How News Media Houses can Use Attractor state concept to manage disruption in Africa

The last couple of decades has seen many sectors that were considered stable due to high barriers to entry disrupted by small entrants who have gone ahead to get significant market share and completely change the status quo. Take for example Mpesa disrupting the Kenyan Financial sector, Uber; taxi travel, AirBnB the hotel sector and many more.

The question most executives are grappling with is; how do we stay ahead of the pack or how can we build resilience against disruption. This article focuses on the news media industry but the principle can be applied to any other industry.

The concept of change and change management today goes hand in hand with the attractor state concept. An industry attractor state describes how an industry ideally should function vis a vis technology and demand. This means being able to meet the needs and demands of customers as efficiently as possible.

An industry player with a clear point of view about the industry ideal or attractor state helps them plan and prepare for the future better giving them a competitive edge. Although an attractor state provides a general gravitational pull towards the future evolution of an industry, there are no guarantees that it may come to pass.

A major difference between an attractor state and many company Visions is that an ideal state is founded on overall industry efficiency rather than a single company’s desire to be ‘’King of the hill’’ or market leader.

For example instead of conducting the off the shelf strategic planning of conducting a SWOT analysis; an organization can focus on identification of accelerators and impediment to the organization movement towards the attractor state.

Currently newspapers, television, website and other media receive much of their income from advertising. This challenge is being felt with the major leading media houses that have a weekly circulation of newspapers running into millions of copies albeit declining advertising revenue.

The challenge they face is two pronged; readership is slowing because today’s readers have free access to round the clock broadcast news, free online access to basic headline stories through various avenues such as specialized blogs and articles that offer in-depth comment and analysis.

Secondly, advertisers are now drifting towards targeted media such as Google, facebook and the likes who are able to identify customer specific interest.

Generally news media are differentiated in three forms; Geography (Global, Regional, National, Local), Frequency (Monthly, weekly, Daily, Hourly) and Depth (Headline, Feature story, in-depth expert analysis).

The ideal attractor state for news espouses specialist along each of the above forms rather than a jack of all trade.  In the near future the current general purpose newspapers will be nonexistent. Similarly local news and specialized news media with continue to flourish.

The strategic move for the big media houses should therefore not be ‘Moving Online’ or ‘More advertisement’, but delinking their activities.

In the ideal or attractor state of delinking, newspapers may be operational but very subtly with minimum overheads.

Further in-depth news analysis and investigative journalism would be weekly; delivered to avid digital readers, national news will be delivered online more so through the mobile platform.

Finally with industry pressure to adopt an online model newspaper companies will need to aggregate content from a variety of sources and independent writers rather than staff journalist. Successful online media present the user with carefully selected links to articles, stories, blogs and commentary.