I wrote about our project in my last newsletter back in February — it’s been a while, hi! — but the mandate was to help MISF build its revenue strategy to support its ultimate goals of growing the game in the Marshall Islands, building its men’s and women’s national teams, and joining FIFA. That month, our team traveled to Northwest Arkansas, home to the largest Marshallese community outside the Marshall Islands, to meet with potential sponsors, funders, and community leaders to explore revenue opportunities.

The lessons we learned on the trip not only changed the trajectory of our project, but also reaffirmed many of the common themes we’ve been talking about in the local news space over the past few years, including the importance of community trust for building durable revenue streams and the value of trusted messengers for sharing news and information.

Here’s how it happened:

For our first two days of the trip, we met with the leaders of Marshallese advocacy groups and government officials. We ended each meeting with the same question: Who else should we meet with? We received the same answer each time: Everyone told us we had to meet with a person I’ll call A. But when we asked for an introduction, everyone cautioned that A was constantly busy. Texts went unreturned and calls weren’t picked up.

Who’s A? He’s a program leader at a local church with a large Marshallese membership. Beyond that, he’s an important source of community information, posting regularly to his Facebook page. In a community of 20,000 or so people, A has more than 12,000 followers. His page, and other groups he manages, are where the Marshallese community goes for information. If we wanted to get the word out about the MISF, we needed to get to know A.

After a few more tries, we were able to get through to him. A agreed to meet us at 6 p.m. on a Friday at his church. He led us through darkened hallways to his office, which was decorated with Marshallese art and traditional Marshallese shirts hung from the walls. He took a genuine interest in the project, and shared information that only comes from deep familiarity with a community. He told us how central Facebook is to sharing information, he shared details about the pick-up softball tournaments organized to celebrate holidays like Constitution Day, and he let us know that soccer is becoming more popular with young people. As we parted, he agreed to help us share resources with the community.

We were grateful to everyone we met in Arkansas for sharing their insight, and it fundamentally altered how we approached the project. After each meeting we learned a bit more about how information flowed through the community, what institutions people trusted, and who we needed to engage with to reach our target audiences.

We learned that the community had to come first if the MISF wanted to both fulfill its mission to develop interest in soccer and also meet its revenue targets. We decided to devote significant time to crafting a community engagement strategy that could help the federation deepen relationships so it can build a fanbase and grow its grassroots. We also revamped the organization’s digital infrastructure with tools like a CRM to better manage its work and focused on revenue generation to support community engagement by applying for grants and meeting funders and sponsors.

For years now, those of us in the local news space have talked about trusted messengers and meeting communities where they are. It was thrilling to see these ideas in action in a non-news context.

There are people like A in every community. The coverage and platforms may change, but the trusted human connection will remain the same. It’s not enough just to publish stories and expect that they will reach their intended audience. Journalists need to get out of their newsrooms and tap into the information streams that the audiences they’re trying to serve are actually using.

Our project with MISF wrapped up last week. We got a number of those ideas off the ground and handed off strategies and plans that the MISF can run with moving forward.

This also means that I finished my first year of business school. I’m now halfway through the MBA program. It turns out that balancing school on top of a full-time job and raising two boys under 3 is a lot, and none of it would have been possible without the support of Katy and our family. I couldn’t have done it without them.

Year 2 starts in a few weeks, and I’m excited to continue to think through what I’m learning in this space, although hopefully a bit more frequently.

Thanks, and more soon!

That story kicked off a years-long chain of events that eventually brought me and five of my classmates to Springdale, Arkansas this week to consult with the MISF and help the federation develop a revenue strategy to fuel its next stage of growth.

The MISF’s appeal to journalists is obvious. It’s a classic underdog sports story. Seriously, watch this clip from a documentary being made about the MISF and tell me you don’t get goosebumps.

But a good story is nothing without a platform to share it, and the MISF’s story is a valuable reminder of journalism's power to amplify voices and connect communities.

The original 2021 Athletic story attracted global interest in the MISF project. Coaches, players, executives, and fans rushed to donate or volunteer. As part of our consulting project, we’re working with volunteer leaders in Arkansas and the United Kingdom who were inspired to join the MISF after reading about the project in outlets ranging from The Athletic to the Associated Press.

“That article opened a lot of doors,” MISF President Shai Livai told The Athletic in a follow-up story.

