South China Morning Post's reinvention

One of the social hubs of SCMP's new headquarters at Times Square in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong. / Korea Times photo by Yun Suh-young

• Published Apr 8, 2018 4:47 PM KST
• Updated Apr 10, 2018 12:17 AM KST

How the 114-year-old paper's 34-year-old CEO is changing the workplace

By Yun Suh-young

HONG KONG — When stepping into the new premises of South China Morning Post (SCMP) at Times Square in Causeway Bay, to which they relocated two months ago, the immediate impression is casual, open and collaborative.

The newspaper occupies three floors of the six-story building they purchased and will eventually move into all six.

On every floor, there is a lounge taking up half of the space. They are called “social hubs” and look very much like co-working spaces that are trending today — with sofas, coffee tables, bar counters, stools, and lockers.

According to Gary Liu, the 34-year-old CEO of SCMP, it’s meant to be like that.

“That’s actually part of the goal,” he said, when the reporter commented it looks like WeWork, one of the world’s fastest-growing co-working space providers.

“Every single floor has what we call a ‘social hub.’ The employees have an opportunity to work together in small groups. There’s a cafe upstairs that also looks very much like this. Every floor has a different concept. Every single floor looks different.”

Not only that, every single conference room is also decorated differently by local Hong Kong artists. Art, in the larger context, is embedded here and there in the newsroom. Walls are printed with photographs by SCMP’s photojournalists, infographics and artwork.

Changing work culture

The way the newsroom is designed and decorated has made an impact in the way people work, for the better.

“So what we changed is that it’s no longer set seating, so you don’t sit at the same desk every day. You can grab your laptop and sit wherever you want. The free flow of information has, in two months, completely changed,” Liu said.

Upon her visit to the Post, Liu gave The Korea Times reporter a personal tour around the newsroom. The Korea Times is SCMP’s only official partner in Asia, collaborating on content exchange.

“These environments are meant for cafe meetings like what’s happening right now. It changed quite a bit. We used to have very high artificial silos between desks. People didn’t talk to one another. No sharing of information. More competitive than cooperative. (But) the environment of having people have to move has already changed (the culture) — breaking down the silos. Especially the China desk and business desk — they’re now cooperating more.”

The main two floors of the newsroom are openly connected — there’s a stairway in the middle connecting the two floors from which people can grab a view of both floors. At the middle of the atrium, there is a huge oval desk with senior editors sitting around each other in a circle. From the upper floor, anyone can see the editors at work below.

“The second part is transparency. It’s that all of our senior editors all sit together down here. It’s the first time in at least 10 years that all of our desk editors have sat together. They’ve been previously split across offices or in their own rooms. So their conversations were at best through emails or phones, never in person,” he said when asked how the change in the environment has changed the newsroom culture.

“When they have offices, conversation, especially in Chinese companies, is not that fluid. Now, they’re out in the open, always sitting around each other. Usually around 4 p.m. or 5 p.m. it’s the most fun because the news really coalesces. There are people arguing with each other, asking about story ideas and whatnot.”

Liu humbly shared the credit with everyone when asked if this was his idea.

“Everything was a collective idea. But I will say I was inspired by the fact that I come from an industry where open workspaces like this are standard.”

Liu, a digital expert who was appointed to head the 114-year-old newspaper in January last year, has been bringing in some noticeable changes for the past year. Redesigning the SCMP logo and brand image and relocating the newsroom to a new location with a new design have led to some strides in changing the newsroom work culture, as well as making some big investments in new media — notably video — to gear up to meet the changing media environment.

Liu previously served as CEO of Digg, a news aggregator based in New York, where he tripled its revenue, before being appointed to head the SCMP. He also held positions at Spotify Labs, AOL and Google.

Platform shift

One big change in the newspaper is their heavy investment in video, which explains why they have set up a video studio in their new newsroom.

“A lot of newspapers say video as a medium is important to them but what has ended up happening is they haven’t invested correctly. When you do that, the quality is low, you try it and experiment and (when) it fails, you give up. For us, we really wanted to commit to making sure we could actually broadcast about China to the rest of the world, even as a newspaper. We’re never going to be CNN, we’re not trying to be Bloomberg, but we’re trying to be an objective China source that has experts who sit at this desk and can broadcast to CNN and to BBC,” Liu said.

“So we spent a good amount of money on this setup. I think we’re the first newsroom in Hong Kong to have invested in real video operation. We also brought in two of the most senior CNN executives here in Asia to lead our video operation. Consumers today have chosen to consume news in video format often times more than written. So we have to follow consumer behavior.”

And to meet to the changing times, journalists should also keep up with the pace, equipped with multimedia skills.

“At our newsroom, the difference is we’re training everyone to be able to do video editing. Every journalist should be able to, by the end of next year, know how to do some form of video editing,” he said.

“We have a training editor who was a 35-year Reuters bureau chief who now we’ve hired and all he does is train. We focus a lot on training here. We didn’t used to but now we are. A lot of news organizations, when they make the change from print to digital, they fire people and then bring in new people. Our goal is to not fire anyone, unless of course they don’t perform, but for everyone to be up-leveled, to be taught how to move into the new age.”

Quite a few people are allocated to the video team, with about 20 dedicated employees from a newsroom of about 350, which is equal to the number of people allocated to the print desk where they solely focus on designing the print copy of the newspaper.

“We can, from here, do pre-programmed scripted shows, live broadcasts, live shoots directly to internet and format video however we want. The strategy here is what we call a distributed media strategy which means the same story can be packaged in a hundred different ways and distributed to every single platform. It’s custom-made — it has to be — because every consumer is different now,” Liu said.

“It used to be easy. You write one story, print it once and everyone reads it the exact same way. Now you and I choose differently so one story has to be a hundred different ways.”

As the primary channel of distribution for news is changing from paper to mobile, newspapers no longer have control over what readers read, he said.

“(Mobile) is a machine that tells you what you should read and it’s not good for the future of understanding the world. We have lots of real-time metrics. Our teams are constantly looking at what users want. But here’s the tough part. As a news organization, we can’t just give them what they want,” Liu said.

“We have the responsibility to give them what they need and that’s the balance that’s actually very hard to find, because users of the younger generation are now very used to only seeing what they want. They have forgotten (or never knew) the purpose of the newspapers is actually to educate.”

Investments for future

The SCMP is one the very few and lucky papers that has a rich investor to back its operation — the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba which acquired the company in April 2016.

“We are at a very privileged position at the SCMP right now because our new owners don’t need for us to make profit. Very few newspapers have that. So we can actually take our money and invest it and increase the number of journalists we have and (invest in) new office and building new culture and new technologies,” Liu said.

So making revenue is not SCMP’s biggest concern at the moment. It’s rather putting in more investment for the future — even if it comes at a cost.

“That’s always the hardest question,” Liu said when asked about their revenue model. “Our revenue model right now — the answer is incomplete. The newspaper took down the paywall two years ago which means everything online is now free. So we can only make money out of advertising. Unfortunately, advertising is not enough in today’s world because digital advertising is very cheap.”

He acknowledges the need for another subscription product in the long term.

“We don’t know when it’s going to be, what it’s going to look like. But the reality for our news industry is that in the past, newspapers could survive off of one or two revenue channels most of the time. It was never subscription by the way. It was always out of advertising or most likely classified ads,” he said.

“But in the future, instead of two, we’re probably going to need seven or eight different revenue channels. So we’re investing in digital advertising, we are investing in technology that allows us to monetize data, we’re investing in events, recruitment, in a lot of different things. But it’s complicated now. Eventually, hopefully, we will be able to figure it out.”