Michael Liss
===

Jeff: [00:00:00] Hey, Michael! Stoked to have you on today, man. Thanks so much for joining.

Michael: Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to this.

Jeff: Yeah, it's going to be a good time. I got a lot of questions I want to go through with you. But first of all, just a funny kind of coincidence, because you've been at the Post for quite a while now.

Michael: Ten years.

Jeff: 10 years. Jeez, this is not relevant to product at all.

So just apologies to everyone , out in the world to start. But funny coincidence is my father in law grew up in Long Island is from New York and moved to New Hampshire and him and my mother in law have been post devotees for, decades and decades. When they moved up to New Hampshire, they used to have to, only one store they could find around their area carried it.

They had to drive half hour out of the way to go out to Nashville to find the post, but they did it, regularly. So he's going to be really excited. I got to talk to you.

Michael: Well, Excellent. But, and as you know from the years of research you do on me before bringing me into, to being a guest on your show I have been a Red Sox fan living in New York since [00:01:00] 1996, which was a little bit unpleasant during the nineties heyday, but is all the more fun to be a Red Sox fan embedded at the New York post.

And I will mention, this is a good way to get myself fired that in the 10 years that I've worked at the New York post, there have been a total of zero. New York city teams that have won a championship and Boston has a nice collection in that decade. 

Jeff: Clearly you just need to stay there forever now.

Michael: Exactly. I'm going to get fired as soon as this airs one or the other.

Jeff: Let's hope it's not that one. So you know, to kick it off, I'm always curious just you've been at the post running product for quite a while. Like I said, been there 10 years, you're running product now there.

, what's that evolution look like where, we didn't come out of school in a world where they taught product management. So how does one get from where you started to, where you are now?

Michael: Yeah, and you say that, but it's interesting. Now there is so much product management being taught. Now you really can go very deep on that for [00:02:00] me. And I would be willing to bet this is not a unfamiliar story for me. It really started in project management and doing that at digital agencies before I got this job at the post, which my initial job at the post was director of project management.

I had a media background. I've been in and out of media my entire career. And so when I was coming from a digital marketing agency to the post, it was very exciting to me to bring these things together the digital project management that I'd been doing for the past several years at the agency side, switching over to the client side to do something similar, but back in the media world that I'd spent so much of my earlier career on, and then had remained involved with and like a freelance level.

Throughout that time. So it was a really nice kind of tying together of both of those aspects of my background. And through project management, you get to learn so much. And especially at a digital marketing agency scenario where you're [00:03:00] working on such a breadth of clients, such a breadth of types of projects that you get to do web development, you get to do email development, you get to do email campaigns and.

Learn about SEO and learn about SEM. And it was really exciting to go from, as I was saying before, to go from agency side to client side at a media company and jump in. And then while I was at the post, then that evolution just continued where what I was doing was partially project management, partially product management.

And then, I'm still doing some project management. I don't think that goes away, at least in an organization that's a bit smaller, like ours. And it's also one of those things that I think it gets defined different companies and in different structures, as far as the division between those two.

And obviously, yes, they're very distinct, different things, but there's still two disciplines that do have to work hand in hand. That's

Jeff: That's really, a good point, product and media is probably different than what a lot of people who've listened to the show or who are just in, PM in general [00:04:00] have thought of when you think of product because you're, it's not the same as running, some kind of B2B tech or FinTech or something like that.

You have a lot of different content. Areas that you, you have to work with, right? There's, ad sales. There's actual editorial. I'm sure there's a lot of things I'm not thinking of. So what is that? I heard you talk about, it's basically like playing tennis with 75 people hitting at you at once.

So what, what is, what does product look like in the media world? What B, what does product look like at? New York post and what does that mean for you? And what do you mean by 70? Like how does the 75 balls come into play?

Michael: when you start getting into prioritization and what have you. But to take the first part for me, products in the media, you're right. That there's a big distinction because we're not selling software. We're not selling services. We're not trying to, we are obviously trying to get you buy certain things, but that's not our primary.

Business model. That's not the primary thing you come to us for. You don't come to us [00:05:00] for our website. You don't come to us for our app product for us, for me is really the vessel because the real product is the content you're coming to us for the content, for the articles, for the journalism, for the opinion, for the sports coverage, for the video, whatever that might be for any given reader.