The MISF Men’s National Team played its first games last summer at the Outrigger Challenge Cup, a tournament the federation organized here in Springdale, home to the largest Marshallese population outside the Marshall Islands.

The tournament was covered globally, including a front-page story in The Financial Times.

Now, the MISF is working toward its next goals. The federation is growing its women’s program, continuing to develop the next generation of players and coaches in the Marshall Islands, and ultimately is working to gain recognition by the Asian Football Confederation and FIFA with the goal of ultimately entering men’s World Cup qualifying.

Our team’s mandate is to help the federation develop a revenue strategy to propel it toward those goals.

Our project is part of a University of Michigan program called the Multidisciplinary Action Project, or MAP, which is a core component of the university’s MBA program. Teams of students are assigned semester-long projects that allow us to apply what we’re learning in the classroom in real-world scenarios.

We’ve spent the past few weeks learning about the MISF, the Marshall Islands, Northwest Arkansas, and sports business. Our plan is to spend this week in Northwest Arkansas meeting with MISF sponsors and supporters, Marshallese community leaders, and MISF players and families to learn as much as we can about their needs and ambitions.

We’ll then spend the rest of our engagement developing and starting to implement strategies for how the MISF can grow its revenue and attract more supporters as it plans for its next phase of growth, including the second iteration of the Outrigger Challenge Cup, which is planned for this summer and hopes to capitalize on interest in international soccer ahead of the World Cup in the United States.

The questions we’re asking are similar to the ones community news publishers ask. How can an organization with limited resources have the most impact? How can we ensure that community members are included? How can we grow revenue and bring in new partners to support this important work?

It’s been fun to apply what I’ve learned from my work in local journalism around fundraising in this new context, and I have no doubt there will be new ideas I can bring back to news. I’m especially grateful to my Lenfest Institute colleagues Kirsten Halker-Kratz and Jeff Muckensturm, who have shared their fundraising expertise with our team.

I feel lucky to be in Arkansas this week — I’m especially fortunate to have the most supportive wife, Katy, and family who helped pick up the slack at home so I could be here (and more broadly pursue my MBA). I can’t wait to share more about our work with the MISF and the lessons we’re learning as the project progresses.

After a week when even the general-interest headlines were dominated by news of the decimation of The Washington Post — notably its sports section — and the precarity of the journalism business model, our work with the MISF has been a heartening reminder both of how journalism can bring people together and why I’m going to business school in the first place.

My second semester of business school wrapped up this month. The big thing I learned was that balancing a full-time job, a family, and school does not leave much time for newslettering. But now that the semester is finished and I have a minute to breathe, I wanted to share some of the other things I’ve learned over the past few months.

Throughout the semester, I maintained a running list of ideas relevant to ongoing discussions on developing sustainable business models for local news. In no particular order, here are three lessons I keep revisiting.

My list is significantly longer than these three, but it’s extremely late on December 23, and my plans to write tonight were derailed by two boys fighting bedtime, a dog with a stomach bug, and a promise to build a new toy parking garage. This is already getting pretty long as is, so here’s my notebook dump with a few half-baked ideas and questions:

Decision-making structures

Investors talk about two types of errors — omission errors and commission errors. Omission errors are when you pass on an ultimately successful project, and commission errors are when you end up undertaking a dud of an initiative.

Your organizational structure dictates which error you’re more likely to make. If you have a large leadership group where everyone must sign off on a major decision, you’ll likely avoid bad projects (fewer commission errors) because someone will eventually spot a flaw. But you’ll also kill off great, risky ideas before they ever see the light of day (more omission errors).

Conversely, “flat” organizations that allow a single person to greenlight a project might end up with more busts, but they are far more likely to innovate

Our professor, Felipe A. Csaszar, whose research on this topic is available here, shared this quote from a 2018 Forbes interview with Jeff Bezos that illustrates what this means in practice.

“Let’s say a junior executive comes up with a new idea that they want to try. They have to convince their boss, their boss’s boss, their boss’s boss’s boss and so on—any ‘no’ in that chain can kill the whole idea,”

While maybe we shouldn’t take advice from Bezos on running a news organization, he does have a point here. Structure affects innovation. And that matters for news organizations that are struggling to reach audiences and generate revenue.

One design to try is a flatter organizational structure. Leaders should give their teams greater autonomy to experiment and try new things, and then provide streamlined paths to top leadership for ultimate decision-making so the organization doesn’t get trapped in the “no” chain Bezos described.

It’s worth trying!

