Field Note Archive
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Field Note 08: Ten Ways to Stall
Transformation projects rarely stall on the technology. Over more than twenty years of newsroom change work, the same ten barriers recur, and they fall into three families: not knowing what is being built or why, changing one part of the organisation while the rest stays as it was, and failing to resource the people doing the work. Each maps back to a framework in the book.
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Field Note 07: Who Owns the Numbers?
Only 6% of newsrooms let a desk spend money on its own initiative. Most publishers know what a department costs; far fewer know what an audience is worth. Three ways to organise around content tribes, and what each one does to autonomy, accountability and the numbers.
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Field Note 06: The Offer Changed. The Newsroom Did Not.
Every one of the world’s fifty largest news brands now bundles. The offer has changed a great deal; the organisation producing it has changed hardly at all. This issue uses two news subscriptions — one owned outright, one arriving inside a bank’s benefits list — to set out the difference between packaging what a company already has and building around a community that already exists.
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Field Note 05: The Wrong Specification
Reaching the right reader is not the same as serving them well. Three decades of measuring clicks, views and dwell-time has told newsrooms what they took from readers, never what readers needed. This issue sets out three things a newsroom needs to know about a reader before it can offer something worth paying for — what that reader values, what has newly opened in their life, and where their readiness stands — and why most newsrooms can answer only one of the three.
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Field Note 04: Where No Alarm Rings
Some of the most consequential decisions in an AI-powered newsroom might be made by tools no reader ever sees and no editor reviews — a failure with no alarm attached. This issue names that failure, shows its pre-AI precedent, and sets it inside the Visibility–Editorial Control Matrix: an instrument that sorts every AI tool a newsroom runs into four quadrants, and tells you how hard to watch each one.
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Field Note 03: How trust, authenticity and personalisation pull against one another
A newsroom built for the AI era holds three forces in tension — trust, authenticity and personalisation — each pulls against the other two. The task is to find the configuration in which all three balance.
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Field Note 02: Why Humans Must Own the Narrative
Thirty years of digital transformation built better canals. The AI era requires a railway; a different value proposition, a different architecture, and a different operating system. Where those sit, what they consist of, and why your AI policy cannot do the work of all three.
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Field Note 01: Better Canals
Thirty years of digital transformation built better canals. The AI era requires a railway; a different value proposition, a different architecture, and a different operating system. Where those sit, what they consist of, and why your AI policy cannot do the work of all three.
