Media Transformation is Harder Than Moving Mountain.

Four years ago I thought that helping a media transformation from print media to digital media was very challenging and exciting. Actually the company not only want a transformation but also media convergence. The company had been counting on its revenue just from magazines ad for 20 years! It is indeed too long and risky now. We knew it was going to be declining very soon since then, so we've decided to make a news portal to be the next company's revenue stream. Why news portal? Because our media concept is local news media, same with current magazines. So we made a local news portal to complete the local free magazines.

After a year full of meetings, discussions, brainstorms, revisions, we finally made it to launch back in 2014. That first version was very cramped and slow, because of course we're lack of experience to build any kind of any digital thing before. So after running it for two years and getting a lot of negative feedback on it, we decided to rebuild it. Totally rebuild it. That means the first version was dumped and replaced by the second version, a much better version up until now. It is much cleaner, lighter, and most of all simpler.

Our company's hope was so high on this second version back then when it was relaunched in beginning of 2017, especially from our sales team, so they can sell new other things to their long awaited clients. Unfortunately the sales team are getting difficulties to sell. Why? We have to admit we're a print media company since the beginning and have no experience at all on selling digital media. We have to learn how to sell digital media with data. Not only data, but the clients want convincing. It means big traffic numbers to satisfy them. But we have problems on that.

The problem it is a local news portal, it only publish stories from Greater Jakarta area, a hyper local news portal. So it makes our readers target are mainly Greater Jakarta residents. And of course it can't reached huge traffic numbers just like clients expect from a nation-wide news portal. We are indeed a niche media company. Although we can't make large traffic numbers but we can provide relevant news and stories to local residents. But the clients seems don't give a damn about that. They don't care about the consistency of concept because when it comes to digital all that matters for them is big traffic numbers.

Is that a blunder? Maybe. To overcome that we made other initiative to create an app to diversify our digital media. To make it faster, we partner with a third party. But it seems still take time to get it ready. One thing for sure we've done our best to overcome the magazine risky revenue. But we think that we're running out of time. So here it is, few years of digital investments but we still can't see a clear way to get back all the investments made, yet making the transformation mission is harder than moving mountain.