Rugged landscape analysis

Have you ever been hiking and reached a plateau, thinking you’ve reached the top of the climb, only to turn a corner and realize there are taller mountains just around the bend?

It’s frustrating! You can only see your immediate surroundings, so you missed that there are other peaks.

That’s the idea around the concept of rugged landscape analysis. Organizations can’t simply jump to the highest point, so they tend to make small, incremental changes and miss larger opportunities. Firms need to allocate time and space to understand the broader landscape.

The example that was shared in class was Netflix. If it had proceeded incrementally, it would have missed the streaming peak and instead would have focused on ways to more efficiently deliver DVDs via the mail.

A better understanding of your landscape is a competitive advantage, and companies that have multiple goals and priorities often do a better job of understanding the whole picture. I’d argue that news organizations fall into that category — yes, they need to make money, but publishers also want to prioritize informing their audiences, protecting democracy, and connecting communities. Outlets should leverage multiple perspectives to identify new opportunities within their landscapes.

Bottlenecks are powerful

I had never really thought about bottlenecks before, but they came up in a couple of classes this semester, so now I am thinking about them constantly. If you can identify or control where and how a bottleneck occurs in a process, you can exert influence.

My operations class focused on optimizing business processes— such as supply chain management and just-in-time manufacturing. In that class, we learned that bottlenecks in a workflow reduce capacity and limit throughput. If you map out a process and identify a bottleneck, you can focus on addressing it and increasing your output. We learned about this from a manufacturing perspective. Still, it works really well in any context, and I’m already thinking about how I can streamline some bottlenecks I identified in our editorial processes at work.

In strategy, we identified bottlenecks in an industry’s supply chain. If one firm controls a point of access that all other firms rely on, it can leverage significant control and profit. When a bottleneck emerges, other companies will seek to break it by investing in competitors or by collaborating to create an alternative.

I immediately thought of Google’s control over search and discoverability for news as a notable bottleneck — and one that’s worsening as Google restricts traffic to publishers with its AI adoption. My next question was what it would look like for publishers to break that bottleneck? Yes, many are focusing on newsletters and other ways to build and engage loyal audiences, but could there be something more substantial? What would a more significant collaboration look like? Is it even possible, given Google’s ubiquitousness and vast resources? I don’t know! But it’s fun to imagine the possibilities.

Okay, that’s it for me — thanks for being a part of my MBA ~journey~ thus far. I’ll have more to share in 2026. See you then!

I returned to work this week after more than two months off for parental leave.

I was totally unplugged from work while I was away. I’ve continued with my MBA, but the priority has been parenting. It was a joy to spend time caring for our newborn and watching our two-year-old grow into his new role as big brother. He asked to hold his baby brother’s hand for the first time this past weekend. It was the sweetest thing ever. I am lucky I was able to take the time with my family — honestly, every new parent should be able to do so, but that is a topic for another newsletter.

Now that I’m back in the office — really my basement — I’ve been digging out from a mountain of email, rejoining the projects I handed off, and catching up on the media news I missed.

And thanks to a new-to-me framework that I learned in my Strategy class this semester, I’m viewing our work and the broader industry through a new lens. It’s called Porter’s Five Forces.

The Five Forces framework is a tool used to assess the attractiveness of an industry and determine whether a firm should compete in it. Each force influences a firm’s potential profitability in different ways.

The Forces are: Rivals, Suppliers, Buyers, New Entrants, and Substitutes. You then analyze each by the extent to which it exerts power over firms in the industry. The higher the power, the less attractive the industry is for a firm.

Here’s what the Forces look like diagrammed. The vertical axis shows competition for customers, while the horizontal axis represents competition for products.

A quick analysis of how the Five Forces apply to local news is revealing. Here’s a simple overview of how I see the Five Forces impacting local news:

• Rivals

  • Threat Level: Medium

  • The threat of rivals really depends on your location and coverage area. In some cases, the competition between outlets — both journalistically and business-wise — is fierce. In other areas, such as news deserts, there are few rivals to worry about.

• Suppliers

  • Threat Level: High

  • Google, ChatGPT, and other outside platforms are considered suppliers under the framework as they supply audiences to news organizations. The threat here is as exceedingly high. A small change to the Google algorithm can wreak havoc on a publisher, and the continued surge in AI adoption is also a growing danger.

