“I want to start an uncomfortable conversation: Are there too many journalism events?”
So said Marcela Kunova, the owner and operator of journalism.co.uk (JUK), last week.
She continued: “I just looked at my agenda and JUK events calendar. It’s gone out of hand. Conferences, festivals, summits, workshops, talks, congresses, study tours, awards. Dozens of great events are clustered between April and June and from September to November; sometimes three or five happen at the same time. They are all great – speakers, topics, organisation. I root for all of them. It’s just TOO MUCH.”
She asked if anyone else felt that way and in the comments underneath her post the consensus was that yes, they did.
I’m going to take a contrary view. I think the journalism industry needs to discuss its issues and share its learnings more, not less often. I agree with Marcela’s point about scheduling but the main problem I have with events is that I don’t think all of them are great, though many are and will remain key events in my personal calendar.
Too often they feature the same speakers you saw at the last conference talking about the same old topics (newsletters are an important retention tool, you say?), and you come away with not a whole lot of actionable information or new ideas.
I have some very quick fixes. First, make the days shorter. As the sessions move towards the evening, the amount of phone-checking among attendees increases; people can only concentrate for so long. Nobody wins from a “packed agenda”. Finish at 4pm.
Second, make more time for networking. This is the main reason people attend conferences. Props to WAN-IFRA which scheduled very long lunch breaks for its recent annual congress; though maybe that was because it was in France (wine was also served).
Third, panels should only be one moderator plus one interviewee or one plus two maximum. Otherwise nobody gets a chance to say anything of consequence.
Talking of which, here is my modest proposal. I think media conferences should be more about discussing failures than successes.
I firmly believe in Michael Jordan’s maxim of “you win or you learn”. He talked a lot about how the shots he missed contributed more to his greatness as a NBA player than the ones he made. I can relate to that – at a very much less exalted level, lest you think I am in any way comparing myself to him.
If I think about my career at The Times I learnt the most from failures like our international app – which had great content, a clean and appealing design, but a very difficult route to actually paying for it; or my mistakes in hiring – great team members tend to be great in their own way, bad ones have certain traits you should spot at interview; or the shortcomings of our digital transformation – too many to go into there…
The wins can be the result of great ideas but equally might be the result of a happy accident of timing or a stroke of luck. Would The Times’s subscription offer had taken off had it not been launched at the same time as the iPad? Or if Steve Jobs hadn’t decided to bring Rupert Murdoch in on the launch?
Equally, failures are not just about bad ideas – timing, budgets, personnel, poor internal processes, tech issues can all play a part. By really digging into them, in a no-fault way, we can learn to reduce the effect of these influences to the fewest possible.
So I propose a Media Festival of Failure, in which publishers are encouraged to talk about the app launches that fell flat, the new products that nobody wanted, the new ways of working that everyone hated, the AI tools that just produced gibberish. No glorious successes allowed (and frankly I wonder how many of those we are shown at conferences are privately regarded as such by those presenting them). But lessons galore.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been marinated in Britain’s culture of self-deprecation that I find stories of things going wrong much more entertaining than tales of triumph. But they are also important and useful.
I know internal comms teams will find this idea horrifying. Too many presentations are limited by their flattening hands. We must tell them to relax and realise that ultimately they’ll be telling better stories about their companies if we are allowed to do the same.
Anyone up for this conference? (Or is it another idea from which I’ll have to learn?)
This first appeared in our weekly newsletter Editor’s picks. Sign up here
Supercharge Your Content Strategy
Feel free to test this content on your social media sites to see whether it works for your community.
