win, ultimately. Now, I’m not sure if the media industry can endure another major player syphoning away a significant share of its revenue.
As I said, we have to fight. We have an important task to fulfil here. We see so many challenges, and this is one of them. So either we surrender, or we try to make the best of it. This is an area where the industry should stick together. This is something you will never solve as one media company, not even as one country. Here we need global alliances. I’m convinced we have to work with them, and not against them, but we need to find a strong position in this new ecosystem.
Yesterday, you were talking about your vision of putting the media in the United Nations’ sustainable development goals. Can you share more with us?
The United Nations has 17 sustainable goals, and not one of them is around the media industry. I don’t know if we have managed to get there, but if we, at least, talk about ESG (environmental, social, and governance), it is such an important topic for companies. If they contribute something in a sustainable way, then they get, for instance, better bank loans. If they work according to ESG frameworks, and if we’ve managed to be within these ESG frameworks, everyone benefits.
If advertisers get benefits from spending their money in professional media companies that take social responsibility, we would get so much further. If the media gets only 10 percent back from social media, it would be such a game-changer. We have to fight for that, and so, we have to create this narrative. We have to show advertisers that spending their money into media companies is a good investment in an empowered society and democracy. We’re storytellers but we are not that good when it comes to storytelling about ourselves.
The next challenge is defining a “media company” – that will be a topic that will keep us on our toes over the next few years. There will be many platforms that look like media companies, but without people behind it, and it will be hard to differentiate between the two. We see it already happening in markets like Germany, where agencies are defining criteria, putting them in a blender and then there’s a number coming out, and they say, “This is a good media company!” “‘Dear client, invest into this, don’t invest into this,” – according to their criteria. As publishers, we are not amused. So, let’s do something. Let’s act. It’s up to us, we have to take action and tell our story and not leave it up to others. It should be us.
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