But they're not coming to the website. They're not because they like the website itself, or they like the app itself. So we're really like the vessel to get that across in the best possible way. And I do this guest lecture at the Columbia publishing course every summer, that's cheekily titled the digital product, the nexus of the universe, and the reason I describe it as that is when I think of product in the media, I really think of it as.

Where three things come together, where the editorial strategy and needs and storytelling and to your point before where the business goals and the business needs and strategy, and then where the user [00:06:00] all come together in the middle. And that point to me is where the product itself 

Jeff: Operationally i'm pretty familiar with how Again in a b2b company or in a b2c company They are understanding voice a customer and the business side. But how do you balance those three things at the poster in a media company in general, how are you looking at editorial, business the user?

And understanding i'm sure you have north star goals across maybe several of those How do you kind of balance and make sure they're all working in harmony?

Michael: I think it's a deep challenge, especially balancing the user experience in the business side for us on the product team. As much as our users are, our readers, our users are also our newsroom because we're the ones that are creating the tools that they're using to publish.

And so as much as we need to be working for what. The needs of our users are we need to be working for what the needs of our editors and journalists are and making sure they have the tools and the tools are easy to use that they have [00:07:00] the variety of being able to tell the stories of the way that they're trying to tell them.

And so much of our work is facing inward as much as it is also separately facing outward the stuff that you as a reader might. So that makes it an interesting dynamic as far as the amount of different things we're running around trying to do. You mentioned before the comment that I'd made on your own blog about it feeling like you're juggling 75 things and it's like juggling chainsaws and bowling balls and things that are on fire.

Because you are getting requests from AdOp side, from the, Affiliate and commercial revenue side from your editorial team and all of these other places all coming in at once and trying to figure out how to make that all work together. Unfortunately, one of the biggest challenges for us as a business, and when I say for us, there's many others that look like us in this regard, this isn't unique to us, is that there's going to always be an inherent tension between the advertising experience and the user [00:08:00] experience.

And that manifests itself in a couple of different ways. One is the way in which you as a user are experiencing the page and being interrupted or not being interrupted by ads in either a terrible experience or in a graceful, elegant experience that as a reader you understand this is part of the deal and it's done in a way that it doesn't bother you.

That's the above the surface way. And there's a tension there, of course, but there's also a big tension, what's going on under the surface, all of the site performance and page speed and Google core web vitals. And I realize I'm getting a little deep into the media weeds and you can pull me back if you need to

Jeff: Yeah, it's all good.

Michael: all the things that mean all the things that mean.

The page is going to load or it's not going to load, or it's going to take a really time to load or that video is never going to start or the page is going to crash and refresh. And a lot of that is happening just because there's so much going on underneath the hood all at once. And [00:09:00] advertising plays a huge part of that.

Other things do too, generating the content itself, your own analytics and all of these other things. It just means that you end up with a very challenging path to walk to ensure that the user experience. It's not just satisfactory, but also delightful because that's our job as product people is to delight our users.

Sometimes you'll settle for just working, to be honest. But while you're still also getting all the business goals that you need to make in a very challenging environment right now. Page views are down. Advertising revenue is down. Referral traffic is down. And so you need to marry all of these things together.

And I think that is one of the biggest challenges that we have. And I say, we, as the New York post, I also say we, as an industry,

Jeff: As you're talking through that kind of a light bulb went off in my head, for you know Maybe two light bulbs. I'm not quite juggling 75, tennis balls I'm not having not playing tennis with 75 people right now You Two things struck me as you were going through that right there.[00:10:00] 

One is I've spent the past several weeks at a couple of trade shows for log rocket. At specifically several e commerce trade shows. Most recently one called shop talk. It's out in Vegas. It's 10, 000 people. There's a huge e commerce conference and, talking to, hundreds of people.

I was there. As you were just going through what you're talking about, Google web vitals and site performance and making sure the experience loads, I couldn't help but notice the parallel between what you care about in media and what the people who were running these large e commerce sites care about their you need the experience to be good, but you also, you care about refer traffic.

You care about where your traffic's coming from. Is Google sending you traffic? And part of that is those lighthouse scores and performance. So that was, an interesting thing. I never thought of, you know, I came in thinking, media is so completely different from several other industries and always this is why I love doing this.

