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CHRIS HOOD: Welcome to this episode of "The Transformation
Debrief."
I'm Chris Hood, a digital strategist at Google Cloud
and your host.
In each episode, we aim to stir visionary thinking
and share unexpected insights on transformation initiatives
and lessons learned along the way.
Gannett is a subscription-led and digitally-focused
media and marketing solutions company.
Their portfolio includes "USA TODAY,"
hundreds of local media outlets in 46 states,
and Newsquest, which operates 120 local media
brands in the United Kingdom.
Gannett also owns several digital marketing services
to help create a powerful network of brands
and capabilities designed to transform and preserve
the future of local journalism.
Today, my co-host for this episode,
Kirsten Kliphouse, President of Google Cloud Americas,
joins me, along with our guest, Erik Bursch, Senior Vice
President, Consumer Product and Engineering at Gannett.
Let's get to know our guests a little better.
KIRSTEN KLIPHOUSE: Thank you very much.
And I am excited to have this conversation
today because at Google Cloud I actually lead the Americas
region for us, which includes all of our larger customers
as well as commercial businesses, startups,
digital natives, et cetera, and really
help them transform their businesses
and find value in leveraging the Google set of technologies
and solutions.
ERIK BURSCH: Great.
Thanks to be here.
It's great to be here also.
My responsibilities are within the digital consumer product
organization and engineering at Gannett and "USA Today."
CHRIS HOOD: One of the things we love
to do to start each episode is ask a standard question
for both of you.
We'll start with Kirsten.
What was the most transformative role or decision
in your career to date and why?
KIRSTEN KLIPHOUSE: The most transformative decision--
I actually was helped with that decision.
I had someone pushing me into that decision, which
was a wonderful, actually, looking back in hindsight,
decision, which was to basically leave
some of my focus out in the external market
and working directly with customers
on a first-party basis to now moving
into a role that actually put me a little more behind the scenes
and had to look more at the operational capabilities
and the scale and the globalization of the services
that we had to offer in this role.
And I was actually pushed into it.
I really enjoy being out with the customers
and engaging and helping them solve problems
and thinking about innovation and the future of how
technology can intersect with their business.
And here I was asked, well, wait.
You know customers so well.
Take a step back.
And I want you now to help the organization think more broadly
about how we operationalize all of our capabilities.
And I never considered myself to be a really strong
operational person.
So it was a real big change for me to take,
or a big transformation for me to have
to take on, to now leverage a whole set of skills
that I probably hadn't used as much,
and they were probably latent.
I can tell you, those skills became heightened
in that transformation.
And when I look back at it in hindsight,
it was probably the best decision
was to really jump in, sometimes,
to your discomfort and the things that you're not
comfortable doing in a transformation,
and then see yourself all the way through to the other side.
ERIK BURSCH: Yeah, I think that was very well said.
I think having that nudge to move
into more of a uncomfortable space for yourself,
that's where you really see the growth, professionally,
I think.
And I've had a chance to really have a lot of great mentors
and managers over my career.
And I came up in the operational realm,
and was an IC for a long time, managed several teams.
And I had a manager several years ago came to me and said,
I really see you as taking your next step
in moving over to manage development teams
and really switching from that right-brain to left-brain side
of things.
And I was a little taken aback at first.
I was like, this is my world here.
I think I do this pretty well.
After a lot of conversation, I made the switch,
and it really--
I mean, exactly that.
It really put me in that place of starting over again, being
uncomfortable, really diving back in
and jumping in the deep end with that.
And I think that that really opened up several doors for me
in the career.
From a Gannett perspective, when we
looked at moving to the cloud, when we looked at--
I don't like to use the word DevOps
because I think it means 10 different things to 10
different people.
But where you look at automating your actions,
whether infrastructure or product code or otherwise,
that really put me in a position to bring together
my two strengths and lead Gannett in that aspect.
And I've tried to do that several times for folks
that I manage, encourage them to take risks,
to be uncomfortable in that space.
And that's certainly what, as I look
at my career, one of the biggest ways
that I've transformed my growth.
KIRSTEN KLIPHOUSE: You know, Erik, I was going to ask you,
one of your biggest things that you've had to change though
in this transformation period is really around movement
to subscription, right?
And think about any industry that's changed,
you've probably changed more than almost any other industry
in a really short period of time.
Can you talk a little bit about the business model change
that you had to go through?
ERIK BURSCH: I mean, for a long time,
content was consumed for free digitally
even though that same content was being
paid for in different formats.
And I think there was a really big change the last couple
of years to look at users, consumers, valuing what
they want to consume digitally.
When we talk about the digital dollar
and where that's being spent, I think the users are really
understanding that when they want a premium experience,
whether it's access to all content,
whether it's an experience that is
more streamlined or otherwise, that there's a cost to that.
CHRIS HOOD: So not only is the business model now impacting
you, we're also in an age of microcontent,
nuggets of information that is at our fingertips everywhere.
And you're competing with other types of digital platforms
that are sharing this news also.
ERIK BURSCH: It's all in the spectrum
of where are people spending their time and the consumption?
And a conversation that we've talked a lot about internally
is the attention span of users.
And it's really narrowed aggressively
in the last couple of years.
And I tend to just use the phrase of 5 to 7 seconds
of attention span.
