Whilst rallying my small Press Gazette team for the week ahead, I like to channel Napoleon and the tactics he deployed during his Italian campaign.
We can’t hope to win if we try to cover everything and arrange our forces equally all across the battlefront. But if we channel our firepower on one area of focus we can, like Napoleon, punch through and leave our enemies in disarray.
For the latest edition of the Press Gazette podcast I asked magazine industry titan Mike Soutar how to tackle modern publishing industry challenges looking at the lessons of history and his own long experience.
The Shortlist Media founder and former IPC Media director is something of a history buff. He has just launched a new eight-part podcast series with Immediate Media’s History Extra called History’s Greatest Leaders.
Each week Soutar talks to a leading historian and tries to glean lessons from a different historical leader, ranging from Genghis Khan to Joan of Arc. Episodes also focus on: Elizabeth I, Winston Churchill, Catherine the Great and Zenobia.
Soutar is also the author of Next Gen CEO: 60 Lessons for Leaders in an Uncertain World.
Great leaders from history tend to be shits
I wonder if modern media leaders can really emulate Genghis Khan or Elizabeth I without getting quickly cancelled. Lots of great leaders from history were incredibly ruthless and, without putting too fine a point on it, massive shits.
Soutar uses the example of Pele. Would he be the world’s greatest footballer today? Probably not. But with the benefits of modern training, equipment, nutrition and so on – maybe he would be.
“I think if you gave Genghis, for example, some time to learn and understand the culture, I bet he would be every inch the skilled negotiator and strategist that he was.
“Elizabeth I was extraordinary at creating what we would now call a professional brand identity. She ruthlessly controlled the imagery of her that she allowed to be shown.”
So how can publishers collectively or individually compete with the giant tech platforms that have taken over the market, when they are a bit like the Belgium facing the massed forces of the Wehrmacht in 1940?
“I think the first thing to note about those kind of global digital platforms, those giants, is that they’re not competitors. Look at them as disruptors.
“It’s their audience, by the way. They own that audience. I know we may have very much helped them to build that audience, but they very much regard that as their audience and they can prove that because they’ve got far more user data than any media company ever does.
“I think it is your job as a media owner to steal their audience and make it your own.
“I think you do that by understanding insurgency theory. They are the new incumbents. They are the new establishment.
“It would be nice to think that different media companies could work together, but evidence shows – and I’ve worked in magazines and I’ve worked in newspapers – media groups just don’t work together.
“You need to pick your fights. You need to understand that the Goliaths in the room have huge market muscle and when they decide to do something, they will steamroll everything else.
“But they’re fundamentally slow, they can’t make quick decisions. When you’re the insurgent, you are small and nimble and fast moving. And you can act tactically.
“You empower your teams locally and use guerrilla tactics. Make them look big and clumsy and slow and like the establishment. Liberate your most creative people. They’re your horse-riding bowmen. They’re the ones with the most skills.
“Take that audience, love them better than the big tech giants ever will. There’s a way there to build smart businesses. They’re not going to be the size of Google, but they can still be very large and very sustainable.”
What if we are just on the wrong side of history?
Soutar himself knows that sometimes in publishing you can be on the wrong side of history. At IPC he launched weekly titles Nuts and Pick Me Up which, like so many other magazine titles, no longer exist.
How can leaders deal with forces of change that are far outside our control?
“I started my career on hot metal presses. So I’ve been living with relentless technological change since I was 17 years old.
“I think when change like this happens, smart people stand back and they look at their transferable skills. Companies fail to adapt and they die, and we’ve seen a lot of that, unfortunately, particularly within print media. But people themselves are resourceful.
“How do you adapt your ability to tell a story or spot an idea or connect that idea with real human beings or build a subscriber list or design something that makes people gasp?”
‘AI makes content shit’
Soutar is not among those who think that AI-generated content will supplant the professional publishing industry.
“AI makes content shit. It makes it cheaper and it makes it quicker, but it doesn’t make it good. It makes it much worse. It will change the underpinning structure of media businesses, but it won’t change the craft of narrative and drama because that ultimately has to come from a human head.”
If you look at the big magazine empires, they must feel like the barbarians are at the gates. What advice would he give to the CEO of a Hearst or Condé Nast?
“I think you’ve got to place your bets, you’ve got to be bold enough to say anything that is marginal is a distraction. So even if it might be making a contribution at a divisional level from an accountant’s point of view, you’ve got to find a way to take it out.
“You’ve got to have the courage of your conviction. And if you think that this particular audience over here or this particular brand that you’ve got is going to be important and is going to have growth, you’ve got to back that with your money. And you’ve got to be utterly Genghis Khan-style ruthless with everything else.
“Leaders have to make key strategic decisions by deciding what they’re going to do – and definitely what they’re not going to do. They need to have that courage of their conviction and then they need to pursue that with incredible relentless optimism and vigour.”
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