• Buyers:

  • Threat Level: High

  • Audiences — or buyers — have many choices in how they consume their news, and the competition for attention and ultimately subscription dollars is fierce. Historically, another buyer in the local news industry has been advertisers, who are now largely turning elsewhere.

• New Entrants:

  • Threat Level: Medium to Low

  • It’s easier now than ever to start a local news organization, but it is difficult to sustain one. Beyond the capital required to start and run an outlet, it takes time to build trust with an audience.

• Substitutes:

  • Threat Level: High

  • There is a growing number of substitutes for local news. Content creators and AI have received increased attention lately, but platforms such as Reddit, NextDoor, and Facebook still garner significant attention

Just one high-level threat could make an industry unappealing. Local news has three.

Yikes!

That doesn’t mean that all hope is lost. The Five Forces can change as industry conditions change. While the conclusions may be somewhat obvious, this framing can be a useful map to plan a path forward and design a strategy that addresses the specific challenges they identify.

I’ve kept the Five Forces in mind as I’ve been catching up on industry news from the past couple of months. Here are a couple of examples:

• This great BetterNews case study shares how Pittsburgh’s Public Source built a map of local creators and trusted messengers for its audience. Instead of being threatened by a powerful substitute, the nonprofit news site created a product to better serve its audience and align itself with the creators.

• Earlier this year, Dave Joregenson, the former Washington Post TikTok Guy, left the Post to create his own Local News International platform. And according to a new analysis out this week from Matt Karolian, Jorgenson took much of the Post’s YouTube viewership with him. Views were down about 85% from April to September. By losing Jorgenson, the Post became vulnerable to a substitute product.

• In the news industry, buyers have extremely high power — there is huge competition for audience eyeballs and dollars. That’s why The New York Times has made it a priority to build its subscription business and create a bundle of products that make it harder for its audience to go elsewhere. This week it introduced a TikTok-like Watch tab in its app as another attempt to keep audiences engaged with its platforms.

That’s it from me this week. I’d love your feedback on the Five Forces and how they apply to news, especially local news. Do you agree with how I’ve applied them here? I’d welcome any feedback or thoughts — especially if you disagree or think I’ve missed the mark anywhere.

Thanks, and more soon!

The end of my first semester of business school did not go according to plan. I skipped my last weekend of classes and barely studied for finals.

But I had the best possible excuse: Our second son was born on August 8.

We’ve spent the past few weeks in the newborn bubble. We’re taking turns holding a sleeping baby, managing middle-of-the-night feeds, and watching our two-year-old relish his very important new job of big brother. (And, yes, watching a lot of TV: Long Story Short on Netflix is our current favorite.)

Now, though, it’s time for school to start again. While I’m still on parental leave from work, the fall semester begins this weekend. I’m excited to get back at it, but it’s definitely going to be an adjustment. I’m lucky to have the most supportive partner (Hi, Katy!) and friends and family who have helped us manage everything.

I know balancing it all will be a challenge — especially once we’re both back at work later this fall — but we’re just going to figure everything out as we go along. Everyone is busy and everyone has a lot going on, so I’d welcome any advice or tips for how you manage all your competing priorities.

I’ll have more to share in the coming weeks from my fall classes, but in the meantime, here’s one more marketing idea from last semester: semiotic marketing systems.

Marketing intel to steal: Semiotic marketing systems

This week in business school, I had a lot of fun reading an academic article. (Full disclosure: I read the article a few weeks ago – I wrote most of this before the baby came and am just getting around to sending it!)

The article, published in 2015 in the Journal of Macromarketing, is called “Brands Defined as Semiotic Marketing Systems” by Francisco Conejo and Ben Wooliscroft. The authors define brands as:

“Complex multidimensional constructs with varying degrees of meaning, independence, co-creation and scope. Brands are semiotic marketing systems that generate value for direct and indirect participants, society, and the broader environment, through the exchange of co-created meaning.”

Interesting, right?

You can read the full article here, though it’s paywalled.

Here’s the visual Conejo and Wooliscroft created to illustrate their semiotic marketing system:

Let me try to translate from Academese into English:

An organization’s brand is at the center. The brand has a name, logo, and other assets, but these only begin to take on meaning when its immediate stakeholders consume them. These are the blue circles on the diagram that surround the brand.

Each of these groups — Firm, Distribution Channels, Customers, Potential Customers, and Competition — consumes the brandmarks, gives them their own meaning, and extracts their own value from them. The tiny pink and purple arrows illustrate this exchange. Interpretation of the brand also flows between the stakeholders, which is illustrated by the yellow arrows.