It's great to find these parallels and to see that there's so much more overlap than expected. But also, people who listen to podcast, several people probably know we [00:11:00] also run a fairly large media organization ourselves here. Not quite on the post level, unfortunately, but I think last I checked our blogs combined get, five or six million page views a month.

So where, we have a team dedicated towards those exact same things you just talked about, the site load quickly, where's our referral traffic coming from? 

Michael: Yeah. And those are some of the specifics, right? But then also just fundamentally

all the same thing. You've got different user cohorts that represent. Different personas trying to do different actions. And you as a business are trying to make it as easy as possible for them to convert on those actions.

And maybe that's, I want somebody to come in, find the thing they want to purchase and purchase it. Maybe it's, I want somebody to come in and read an article and read one more article. Before they go, it's still user journeys. It's still next best action. It's still intent. It's still personas. So even if what you were talking about on that ground level is different, [00:12:00] one level above it, it's very similar.

Jeff: right. It's it's as I've gone through this kind of journey of, the past 20 years of working in the industry, it's, you learn as you get older and you get, you take on more and more. You learn what executive roles are all about people. That was one of the big ones I learned, you go and think you're going to run marketing and do marketing ends up being just, you manage a lot of marketers and you, but it's people, everything is people in the world, it turns out same with, product you can be an e commerce and media and you're thinking about the same things.

It's just interesting to see those base levels, but you brought up also the friction between the user experience and the advertiser kind of goals. You would think right in a perfect world the advertisers would watch it 100 percent Because that you could or the business might because you could sell more ads we run into the same thing on our publications.

We're You know, I remember specifically a board meeting where we had one of our, one of our growth leaders and he was talking through the plan and one of our board members brought up that's great that you might short term get some more leads from this, but have you thought about the longterm implication of people [00:13:00] trusting you or not trusting you as much or what this means to the brand?

You can't ruin that. How did, how does the post think about that? How do you think about that user experience and , is it by gut? Do you have ways to actually measure it, or is it in between?

Michael: I think there's definitely some of both, right? There's the objective and the subjective and the qualifiable and the quantifiable. You can look at it and be like, this feels bad to me. This feels good to me. And that's going to be subjective, but it's still very important.

And that by nature is going to look different for different people. You could make an argument that users are used to a certain type of ad experience. And that even if it's not the least interruptive, most beautiful version of it, that there might still be an acceptance for it. You could make a counter argument that.

You need to still do something differently there. I'm not speaking about my own pages right now. I'm just talking about in general, right? At the same time, there's data that says your core web [00:14:00] vitals are up or down and your JavaScript blocking time is up and down and you can get into these very Technical developer level metrics that show you improvement or, going the wrong direction across a range of different metrics.

And so what one has to do in an exercise that we've been working on this past winter to really try to set ourselves up for the work we're doing right now. Is establishing things like technical KPI. If we're going to keep making changes, if we're going to evaluate How things are doing for us under the hood.

If we're going to evaluate whether we want to work with this new ad partner or other platform partner. Cause again, it's not only the ads by any means that are, you mentioned affiliate revenue, the amount of JavaScript that you end up adding to your page to work with. Some of those vendors is also.

Problematic. So by creating certain technical KPI and then creating a performance budget, saying this is [00:15:00] what we consider to be acceptable. And this is what we consider to be good. And this is what we consider to be bad. You can run those tests and you can keep tracking that data. Now I will say that to then.

Act on that data can be complex, and it can be complex both from a technical standpoint. It can also be complex from a business standpoint. Some of those things are things you do need to have, or some of those things are things that will become very challenging to prove out. We know that we're doing this, whatever this might be, has a predictive outcome of doing this for our business, but a negative impact of having this effect amongst our technical KPI It's not always easy to make that final decision of which side of that you're going to lean on, right?

And I think that's something we're just going to need to be learning as we get more and more disciplined about it. But the great thing about it at least is having the right mentality, having the right approach, having stakeholders in other parts of the business. Really understanding this and really being on board with [00:16:00] this is such a huge and necessary first step.

And from there though, it's a lot of testing and it's a lot of proving out. And one of the things that our data team did in working with a consultant that we just went through a project with is trying to come up with the actual user correlation, right? You've got technical KPI. You've got behavioral KPI. Can you correlate the ways in which those affect each other? So you can say we see that this particular metric, it being bad or good seems to really impact engagement. This particular metric being bad or good seems to have less of an effect. Which ones to focus on. It sounds very easy to just say all of that.

