Friday 28th June: The secret to engaging young audiences: empower young leaders

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I’m of the opinion that basically everyone in the upper echelons of a newsroom is at least 20 years too old to hold their position. That’s not just me being oldphobic, though — it’s a reflection of the slow response newspapers have to almost every single change in the digital ecosystem. The people signing off on the strategic decisions often appear to be behind the curve — but worse is that they’re unreflective of the new audiences on whom their papers’ continued existence relies.

For DCN, Matthew Keys argues that empowering younger leaders can help: “Benaiah agrees that one way to attract and engage younger consumers is to create content that resonates with them. To do so requires hiring young people into key decision-making roles. It also means allowing personality to bubble through. He likens it to the better days of the newspaper industry, where someone might pick up a copy of the daily edition to read the latest clip from their favourite columnist.”

That paragraph might make the piece seem light and optimistic. If you read it, though, it’s teeming with frustration in the form of quotes and anecdotes from young staffers with ideas that could transform newsrooms for the better, but have to run it past an old crusty who is — more than likely — just running out the clock to retirement.

Another day, another story about a storied magazine brand granting OpenAI access to its archives. And, finally, some clarity on what a media company might get out of these deals beyond cold hard cash: “Under the agreement, OpenAI will cite Time in its responses to user queries and will link back to the original content source on Time.com, Time said.”

Oh, hello! It’s two of the Media Voices team — and plenty of our friends — on this list of 21 women covering the media business. Esther and Jo are both included (very deservedly too, given how hard they work) on this list of luminaries who are covering the industry’s ongoing transformation. We’d be remiss not to return the favour: journalism.co.uk’s Marcela Kunova is a fantastic analyst and interviewer whose articles are always worth a read.

And speaking of women in the media industry, Liz Gerard has written this piece for the New European on the continued soft power of a diminished tabloid. Speaking at the Hugh Cudlipp lecture the Mail’s former editor Geodie Greig — who was making progress on improving the title morally and commercially — laid into his counterparts Dacre and Verity — who weren’t. Gerard writes a great piece, and this one explains why the Mail’s soft power worked against its chosen political party.

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