“Intended brand meanings can be validated, adjusted or rejected by stakeholders, the authors write. “At this point, the brand has become an open cultural construct.”

The brand as a cultural construct doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s both influenced by and takes meaning from the broader ecosystems in which it exists. These are represented by the big red arrows, such as society and culture.

Using this framework, news organizations can easily become their own cultural constructs, open to all types of interpretation from various stakeholders.

Pretty much every journalist I’ve ever met is well-intentioned. Most work in news because they believe their work has value to their communities and that an informed public is a service to our democracy. I agree!

Publishers need to remember that not everyone sees their work that way. Different stakeholders interpret their work differently, which means they understand their brand differently. That impacts not only how their journalism is consumed, but how they’re able to grow a business and sustain themselves.

Each community is different, which means that the ecosystem each news organization exists in is different. If publishers are to serve their communities, they need to understand how their brand is viewed by their core constituencies. By identifying and examining the different forces at play influencing their brand, news organizations can make more informed decisions about the journalism they produce, the audiences they’re trying to serve, their product and revenue strategies, and more.

Okay — that’s it for me for this week. I’d welcome any feedback or thoughts about Semiotic Marketing Systems or anything else you’d like to see in this newsletter. This semester, I’m taking classes in strategy, operations management, finance, and managerial accounting, so expect more on those topics.

Thanks, and more soon!

I almost failed my first economics test in business school. I spent hours studying and knew the material, but as I sat in the classroom taking the test, I got stuck on one problem and went down a rabbit hole trying to figure it out.

I finally managed to identify my error, but as soon as I wrote down the correct answer, the professor announced that there was just one minute left on the test. I was only halfway done. Oops. I frantically scribbled in some answers to the rest of the questions to salvage what I could.

It was less than ideal, but it was a good lesson. Test taking and effective studying are both skills that I’m having to relearn. I’m not so concerned about my grades — as long as I pass, they don’t really matter! — but I want to make sure I’m learning the material and squeezing as much as I can out of the program. I haven’t been in school in over a decade, so relearning how to learn has been a valuable process.

Our second economics test was this past weekend. I didn’t linger on problems when I got stuck, and I was able to work through everything. I finished with time to spare.

I’m planning to write about lessons from my economics and accounting classes in future newsletters, but for now I have more marketing intel to steal.

Today’s new-to-me marketing idea is the Growth Share Matrix.

Marketing intel to steal: The Growth Share Matrix

Created by the Boston Consulting Group, the Growth Share Matrix is a tool to map a product’s lifecycle and help businesses prioritize their resources.

Here’s what it looks like:

The 2x2 grid is measured by market share on the x-axis and growth rate on the y-axis. Each square on the grid represents a combination of the two, and you can follow an ideal product lifecycle by starting in the top right and going around the grid counterclockwise.

The top right is the Question Mark. This is where products are introduced. They have high growth potential but low market share.

The top left is the Star. These are products with significant growth potential and market share. This is where companies should invest and continue to nurture products because they continue to have potential.

The bottom left is the Cash Cow. Products here have decreasing market share and growth potential, but are still making money. Companies should milk (moo!) these products for all they’re worth so they can reinvest in new products that will become stars.

The bottom right is the Dog. If I came up with this framework, I would have chosen a different name for this square, but these are the low-growth, low-revenue products that go to the big farm in the sky. RIP.

Where would you put your organization’s products on the matrix?

Many local news products live in either the Question Mark space or the Cash Cow space.

For many outlets, products like newsletters, podcasts, or even the trendy and of-the-moment creator partnerships are Question Marks. They’re great ideas that are starting to build revenue and audience, but they might not yet be sustainable or reaching the maximum audience possible.

Publishers should continue to invest in these products, and they should give their teams the space and resources to experiment. But they should also not be afraid to cut the cord if something isn’t working. Not every Question Mark will turn into a Star. Some will be Dogs, and that’s okay.

On the other side, many legacy publishers are living with Cash Cows — print newspapers and linear broadcasts are the prime examples. Audiences for these products are diminishing, but they’re still generating significant, but shrinking, revenue. Publishers must utilize these revenue streams while they still can to invest in new products — Question Marks! — that can have the opportunity to become Stars.

This concept is the heart of The Lenfest Institute’s Beyond Print work. The project is focused on helping legacy newspapers make this transition. Our Beyond Print Toolkit has resources and guides to help publishers leverage print as much as they can while building new digital products to grow audiences and revenue.