It's really challenging and difficult and a lot of hard work to actually put that into practice and really improve from it. But that's really the very long answer and a little bit technical answer to your question.

Jeff: That's fair. Sometimes it gets technical, right? When you're running a web application, whether [00:17:00] it be media or e commerce or, a mobile app, , this is one thing that, we have stood by at log rocket and primary thesis of ours was the user experience and the technical end cannot be divorced from each other. You can't have one without the other. It's inevitable that in many cases they're going to play into each other. And the more realistic we are about that, the more we can understand both, the better off we're going to be. So it's interesting to hear that you're looking at both those cause you don't always hear that.

But it makes

sense 

Michael: for us and other media companies, what's fascinating is to run You can run all of these tests across whether it's speed curve or whatever tool you might be using. You mentioned Lighthouse, which obviously we look at as well, running all of these things, all of the third party stuff blocked versus running with it on.

So you can see what is your own first party stuff that's causing this by stuff. Stuff is a technical term. I told you we were getting technical by stuff. Like in this case code, versus all of the third party JavaScript and tags and the other weight that you're adding. And to be clear, you need to be [00:18:00] working on both sides of that.

It's not, you can't just say well, JavaScript, third party is what's making this a hornet's nest. There's so much first party code work that you really can refactor and optimize. And that's the stuff you can do yourself. The third party stuff can be trickier because either there's a business decision there.

Or you need to go back to that third party and work with them to see how they can improve things or to see how you can implement them better. So sometimes with third parties, it's something you can do yourself because you can optimize the way it is on your page. Sometimes you need to work with them and they're willing to do that. Sometimes it's a little more complicated than them being willing to do it. And sometimes you have to make a business decision, but I will say that like one can make an argument that a lot of Google's core web vitals are to serve Google. And that doesn't always match with serving the business or the user, even if Google's intent is to do it that way.

But because we're all serving Google in this, because they're the ones that have made this. [00:19:00] We're saying, these are the ones that matter. These are the metrics that matter. According to Google, the ecosystem understands this, the people that are working with publishers from the various platforms. Which includes ad tech and non ad tech understand this.

And for me as a product person, first of all, half the time or whatever percentage of the time, they're already aware of this. I don't need to socialize this idea. I don't need to sell it to them. Sometimes they're very proactively working on this stuff themselves because it doesn't just affect the New York post.

It affects all of their clients. It affects their own success in their own health. And so there is that sense that, the rising tide is going to raise all ships in this, that we are all in this together and that it really is incumbent. On all of these other platforms to be helping here. 

Jeff: So when it comes down to it we've talked about your serving ads and, Users and readers and editorial, let's say you run into a situation where something is going to help the [00:20:00] business side, but it's going to cost the user experience. Do you have a concept of kind of one primary North Star metric that you look at to guide?

Oh well, we're going to do this because it's better for this or is there a formula there or, what does success look like in the New York Post for you? 

Michael: I think from a data point, success is going to look like having healthy revenue, healthy engagement, and being within our performance budget for our technical KPI, and I think it's going to always be. A bit of three card Monte to get there. Things are always shuffling around and the pendulum is going to be swinging a little bit one way or a little bit the other way at given times.

And I think some of it is just negotiation and consensus and understanding and having those conversations. I do think it's a challenge. I think the most important thing is that everyone's trying to swim the same direction. And then from there, there's going to be always anywhere differences of opinion and trying to figure out what one actually needs to do and. Trying to just find what that balance can be in and can you do it in the best possible way.

Jeff: I [00:21:00] really do think sometimes those are the most interesting situations. When you have something where there is a definitive right answer, it's a little less interesting at times, I don't know maybe I'm just off my rocker a bit on that one, but it seems like where you have to have that negotiation, where you have to have, taste or that matter of opinion or, I like an opinionated business when it comes to, we have a, a goal, we have a mission here and I don't mean, you don't, I'm not talking, I say you have to have a political goal.

Opinion or stuff like that, I like something with an opinion about what they're trying to accomplish I think there's something to you can really differentiate yourself in a world where there isn't a black and white correct answer so that's cool. I mean i'm glad to hear that's an interesting way of thinking is it's a negotiation It's you know, three card monte, which I feel like is very appropriate for new york.

