How many T's in Diversification?

I’ve been thinking about Georgie Holt, Anders Ericsson, and Trevor Jones this week. As a trio they tell us a lot about the future of revenue diversification in media

The ability of news and magazine companies to diversify revenues has never been more important. Over the next five years they face the pincer movement of a print endgame and the acceleration of an AI driven information landscape that challenges trust, brand power and renumeration for content creators.

To ride that out, the best publishers will be those that can migrate their brands and talent to take advantage of growing and emerging digital channels while being ruthless about getting out of markets before the music stops.

That’s easy in principle, tough in practice. We often underestimate how good we have become at the core business and how much we have to learn in new markets. Partly in publishing this is because the “Content-is-King” team overvalue how important pure content quality is to audiences, compared to understanding the platform dynamics at play that enables them to discover it.

I was lucky enough this week to be at the Media Collective summit ¹ and listen to the impressive Georgie Holt talk about the work that FlightStory does behind the scenes to build “Diary of a CEO” into the second biggest podcast in the world.

Georgie used the phrase “Algorithmic Editing” which describes the ability to curate content not just for the audience but also for the YouTube machine that drives discovery, engagement, sharing and subscription. Their relentless optimisation of the channel is the unseen part of the success of the product.

More of you will have heard of Steven Bartlett than Trevor Jones, who has for 34 years been the unseen hand in operations at News UK. Trevor is a one man print sales algorithm.

Every afternoon about 4pm he and his teams assess the front page stories that will be on sale the day after. They calibrate the print run required to maximise sales across over 40,000 sales outlets based on the front page splash, sports schedule, sales patterns, price changes and the weather. They usually forecast the national sale to within a few thousand copies - they are unbelievable optimisation experts in the channel.

Likely more of this audience will know Trevor than Anders Ericsson, who was the originator of the theory that 10,000 hours of practice was required to become an expert musician. This theory was later made famous by Malcolm Gladwell who applied it more widely and saw the same pattern in sports, art and business. It is clearly applicable in media.

Successful diversification of media revenues is predicated on creating world class expertise in new channels, and aligning editors, product teams and operations behind it. Building world class expertise takes a dedication, focus and persistence in a narrow subject.

This has profound implications for the shape and leadership style of media organisations. Years ago McKinsey defined “I shaped” and “T shaped” managers, where I’s had a deep vertical expertise and T’s had an aspirational combination of broad general skills matched with one deep vertical specialism.

Imagine a distribution channel as an I, that needs deep commitment to learning, and creates new demands for content creation, talent management, packaging, marketing and analytics. The team that worries about that from dawn to dusk is an “I” team, and will vary in shapes and sizes and salaries.

The challenge for publishers is that to be world class, every new algorithmic channel needs a new I team, and they ideally need to be able to influence end to end operations from creation to distribution for that channel. This is very different from big Department structures of Newsrooms / Production / Marketing / Operations where each fulfils all the needs for their area.

It also requires a different leadership model. Execs become the small T group that sits above those I teams, monitoring growth and progress, allocating resources and gradually migrating the balance of activity from legacy into future facing delivery.

The key questions for those senior decision makers are

• Which are the I’s do we need for our brands to thrive in the next decade?

• Which legacy I’s won’t make it?

• How do we compete with smaller faster new entrants for talent?

• How many seed investments in learning and mastery can the organisation support at any one time, financially and operationally?

On that last point of how many specialisms can a structure bear, it’s worth noting that there are four I’s and one T in Diversification. Perhaps the ideal media org structure has been hiding there all along…

Note - Thanks for all of the reaction to the Sun+ paywall article last week, revisiting a project from a decade ago which still holds a fascination for those that were there. My learning from the algorithm this week is perhaps we need to tell more unflinching stories about things that didn't work and why - there’s gold there.

1. https://www.themediacollective.net/events/the-media-collective-summit-2025/