It’s also been top-of-mind this week as Congress eliminated funding for public media. The cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds local stations across the country along with NPR and PBS, are gutting. It is unequivocally horrible news. But it should also be a call for reinvention.

Here’s how Richard J. Tofel, the former ProPublica president, described it in his Second Rough Draft newsletter this week:

I worry especially that too many in and around public broadcasting are reacting to this watershed moment by repeating the critical error made by those metro papers: trying to preserve as much of what has gone before as possible, rather than seizing the moment to reinvent a system, and many of its components, that for far too long had remained unvarying and poorly adapted to a changing media landscape.

Now is not the time to rely on Cash Cows. They will soon become Dogs. News organizations must focus on turning Question Marks into Stars.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been obsessed with a new-to-me marketing concept that I learned about in class. It’s called the Kano Model. Developed in the 1980s by Japanese researcher Noriaki Kano, it’s a framework for measuring consumer satisfaction.

Here’s how it works:

There are three levels of features to every product or service: Musts, wants, and wows. (I’ve seen these described in different ways online, but this is how it was taught to us.)

Musts are essential. They’re the basics that must be included and will cause dissatisfaction if they’re not included. Wants are nice-to-haves. These aren't absolutely necessary, but their presence makes the experience more pleasant and contributes to satisfaction.

If you want your user to be satisfied, you need to meet their musts and wants.

Wows are bonuses. They are, by definition, unexpected and they’re key to delighting the consumer. However, they can be risky. Since they’re not expected, you can’t be certain how the user will respond. (And yes, I keep reading “wow” with Owen Wilson’s voice in my head.)

In class, the framework was explained to us through the lens of a hotel. Basics like a bed and a bathroom are musts for any hotel. Wants could include fun extras like turndown service or a swimming pool. A wow though is something the guest would not expect. For example, on a recent family vacation, we checked into our hotel room to find a stuffed animal for our son. We didn’t expect it, and it was a huge hit with our 2-year-old. He carried it around for the rest of our stay.

Here’s what a graph of the Kano model looks like. The x-axis is the quality of the service and the the y-axis is positive and negative consequences.

Musts done well don’t result in any positive consequences, but if you do them poorly, the consequences are extremely negative. Wows done well result in extremely positive consequences, and the downsides are minimal — though you don’t want to disappoint consumers. Wants are in between.

One of the challenges for producers is that wows can only be wows if they’re unexpected. So over time, wows become wants, and wants become musts. Businesses need to be continually evolving to serve the needs of their consumers and meet their expectations.

So how does this all relate to journalism? There are two points I keep coming back to:

1. News organizations must do a better job of meeting their audiences’ musts

2. I can’t remember the last time I was wowed by a publisher

Let’s start with the musts. What are the musts of a news organization? I’d argue they include reporting the news accurately, distributing it in an accessible way, and making it easy to pay for the work. I’m sure there are others, but those are the ones that are top of mind. I won’t get into the questions around reporting here — that’s a much broader question! — but in terms of the basics of creating functional user experiences, many publishers leave much to be desired.

Too often, publishers have slow websites that are bogged down with autoplaying video and disruptive advertisements. For those readers who still receive print newspapers, delivery challenges are all too common. And don’t even get me started on how difficult it can be to adjust or cancel a subscription. (My colleague Charles Jun wrote about this not too long ago.)

Of course, many news organizations are meeting these musts, but too many aren’t. It’s no wonder audiences are fleeing — especially to social platforms and apps that are well-designed and encourage repeat visits. If publishers want to survive, they need to do a better job meeting the musts of their audiences.

Now the wows.

I can’t remember the last time I was unexpectedly and pleasantly surprised by a news organization. I’m not talking about being wowed by incredible reporting — that is more of a want or a must — but rather I’m thinking about a new way of experiencing the news or being pleasantly surprised by a publisher’s customer service. (In fact, I don’t think that’s ever happened to me.)

When I think of wow moments, my mind goes to memories such as reading Snow Fall and experiencing immersive online journalism for the first time, receiving news updates via SMS text message, or receiving live updates on election results via Apple Wallet on my lock screen.

The other examples that rise to the top for me are new forms of community and audience engagement from newsroom leaders like Outlier Media in Detroit, El Tímpano in the Bay Area, or City Bureau in Chicago.