Michael: Yes, indeed. Things are always just shuffling around the board

And

the other thing is like when we, when I talk about like site performance and core web vitals, like there's good hair days and there's bad hair days because it's how are all of these third [00:22:00] parties acting up on any given day or being chill on any given day, right?

There's so much volatility and it makes looking at that data a bit challenging. You need to have that longer view because any one day Can be like, yay, we fixed everything. And any one day can be like, Oh my God, what happened overnight? And it's just the volatility of what's going on in the ecosystem. 

Jeff: we just had a woman named Carla Fisk on recently on the podcast and she brought up, it's so important to map out that team and build those relationships. And, exactly what you're talking through is why that's so important is understanding the other leaders who you are having this, three card Monte situation with.

If you don't know these people, if you don't have that kind of experience with the other humans you work with, it's much harder to make these negotiations, whereas you can have this dynamic situation. 

Michael: was gonna say, and I think one of the real challenges going back to something you were saying a little earlier is just that, what you need to do as an organization, as any organization is define what good looks like, but that's not simple.

Jeff: Yeah. [00:23:00] You can say that again,

Michael: and there's going to be disagreement around what good looks like for one person versus another.

And I think that's a process and you need to have the right roles involved with that, and you need to ultimately say well, this person, everything else being equal is going to be the one to make this recommendation to the most senior executives that are then going to have to say yes or no to it. And, that's just all an ongoing challenging process, challenging for us, challenging anywhere. 

Jeff: I think it's that challenge that allows companies to be the truly great ones aren't ones that do everything by the book, right? You want to do something really interesting. You're probably not following every rule. You need to come up with your own hypotheses about where you're at.

Where great lives, what's best for the people, the stakeholders you care about and what's the combo that, that makes great. 

Michael: And in the media, the challenges tie back to the business plan, because if you're a subscription business. Your pages are going to look very different and your ad stack can look very different than if you're a more direct or programmatic advertising sales [00:24:00] side. Where, your, most of your revenue is from advertising. Those two situations and what those pages look like, what you're trying to get the user to do are completely different from each other. If everything is paywall, then it's about trying to keep your readers coming back for more and more, but most of your revenue is coming from subscription and then throw in, if you're something like the times or the wall street journal, where you've got a higher end advertising, that's more direct sales. You can be so much cleaner , in how you do things. You can have such a less complicated ad stack. So many fewer ads on the page because your mission and your business plan are different than a publisher where it's more programmatic advertising and more about volume and scale.

Jeff: Now, that brings up an interesting kind of point we can pivot on a bit because I was listening to you on a different podcast, actually, and you were talking about community and how that has been a really big initiative over at the post has been built. I think you started with sports but have seen more growth.

So is this kind of that focus on how you can [00:25:00] build that subscription revenue or, I guess what's the goal there and how's that, how has that project come about and how's it going?

Michael: The goal in that case isn't subscription revenue for us. We had comments on our pages years and years ago, and then You know, the trend in general kind of had started to move away from that. We had moved away from that ourselves, but now that we are in this, third party cookie deprecation universe, and the need for first party data has become so much stronger. Cometing for us is a play on two things. It's an acquisitions play and it's an engagement play. It's an acquisitions play in that we want registered users because that's going to become a monetization necessity in a world in which third party cookies have been deprecated and it changes how advertisers and marketplaces can user inventory and target their advertisements, right?

That becomes incredibly valuable. And the value prop of [00:26:00] commenting is a strong one. On a site like ours, we're across various different parts of the website. Parts of our content, you've got people with strong opinions, right? And people. That can rally, you know, we started with sports because sports is one of the things that defines us that defines our coverage.

And it's one of the places where you have people that really want to talk about what happened last night, or what didn't happen last night you've got really like minded people. Coming around whether they're like minded or not, you've got people coming together around things that they have in common and a lot of passion.

So it made a lot of sense for us to start in sports, see how that was going and then roll it out from there. I do also think that there's a great engagement opportunity. One of the things that goes with referral traffic coming down so much across the industry, so much less Google traffic, and that was even before we got into what Google's doing with AI and what that could mean for where it does go.

Which is for closer and closer to [00:27:00] zero. And before Facebook effectively got out of the news business, we need to have more direct relationship with our readers and more direct engagement and get more and more out of the direct audience, the people that are coming to us by choice and because they spend time with us directly, right?