That's caused us to really rethink our products
and really try to bring different components
into our products.
KIRSTEN KLIPHOUSE: Well, Erik, it also talks a little bit
to the agility that businesses need
to have today to be able to transform
to the different types of competition that might be
out there, the different business models
that you might need to apply.
But that customer experience has become core
to this digital transformation era that we're all part of now,
and how do we really capture the opportunity
that's in front of every one of us in each one of our markets?
And so I think cloud is one of those great examples of how
we actually help organizations start
to be able to create that agility and also the scale
that you're talking about globally and all different
markets and a mix of mediums.
The cloud is one of the big enablers for that.
ERIK BURSCH: And we couldn't do what we do now
with moving in a lot of different directions
and scaling on breaking news events
and otherwise where we were even in our earlier cloud journeys
that we had.
CHRIS HOOD: Not only does that consumer experience resonate
with a lot of our listeners and people
who are watching this right now, but it's also personalization.
And Gannett spends a lot of time in local communities,
and you've got publications across the country.
How are you managing and looking at that intersection
between your national news and your local area news?
ERIK BURSCH: The amount of content
that we publish on a daily basis across our network is massive,
and we really want to know what the users want to consume.
And that might not be what is necessarily
one of the top stories on "USA TODAY"
right now at the given moment.
So I think personalization, when you're
talking about the massive amount of content that we publish,
it's really being able to surface and find
the content that's most important to that user.
KIRSTEN KLIPHOUSE: Erik, when you talk about
that, it is what's important at that time to the user.
But we talked a little bit about the business transformation
that's happened and the business model that's changed.
But you've also had to change your people
because this speed that you're operating at,
this culture of innovation, has to have changed along the way
too.
Can we maybe dive in a little bit into the change
that you've seen and how maybe you're
doing things a little bit differently from a culture
perspective to adapt to this new environment?
ERIK BURSCH: And I think that the mantra that the teams tend
to hold or the one key fact is that they
don't want to be comfortable with the status quo.
And you certainly can't be comfortable
in the digital media space with that.
Earlier, we talked about the last couple of years.
It's really the last couple of months, last month,
the last couple weeks.
There's always change occurring.
KIRSTEN KLIPHOUSE: A lot of the conversations
I have with clients in your industry or in other ones,
it's not just about the technology or the business
model.
They always go back to, OK, now how do I transfer my people?
And I'm glad you talk about that culture of innovation,
and you've been able to recognize the things
that you need inside of Gannett to foster
sort of that need for innovation and people
wanting to lean into it versus opting out of it.
Because it will make the difference
between a successful transformation and a not
successful transformation.
ERIK BURSCH: I talk to every member
in my organization in this setting
at least every couple of quarters
to where I'm asking them, what's important to you about a given
position?
I have sort of a list of 10 things that I have.
And they're all sort of very good things.
It's work-life balance.
It might be being part of a winning team
or engaging with different types of new technology
and otherwise.
And the biggest thing within any company
is understand what's important to your employees.
CHRIS HOOD: I know one of the areas that Kirsten
is passionate about is sustainability,
and we have to dive into this topic
when it comes to the transformation of news
and media to digital How's Gannett looking at that?
ERIK BURSCH: Yeah, so we are taking a close look at that.
That's something that has been a constant piece of conversation
throughout our organization.
And in a traditional sense, you had
a paper published every day of the week
and delivered to doorstep.
And we have a couple of different facets
of our digital product.
We have a traditional E-edition, which
is as the newspaper looks and feels but in a digital version.
And then we have our core digital products,
which are updated 24 hours a day across our platform.
So, yeah, I would say we are very, very early
on in that conversation, as are our friends
in the traditional media space.
But it's a complex one, for sure.
KIRSTEN KLIPHOUSE: I'm really excited about the next five
years because I think we're going
to see a whole wave of innovation
that we've just started to scratch
the surface of because of the fact
that we were so worried about getting our first workloads
into the cloud.
ERIK BURSCH: Yeah, I would agree.
I mean, I think that it's been very clear,
and I think a lot of companies understood, hey,
we need to get our data into a place where we can digest it
and otherwise.
And that's where we're at right now from a Gannett perspective.
We have data-- we have so much data
to consume and analyze and deliver.
And we're now at that sort of second or third phase
of saying, OK, how do I bring that together?
How do I make it meaningful and actionable
for ourselves internally, rather than just creating
a massive time sink for different teams
to be able to try and dig for the right data
between the different data sets?
CHRIS HOOD: Absolutely.
And thank you Erik, for joining us.
It's been great having you and a real privilege
hearing what you had to say.
ERIK BURSCH: Thank you.
CHRIS HOOD: And thank you, Kirsten,
for being my co-host for today.
KIRSTEN KLIPHOUSE: Well, I appreciate it.
And thank you, Erik.
Such a great partnership we have,
and I really enjoy the conversation
on how we're working together to transform the market.
CHRIS HOOD: If you would like to learn more about Gannett,
we have two channels for you to explore.
At cloud.google.com/transform, we dive deeper into this
transformation journey.
And you can tune into "That Digital Show"
to hear the extended podcast version of this conversation.
And don't forget, hit Subscribe, and join us again
for our visionary thinking and lessons
learned on the next episode of "The Transformation Debrief."
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