All of those experiences in the 2010s demonstrated new ways to connect with communities or present news online and on our phones — and all have squarely moved from the category of wows to wants or musts.

I can’t think of anything recently though that has captured that magic. AI still seems to be in its early days and I haven’t experienced any AI tools that are game changers yet. Virtual reality feels like more of a passing fad for now.

Am I missing anything? Is there anything that comes to mind for you?

If so, I’d love to hear about it and I can share it back in a future issue of the newsletter. I’ve been thinking about it for a couple of weeks and have been drawing blanks.

Ultimately, if journalism is going to sustain itself and thrive, it’ll need to make sure it’s delivering on its musts and creating new wows to delight audiences and keep them coming back.

My LinkedIn post sharing that I was pursuing my MBA was by far my most popular post ever — my ego thanks you for all the likes! — and it generated dozens of insightful and kind comments.

One of my favorites came from Bridget Thoreson, Hearken’s chief project officer & dream wrangler, and the author of the brilliant newsletter Explore Your Career River. (Seriously, it’s great — you can subscribe here.) Bridget wrote that she went to graduate school to “steal marketing intel for journalism.”

I love this framing, and it’s been in the back of my head since I started my first marketing course. I am constantly scribbling notes or starring passages that are relevant to my work at The Lenfest Institute and would be valuable for our partners at news organizations.

As one of the handful of people who work in media in my class, I feel like a spy — and I want to share the results of my espionage. So I’m making this issue the first in a, hopefully, recurring series in the newsletter.

First up? Jobs to be done. This is a framework that may be familiar to some of you already, but it’s a classic for a reason — and worth revisiting in the context of news.

Jobs to Be Done

News organizations and journalists could learn a lot from marketers about how they can understand and meet the needs of their audiences.

One of the examples shared in class was a quote from the late Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt who said, "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”

Consumers — or in our case, audiences and communities — don’t want products; they want to accomplish something. News consumers want to be informed, entertained, connected to their neighbors, etc. This should be the framing for how publishers talk about their journalism, the value it provides, and why it is worthy of support.

Clayton M. Christensen, the late Harvard Business School professor, termed this approach “Jobs to be Done.”

“If we understand the job the customer is trying to do and develop a product that nails the job perfectly, then the probability that your innovation will be successful is improved in dramatic ways,” Christensen said.

And luckily for us, Christensen applied the framework directly to journalism. In 2012, Christensen co-authored “Breaking News: Mastering the art of disruptive innovation in journalism” in Nieman Reports with David Skok, who would go on to found the Canadian tech and business newsroom The Logic, and James Allsworth, who now leads innovation at Cloudflare.

While some of the references are dated — The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed are no longer buzzy new entrants — the core principles absolutely hold up.

In the report, Christensen, Skok, and Allsworth outline questions news organizations should ask themselves to understand their audiences’ needs:

1. What is the job audiences want done?

2. What kinds of employees and structure does the company need so it can fulfill that job-to-be-done?

3. What is the best way to deliver that information to audiences?

And even as technology evolves, the jobs remain the same — no matter if you’re watching a news creator on TikTok, listening to All Things Considered in the car, or reading a print newspaper, you’re using those tools to complete a job, and it’s up to publishers to understand that need and help you fulfill it.

If publishers understand the jobs their communities need help accomplishing, their audiences will come back to them — and pay to do so.

“As managers at media organizations consider instituting changes to their business model—perhaps by charging for content that they previously freely provided online—they should ask whether their organization is doing such an outstanding job of satisfying consumers’ needs that consumers will pay for their content. This is particularly the case if you’re in a commoditized space where other organizations are providing very similar content for free. In addition, it’s critical to avoid falling into the trap of believing that you can charge for content just because it costs money to produce,” the authors write.

“Instead, the content must be so compelling that users will pay for it. This requires targeting the right jobs.”

The full Nieman Reports article is here.

Thanks for reading MBA Notes. I’m using this space to process what I’m learning in business school, and I hope it’s useful and interesting for you as well. I’d love any feedback or ideas you might have. Please feel free to email me or reach out on LinkedIn.

Whenever I’m asked why I wanted to go to business school, I usually give some version of the same answer: I wanted to jump into the deep end, get out of my comfort zone, learn new skills, and meet new people.

