Hi there,
From their website: The Flat Earth Society has members all around the globe.
Now, we assume that everyone who subscribes to this newsletter understands and hopefully appreciates this joke, but it inadvertently set the smartocto team thinking.
We have members/followers/customers all over the globe too, and we want to engage with all of them. With Christmas nearly here, we've introduced an advent calendar. But of course this is predominantly a Christian celebration and not everyone is Christian. Are we excluding people with our content?
This is a struggle every self-respecting media title faces. You want to reach as many people as possible, but you also need to inject personality and colour into your media brand. In the coming weeks, most websites will be looking back at the year 2023. It's precisely in the choice of which events to reflect on, and how, that your priorities and target audience become clear.
It's essential that your editorial team knows where your focus lies, which needs you aim to fulfill, and the tone you want to set. In our case, we don't want to hide the fact that we are a European company with roots in the Netherlands and Serbia. But more importantly, we aim to be seen as helping media makers translate data into strategy. This is because we believe that simply offering a tool is not enough. We hope that this message is what you primarily see in our advent calendar on userneedsfornews.com.
BLOG
“No publisher that I’ve spoken with is in any doubt that they need to start using this new technology, and get on the AI train as fast as possible”, says media investor Saša Vučinić. “Their hesitations are limited only to how to do it safely, responsibly, and without violating anyone else's rights.”
The question, of course, is: how? Fortunately, there are many lessons to be learned from the early days of the internet. The mistake that was widely made back then, either by ignoring the technology or by transferring far too much money to companies that promised golden mountains, is not really made anymore.
Our CEO Erik van Heeswijk has some tips in our latest blog: “Define where you want AI to assist editorial teams and which tasks it might eventually take over. This also means freeing up people to focus on this, giving them a mandate and a budget. Ensure every department is represented. Journalism is too valuable to be left solely to technicians.”