And having a robust community of commenters is a great way to do that because they are coming and they're engaging with you more than just reading his story. So they could be coming back because they want to have that engagement across a breadth of stories, they could be coming back because they want to continue in the conversation that they've started on a given story.

It can really be driving people back more so I do think that's also a really important part of this. And one of the things that I'm hoping we do as we're doing our strategy planning into. Our next fiscal year is I would really like to leverage the commenting community even more for engagement across the site than I think we're doing right now.

I think we have a nice opportunity there. So that's where community fits into play. It's, we really need [00:28:00] a value prop to give our users to get, have registered. Known users that we can associate an email address with. And we need to continue to have deeper direct engagement and a community can really help solve for both of those or help contribute to success for both of those.

Jeff: right. And sports seems like a great way to start there. Cause everyone has an opinion there. So to keep on, how the website has adapted and progressed. At one point you, you talked about this idea of , driving engagement by changing how the website actually looks and what's featured. And I think it was something about going from featured articles to top articles and highlighting more at the top of the page.

Michael: So we made a big change on the website to have a far more robust, more curated, deeper homepage on the website. Whereas previously on the website, it was like, here's 11 top stories. And then you get into section by section furniture.

Here's the most recent sports, the most recent Metro, most recent opinion. But the real [00:29:00] curation was just those top stories. Now we have a much deeper, more modular. Homepage of the website, which features a lot more content that's put there in a lot of different ways. And some of that kind of, in any type of curation, things stay in place for a while, right?

You don't just have an article up for five minutes and then it's gone for the most part. But in the app, what we had was going from the top 11 stories at the time, and then into just the reverse chronology of here's all the last stories we published in order of recency, not by section or topic or what have you.

Our app is, as would make sense, very sticky in that these are the users that said, I want to take the trouble to download the New York Post, put it on my home screen and keep coming. And so the people that are in there, while it's a small segment compared to our, Web traffic. It's an incredibly deeply dedicated, engaged audience.

So [00:30:00] now we had this challenge of, we've got an entirely new homepage on the website, and some of that is going to be stuff that's not quite updated as frequently as what we had before, which was you get past this 11 and it's the newest, the newest, the newest. If things are going to be in place a bit longer throughout the day. And you're going to have to work a little harder to find what's different. What's not different. How is that going to play versus the experience that they were used to, which is newest story, newest story, newest story. And so what we did was we launched two tabs. We had what we call top stories, which is exactly how the homepage is curated for the website.

And then we kept a latest stories, which was just, here's the reverse crown, if you just want to see what's new, as opposed to be guided. Then you can do that, which is to say, if you want what was pretty close to the old experience, you can do that because we were really worried. It's really important for us for many reasons to be providing this top stories mirror of the homepage in the app.

Of course, that's a necessity. But is that going to [00:31:00] risk how users consume things if they're finding it harder to find what story might've moved or changed within a much longer curation section. And so we just separated those out into two different tabs. And what we found out pretty quickly is that everyone's just rolling with the new and you can make an argument that's partly because that's what it default opens to, but latest stories is right there, right next to it.

And it's there for people to use. It's not how people are using the app. So now that means we can take that out of the bottom tab bar and avail ourselves of that real estate for something else. I wouldn't take it away completely. I would just move it into the sections hamburger menu, but it's the kind of thing where you don't really know.

I didn't have a hypothesis going into this. I knew that people would continue to use the top stories because they're coming to the post to see. what the post is saying and what the post is providing is being considered important, considered to be a top story in some way or another. To do no harm to our high engagement level.

And so I didn't know, are people [00:32:00] going to use it a little bit of both? Are people going to be 50 50? Is there going to be, you know, you always fear there's going to be a revolt 

Jeff: Yeah. 

Michael: going to be up in arms, right? People don't like change. They get used to change, but they don't like change when it first happens.

And me as a user as well, like every time Gmail changes, I'm like, no, not again. And then within a week or I can't even remember what it used to be

Jeff: Yeah, they just changed the login flow and has thrown off my whole day so far. 

Michael: Yeah.

Jeff: Has there been any thought taking that, experiment or that, change one step further? Has there been any thought to. Further personalizing that 

kind of mobile experience, your stickier user, right? You can start to build, you have this community, sticky users in the app.