A month into my MBA program, this remains true. Everyone in my cohort is smart and thoughtful — I even shamelessly brought our dog, Charley, to our first day of class to try and help meet people. (Did I include this detail so I could use her photo as the lead image of this post? No comment.) But I’m realizing — perhaps obviously — that when you throw yourself into the deep end, you’ve got to figure out how to swim. These past few weeks, I’ve been splashing around and slowly learning my strokes.

I won’t bore you with every detail, but we’ve been covering the fundamentals. Financial accounting, surprisingly, has been fun — it feels like learning a new language and way of thinking. In my statistics class, I’m learning neat Excel tricks to make sense of data sets. And economics has been a re-education in remembering how to graph linear equations — I cannot remember the last time I thought about slopes and y-intercepts!

We are still covering the basics in these classes, and I’ll share more as we work toward higher-level concepts. We also start our marketing course this weekend, and I am sure that class will have insights that will be immediately applicable to my day job and hopefully useful for many of you too. Stay tuned.

Beyond these core courses, we’ve also begun talking about leadership strategies and how to effectively guide a team. As part of the MBA onboarding process, we completed a 360-degree leadership assessment with help from our colleagues. The feedback was mapped against the Michigan Model of Leadership, which the school has developed as a framework for thinking about effective leadership.

Here’s what the model looks like:

And here’s how the University’s Sanger Leadership Center describes it:

The MMoL…acknowledges a fundamental paradox of leadership that is tied to two key tensions found in all organizations—how to balance people (yellow) and performance (blue), and how to balance structure (red) and adaptation (green). Navigating these fundamental tensions and achieving the appropriate balance to optimize team and organization achievement is the goal of leadership.

These values are often in competition. It is a challenge to both be collaborative and drive results. It can be tough to foster the creativity and flexibility needed to innovate and also provide structure that encourages efficiency.

The framework was new to me, but I like it. I appreciate the tension between each of the quadrants requires you to choose the right balance to meet your goals and best support your colleagues. There’s no right way to lead a team and different situations require different approaches.

The 360 assessment we took identified the areas where we have strengths and where there are areas for improvement. (You can take your own version here.) My results showed that I’m strongest in the collaboration quadrant but need to work on providing structure to create better processes and defined roles.

In addition to providing the assessment, the program has emphasized that leadership is a skill that needs to be practiced and developed. With the results from our assessment, they encouraged us to hone our skills through testing and experimentation. Here’s an overview of the process:

The test, learn, and iterate approach is probably familiar to anyone who has worked in a product or audience-adjacent role in news over the past few years, but I hadn’t thought to apply the same approach to my own work and relationships with colleagues. I’m excited to try the process and run a leadership experiment or two — I’ll report back and maybe even ask my colleagues if they notice a difference. We’ll see!

I came into the program expecting to spend most of my time focused on the core classes and diving into the various analytical approaches I would need to learn. While that definitely is a priority, and where I will be focusing much of my energy, I’m glad we’re also going to be discussing leadership and the more human-centered elements of running an organization. You need both to be successful, and I have a lot to learn.

I’m just getting started with the MBA program — we haven’t even completed a length of the pool, to continue the swimming analogy — and I’m still trying to keep my head above the water to not only learn the new subjects but also balance everything else outside of school. It’s a lot, but I’m right where I want to be: In the deep end.

Journalism needs leaders who think more like businesspeople.

It’s advice I’ve heard — and given! — over, and over, and over, and over again during my time working in the Future of News space for the past decade or so.

I also happen to believe it’s good advice, which is why I’ve decided to get an MBA.

Next month, I’m starting at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. I’ll take classes on the weekends while continuing to work at The Lenfest Institute for Journalism.

My goal is to get a solid grounding in fundamental business principles, think more holistically about how successful organizations are run, and learn from classmates in other industries. (It’s safe to say that I’m the only one in my class who works at a nonprofit supporting local news.)

Much of my career has focused on sharing best practices and insights to help local newsrooms, and I plan to take that same approach to grad school.

I’m starting this newsletter to share what I’m learning and think through how the concepts we’re covering in the classroom can be applied to the newsroom.

What will the newsletter look like? I’m not sure!

What types of lessons will I share? I don’t know!

How often will I publish while working full-time, going to school, and chasing around a toddler? We’ll find out!

It’s been a long time since I’ve been in school — and sadly the University wouldn’t let me re-use my undergraduate ID, which is the lead image of this post — but I’m excited to start. I hope you’ll join along via the newsletter and share any questions, comments, or feedback.

More soon!