Lessons from a digital launch 10 years on

This first appeared in our weekly newsletter Editor’s picks. Sign up here

Ten years ago this week we launched the new Times and Sunday Times website and smartphone app. It remains the most significant product launch in which I have been involved.

The project took a huge amount of time – it took the best part of two years to come to fruition – and energy. During that period I’d say about 80% of my time was devoted to thinking about it, promoting it internally, managing expectations, and making sure we hit milestones.

This wasn’t just a regular kind of launch though. It had multiple moving parts, of which two were particularly significant.

First, we were combining the digital output of two titles that shared a name, an owner and a subscription but, in their eyes, little else. Newspapers do sibling rivalry like nobody else. An example: when I worked on The Sunday Times, my office access pass did not work on the floors occupied by The Times, which every Monday would run stories casting doubt on our Sunday scoops. You can imagine what fun it was to tell the titles that from here on they would be sharing a website and an app.

Second, we were radically changing our publishing strategy by moving to edition-based publishing online. We would publish the overnight edition at midnight and then update only at 9am, noon and 5pm. Anything that happened in between would have to wait. (And yes, of course if something major happened we would break the cycle.) The idea was to drive habit among users, to get them coming back more than the average number of times a day, which was just over one. The strategy was based on user research and data but, as you can probably imagine, was controversial.

This is all ancient history now, but what did I learn that would change how I would approach such a project today? In no particular order, here are my five key learnings:

1 Nobody likes change

I found out quite how hard change is by putting a button at the top of our new website and inviting readers to tell us how they liked it. We linked it up to a Slack channel and boy, was that a chastening experience.

The initial feedback was horrible. More than 16,000 people filled in the feedback form and 99% were critical. “Who is the idiot responsible for this change? Sack him immediately,” wrote one that unsurprisingly I remember to this day.

And so this went on, day after day, for a few weeks. But then eventually the tide turned and the reviews began to get more positive. “I may have been a bit hasty in my previous criticism,” wrote one. Crucially, the numbers backed up this point of view: after the first few weeks they started rising dramatically. Visits soon doubled and the number of articles read tripled.

My advice to those launching new products today is put your tin hats on and await a battering. But if you’ve done your prep work right, keep the faith and the critics will eventually punch themselves out. I know of plenty of products that have been pulled back far too quickly after the initial feedback was negative. Give them time.

2 The internal sell is crucial

This may sound obvious but it’s almost as important to win the battle surrounding a new product within your company as it is to defeat the ultimate enemy aka the reader (joking, joking!).

I delivered the presentation pitching the new website and app more than 35 times. I knew it off by heart. I now cannot listen to the Aphex Twin song that the design agency put over a video that was part of it.

I even delivered it twice to one executive who had returned from lunch a touch “tired and emotional”. Definitely tired as he appeared to fall asleep during some of the more technical slides. We returned the next day and all was fine.

But this process was worthwhile. There were no last-minute changes of approach or design. Everyone was on board (at least at the start).

3 Users know what they want

More than once I’ve heard a newsroom greybeard say: “Yeah, but users don’t really know what they want.” Actually, they do, they really do.

The website and app project was marked by being user-centric, which was rare 10 years ago. We commissioned Ideo, a California-based design thinking agency, to help us with the project and they embedded themselves in the lives of our users and potential users. They followed them around to work out how news fit into their days.

The feedback was clear. Our readers weren’t as obsessed with the news as our newsroom and typically were happy, indeed happier, with periodic updates rather than a never-ending stream of news. Also they valued analysis and opinion, our “take” on the news, much more than knowing the latest breaking news, which they said they got elsewhere.

As I said before, responding to those macro user needs really worked and I would urge you to do the same. You might have a smart new product feature in your head that excites you, but a far better route to follow is letting the users guide you.

4 Good ideas don’t always win

I’ve said that our new products worked with the readers. But ultimately we followed the edition-based strategy for five years and then it stopped (after I left the newspapers).

Why? I think the main reason was a change of personnel at News UK. Many of the senior people who had been involved in the genesis of the project left even before it was launched. A number of them left thereafter.

And I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that a predecessor’s idea is never a good one. That’s just human nature.

So, for example, we never marketed the editions strategy and product development effectively ended after launch as a new tech team came in and saw their priority as being the underlying platform. The only consistency came from the editors who mostly stuck with the project even though it went against some of their newshound instincts.

If I had to go again, I would have insisted on selling what we were producing (seems obvious, no?) and also I’d have used the tools available to me and my team, notably push notifications and emails, to really drive home the editions concept.

But that doesn’t make me bitter: the website and app were only (lightly) renewed last year and experience has made me realise that the quality of an idea does not always determine its success.

5 … but they can have an afterlife

The Times has moved on from editions, but in the past couple of years the news industry, I would suggest, has moved towards it. Not publicly, but in its practice.

I’m told that at the Daily Mail they now talk of having stories ready for “the 9” or “the 5”, which are packages of content for 9am or 5pm. They don’t announce them as editions to their readers, but they are clearly looking for habitual use at those times.

User needs is a concept that is, happily, spreading rapidly throughout the industry. A key learning I’ve picked from almost everyone I’ve talked to about it is that the “Update me” user need is the most produced but least read type of story. This was exactly what readers told us a decade ago and why we dialled back on breaking news.

My prediction is that we move more into a “briefing” rather than “informing” mode as the AI revolution takes hold.

Finally, what are newsletters, recently the obsession of the industry thanks to Substack and others, if not editions?

All in all, we can be proud of what we did all those years ago. Hat tip to Frank Praverman, Kiska Harrop, Dan Griffiths, Ramin Beheshti, Nick Petrie, Ben Whitelaw, Suzi Watford and everyone else who made it happen. But most of all to the late, great Pat Long, who once said: “I won’t be around to see it, but I hope to have done my bit to keep these papers going for another 200 years.”
Have a great weekend, Alan

Alan Hunter is a co-founder of HBM Advisory, which helps organisations navigate the transformation of their content businesses, from finding the right strategy to producing the right content, and of course everything AI. Contact us for more information at [email protected]