Since I have arrived in 2012, Consumer Reports has been in a series of management and operation shakeups related to converting from a primarily paper publication to a primarily digital service. Since moving to New York City to join CR, I have had the experience of meeting other media professionals in NYC whose observations about all the other media organizations are similar. It has been challenging for everyone to convert from paper focus to digital. There is a social deep disconnect and a lot of outright propaganda from all the media companies about how comfortable they are with a transition to digital.
All media companies would have everyone believe that they did a smooth paper to digital transition years ago, and that the transition almost entirely happened in one step, and that the transition only had the effect of boosted productivity with less effort, and that the changes to make were easy to see and obvious to choose, and that each organization who makes the transition is one of the community of all the other organizations which made the transition easily. None of this is true. I have had enough conversations with enough media professionals at my level at leading magazines, newspapers, television producers, movie producers, publishing consultants, advertisers, and even web publishers (who are historically as dependent on paper as anyone else) to know that there is a culture of fake positivity about how easy it is to adopt a digital culture. I am glad that I am at CR because I feel that the nonprofit culture here avoids the pressure to do boastful posturing about how easy things are. Instead, part of our workplace culture is to be more at ease with a humble transition at a conservative pace and following the lead of pathmakers who took more risk to transition sooner. Some other people at some commercial organizations have some bizarre experiences due to an inability to have some frank conversations.
It is not as if there is anything scandalous happening anywhere, but rather, change is simply really hard and when change has to happen, the managers who guide the change by necessity of their role motivate people to embrace the change with workplace strategies including downplaying how difficult it will be for the group and the extent to which individuals will have to learn new skills to stay competitive in the workplace. I can give an example criticism at CR – since I arrived in 2012, the organization has embraced Google’s office suite of software including Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Hangouts, and messaging. We all use these things continually. These and other workplace tools provided by Google are the best tools in the world, and it was only right that CR start using them. Lots of organizations should. However, even when everything about the transition to adopt these tools was going right, it was still stressful for all the staff to change and this was one of many sudden stresses and changes that people in the workplace had to endure. We all had to do this, and there was never a reason to introduce negativity into the conversation, but still, it really pushes social tolerance to make lots of entirely correct and necessary changes so quickly, and at the same time, be under pressure for solidarity with each other and have to interact as media professionals in the broader NYC media community saying that everything is okay in everything but intimate conversations. I also get surprised at how after everything anyone can imagine changes from paper to digital, even after some time passes, a new social trend starts to transfer even more to digital.
Every change, no matter how necessary, is very hard and comes with a lot of problems in the adaptation. Google was not one of the easier transitions, but it is one of the most popular shared ones that many people are experiencing, and I think in the future looking back the next generation will not be able to understand just how challenging and stressful it was to come to understand how people have to personally change how they interact with each other if previously they expected to exchange physical media and then change to send digital files around.
“Digital first” refers to the practice of publishing media online before posting it to print. This is a scary concept for any periodical. An obvious implication is that newspapers are now an anachronism. I am not sure of the etymology, but I imagine “newspapers” as “new events described on paper”. Digital first means that current events get posted online when they happen, so obviously when the text finally gets to paper, the entire content of a newspaper is what people could have read online the day before or even perhaps two days before. All newspapers now are filled with yesterday’s news. Historically, there was never much market for dated newspapers. People want current news, and now, all paper publications share what typical people already read days or weeks ago. At CR, I have heard fears about whether to publish immediately online which would scoop the magazine. That used to be an ultimate taboo. Now, it is much more established that when a story is ready, it can go out. All media organizations in NYC are facing this challenge. Should TV shows come out first on TV, or can they be played online? Should magazine articles come out before the paper magazine? Will all commuters to NYC read yesterday’s news on the train if it is packaged and printed as today’s news? These are tough scary questions, and the disruption to revenue models is scary! Everyone wants a strong independent media sector and the issue of responding to digital publication remains an ongoing process.