Playing to win: Finding growth in all the right places

Our goal is to shift toward a more service-centric organization, rather than a product-centric one. When you are focused on the why and the outcome rather than the process, it’s easier to keep the reader at the center of what we do.”

Charity Huff, CEO and publisher of 5280 Magazine and the CEO of January Spring

What’s your business’ place in the world? If you haven’t asked yourself or your leadership team that question, I encourage you to thoughtfully ask where you have the right to win, and what differentiation or unique quality gives you the right to claim that stake. In a digitally (and now AI) forward world, the likelihood of you continuing to win at your game of business, doing the same thing you did last year or the year before, is slim.

As publishers, do we have the right to succeed in local journalism and maintain our connection to the community? I think it must be more than that. Our competitive landscape changed with the launch of our media websites. Then again, with the iPhone. And, still more with social media.  

Now with AI, the nature of competitive advantage has fundamentally shifted. We cannot rely solely on our traditional narrative of our community. We need to reimagine how we tell those stories, where we tell those stories and expand or reconsider who we are trying to reach. It’s no longer a world of “If you build it, they will come.”  We must proactively seek out readers and engage with them in ways that are meaningful to them.

In our 5280 business, we’ve reimagined the editorial calendar process, starting with the story and then determining the best channel to serve our readers. That’s required us to re-examine our organizational structure, our meeting cadence and our roles/responsibilities. Our goal is to shift toward a more service-centric organization, rather than a product-centric one. When you are focused on the why and the outcome rather than the process, it’s easier to keep the reader at the center of what we do.

To help ground the team in this way of looking at our place in the world, our audience development and marketing teams helped pull together accurate reader personas. The team hadn’t looked at who our reader was in a while and found that work to be worthwhile. We learned that the overlap between our print magazine readers and our digital readers is less than 20%. This has helped us shift our thinking on how to package digital content when sourcing from something previously in print. And, for the first time, we’ve started to reverse publish, taking online stories and introducing them to our print magazine readers — now that we understand they aren’t the same audience.

By simply asking the questions, bigger opportunities have started to show themselves. I am a transparent leader. I believe in providing people with all the necessary information (both positive and negative) to excel in their roles and understand their contribution to the organization's success. By giving that control and insight to the team, they are setting the course of our business in a bold and strategic direction. The shifts they recommend will reposition our 33-year-old business for growth and help us introduce our beloved brand to more people, who we know will fall in love with it just as I did many years ago.

Charity Huff is the CEO and publisher of 5280 Magazine and the CEO of January Spring. For nearly 30 years, she has worked for and founded companies that have pioneered digital-first strategies and tactics.