Show&Tell

Zurich/CreativeMornings, 2010-10-08

published on 12 October 2010

These are my notes from the talk Dr. Peter Hogenkamp gave for the Zurich/CreativeMornings meeting at the cafe Casablanca on October 8, 2010:

• Goal is to be #1 publishing house in the D-A-CH area. No point in just focusing at CH because of a) the size of the NZZ-group and b) the small number of competitors in CH
• Revenue display online is around CHF 5M.
• 250-300 people would have to find a new job if print-side would be killed right now.
• Findings after starting at NZZ:
  • The CMS Atex/Polopoly doesn’t work for what Peter has in mind, hence stopped its current deployment.
  • Meetings are a catastrophe, happens regularly that he comes in into morning but never sees his office until 3pm, rest is spent in meetings.
  • The size of the organization and target audience means most employees and customers aren’t even in the “early adopters” bracket.
  • “NZZ online” is not the news paper, not representative of the paper and only has very minimal content plus the news agency snippets.
  • The paper has 200 years of experience but only 19 people curate the online part.
  • 3% unsubscribe per year
• Internally came up with the idea to publish the paper as an ePaper app. Peter’s reaction: that’s so uncool.
• However, WEMF numbers are a problem that’s not easily solvable.
• And people love to read the NZZ on the iPad and sometimes make quite an effort to move it there, so ePaper makes sense and makes it easier for those, at least as an interim solution.
• usename: creativemornings, pw: casablanca
• NZZ are the first to bundle the subscription with an iPad for a reduced price, this seems to work well so far.
• Reader feedback for the ePaper app is very positive.
• Ratings in the App Store very split, the tech savvy people complain about the “uncool factor”.
• Will have to live with this split for a couple of years because it takes a while to turn direction.
• Coming from the startup world, Blogwerk, people management is very different.
• Would have loved if NZZ just bought Blogwerk but they already have a team in place.
• Having an HR department makes things difficult, exchanging people is hard and sometimes very frustrating.
• Hardest part of the new job is changing the current team and building a new one.
• How to keep creativity up?
  • The internal PC doesn’t work at all for a creative workflow.
  • Keeping the MacBook, it’s an “identity” thing but it’s also about sanity/personal normality.
  • Introduced “Yammer” as a new form of internal communication. Totally un-NZZ-like.
  • (Internal IT is very conservative and doesn’t like that get-go-do-it mentality.)
  • Hiring a personal assistent to keep the meeting problematic in check.
• Launching “NZZ Labs” for cutting-edge stuff
  • Under an third-level-domain.
  • Because it’s hard to do it on nzz.ch.
  • Because it’s the easiest wat to get things into public hands w/o burning itself.
• Mini-relaunch of the site in November, with “NZZ Labs”
• Trying to create an internal “content startup”
  • Internal team but outside of the existing NZZ structure.
  • Internal competition to get things moving and shaking.
  • Not allowed to book internal meetings.
  • A big problem is internal envy: why do the new guys get to do the cool stuff?
  • Term: Organizational Ambidexterity
• NZZ online has been cross-financed for the last 13 years.
• Trying hard to keep in touch with the community.
• Interesting tidibit: most print journalists don’t want feedback.