Navigating Digital Transformation with a Human-Centric Approach

Salah Zalatimo, former Chief Digital Officer at Forbes, discusses the history of magazines and digital transformation. Magazines have been around for a while, with many well-known brands being founded around 100 years ago. Technological innovations have enabled new businesses to launch, such as the Direct to Consumer (DTC) boom and the cheaper printing costs around the turn of the last century.

A Short History of the Magazine Industry

Salah talks about the background of Forbes, which was launched around the Great Depression, and goes on to why the magazine industry was much like VC Investing  today, and how it changed with the advent of the internet. The tension between maintaining journalistic integrity and separation was a challenge. However, the internet revolutionized the way magazines operated, leading to many magazines going out of business in the past 20 years.

Integration with the Digital Media Space

Salah started his career in 2001, drawn to the digital media space after experiencing the first broadband connection and discovering Napster and music. When he arrived at Forbes, he found it to be one of the few companies that successfully adapted to these new business models. Forbes had more traffic and audience than any other magazine and competed with some of the largest information and news websites in the world. He joined Forbes in 2016 and discovered that their adaptation to the new business model was kind of outside their capabilities. Forbes adopted a new business model in 2016 when they acquired True Slant, a platform that allowed writers to write articles and receive a revenue share on the content. This aligned the incentives of all stakeholders in the content creation process, with writers and publishers trying to generate more revenue and being paid based on the success of the content. Forbes adapted this business model to their own newsroom, increasing their content production and SEO significantly.

How Forbes Maintained Zero Liability

The Google algorithm, which was maturing at the time, was a link-sharing system, making it difficult to lose a lead in SEO. Forbes was one of the first companies to dramatically increase their content production and SEO, leaving everyone behind. This led to a virtuous cycle where writers had their own social media accounts and audiences, which added to putting Forbes ahead of the curve in terms of adaptation. However, content production still operated as a newsroom, and digital transformation was needed to adapt the business model. Salah explains why tension arose between traditional journalists and freelance journalists and how Forbes maintained zero liability for user-generated content..

Problems Facing The Digital Media Business Model

The digital media business model is facing a number of problems, including misaligned incentives and the need for a more efficient business model. Digital advertising is the primary way to monetize the media today, and traditional newsrooms focus on journalistic excellence and fact-checking. Salah explains how Forbes addressed this issue which incentivized writers to optimize their content for new distribution channels like Google and Facebook. This led to a dramatic change in the way Forbes worked and enabled them to grow.

Challenges Managing Freelance Writers

The newsroom faced challenges in managing freelance writers and managing quotas, which created stress. As a technologist, it was clear to Salah that many of these tasks could be simplified, automated, and made more consistent and flexible. To improve processes and outcomes, the company looked at the publishing platform as an opportunity. WordPress, the most widely used platform, is meant for smaller publications, and it couldn’t handle the volume of Forbes. By aligning incentives and improving processes, Forbes was able to grow and thrive in a time when other digital media companies were either losing money or going sideways.

How Forbes’ Platform Was Improved

To improve the platform, Forbes evaluated various third-party options and found that there were many components available in the market that could be customized and further developed for their platform. They considered AI and automation machine learning. To gather insights, Forbes hired data scientists to analyze content performance and identify patterns. They discovered that certain headline words had a 40% higher ranking in Google than comparable synonyms, and placing images after the first paragraph dramatically increased completion rates. They also developed a proprietary viral early warning system called views, which could predict with 95% accuracy whether an article would go viral within the first 15 minutes of publication.

Publisher Challenges

One of the biggest challenges faced by publishers is first-party data collection, which is crucial for their success. Forbes didn't have any connection between the different platforms and sharing, Salah explains how they overcame this issue and what the signifiers are of a post going viral. The impact of this was dramatic and clear, as Forbes could create bots that automatically posted content to social media platforms based on these patterns. This allowed Forbes to focus on the highest likelihood of success articles and increase throughput on social media accounts for specific topics.

The New Publishing Platform, Birdie

Salah discusses the development of a new publishing platform called Birdie, which introduced machine learning and AI tools to improve the quality and reach of writers' content. The platform was named after BC Forbes, the founder of Forbes. The AI elements in Birdie included a headline score, article length optimization, image placement, and content complexity. However, the first version of the platform was not well-received by the newsroom. To address this, the team tried to integrate the AI tools in a more fluid way, using a push button system where users could request suggestions for headlines. This allowed writers to feel more empowered and better at their jobs. Birdie's digital transformation was an efficient way to manage writers, build quotas and KPIs into the platform, and receive suggestions and reminders. This eliminated the need for manual intervention and improved the reach of pieces.

Salah emphasizes the importance of maintaining the human element of the digital transformation process. He believes that it is not just about optimizing how something is written but also changing someone's livelihood and something they have been doing for a long time. Maintaining the human element and coming at it from an empathetic standpoint would have allowed for faster progress and saved stress.

In conclusion, Salah Zalatimo advises companies tackling similar digital transformations to lean into the people they will be affecting early on, consider the words used and the choice of words, and consider the AI powered versus AI assisted versus AI enabled aspects.

Timestamps:

02:07 Digital transformation in the magazine industry

07:13 The history of magazines and their adaptation to technological changes

13:04 Forbes' successful adaptation to digital media

18:52 Forbes' digital transformation and content creation model

23:49 Digital transformation in a newsroom

29:23 Improving Forbes' publishing platform using AI and automation

34:36 AI-powered content creation and viral prediction at Forbes

40:09 Implementing AI tools in a newsroom with empathy for writers

Links:

https://www.ooblek.xyz/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/zalatimo/

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