You can start to build, everyone has a different homepage almost at a post,

Michael: There's always going to be a challenge between what should be personalized and what should be deemed curated because we and other organizations in our space, we are an editorial driven

Jeff: right?

Michael: business, right? And so there is going to be a point of [00:33:00] view that says we as editors believe that these are the important stories. That should be out there right now that should be drawing attention right now and then there's what should Jeff and Michael be reading right now. That's personalized to Jeff and Michael, and where the different signals you want to put into it so I do think you always need some type of balance now that's not to say there are news organizations where it is pretty much entirely.

a personalized homepage, and that's certainly a direction one can go in. I think we'll always, I don't think we'll ever stop curating. I don't think we'll ever stop saying, this is what we're saying right now, or the most important stories. It's more, how do you mix that in? But certainly personalization is table stakes at this point.

And the AI tools to use it to develop that are improving quite a bit. And yeah, that's certainly something that we're working on right now quite a bit.

Jeff: Thanks. Yeah. That does bring up difficulty when, the post is known for having an opinion, , but the specifically editorial opinion is not hidden there. 

Michael: but also if you're coming to the New York Times, if you're coming to [00:34:00] CNN, if you're coming to Fox News, you're coming to say, what does the New York Times, as a New York Times reader, what does the New York Times consider to be the most important?

Stories that I need to know about, or if you're a CNN viewer, or if you're a Fox reader or viewer, like that's part of what you're coming to your media companies of choice to find out. And it's not just, yes, there's the opinion pieces themselves, but it's even beyond that saying in hard news, this is what's important right now.

Jeff: right, it's tough to, you over personalize you start to lose that, people news is there for people to know what's going on in the world. So you need it's that it's the friction you talked about earlier, right? There's the push pull that needs to be maintained for the best experience.

Michael: And there's another big challenge with personalization too, which is that it becomes such an echo chamber. And, we've all had experiences where like. You click on one thing somewhere and then all you start seeing is things related to that one thing you click on. It's just because I wanted to read that once doesn't mean it's the only thing I want to read.

Jeff: Or I accidentally clicked on it. And now it's my entire feed.

Michael: It was like the, someone had a [00:35:00] famous Twitter post where it's like, Yes, I bought one toilet seat once. That doesn't mean I want to see ads. For only toilet seats. I'm not going to go buy 50 more toilet 

seats. So it's a similar idea. Like I read that article about that one thing, but that thing I was interested in, it's not my life.

Jeff: and I now completed my interest in it.

Michael: Exactly. So there's the echo chamber. There's the kind of downward spiral of that, but there's also an, another important aspect to this. And this is something we were actually talking about this week. And that goes back to delight and discovery. If you're only getting something that we already know you're reading about, Then that limits the ability for delight and discovery.

So the real challenge to me is how do you layer those two things in together and still leave room for the delight and the discovery and not just, we are only going to serve you something about X. 

Jeff: I, hate to admit it, but I'll spend probably more time than I should late at night scrolling Tik Tok. And if I'm, washing my [00:36:00] dishes or doing something mundane, I'll, Have it off to the side, but I've realized a bad thing about that is I think one of the inputs they use for their algorithm, which is their algorithm has amazed me about how it will find these little things.

I've never even thought and then it's super fun. Like you said, the surprise and delight, but at the same time, I think they use time. You repeat things as a Wait, but if I'm washing dishes, sometimes I can't touch the screen and same thing will go four or five times And I'm just sitting there going I don't like this very much I gotta get rid of this but now that has become my entire feed because I accidentally washed it ten times

Michael: And honestly, I think Google discover is not very good in this area. I find that I get nervous to click on something On Google discover that I do want to read because I'm worried that it's going to now overweight towards that when I just wanted to read that one thing.

Jeff: I've started to find the articles and discover and go google it So I can get it outside of that experience because I don't because I notice that happened way too much

Last question, and I want to make sure we sneak this in before time's up, but you brought up AI and that's.

I [00:37:00] think a topic that can't be ignored in the media right now because you have the pieces you talked about, using it for better recommendations or understanding that piece, but there's also a darker side where you can do AI generated articles, maybe or stuff like that. What, where have you seen that go?

Or what do you, what are your thoughts on how this is going to impact the media world?

Michael: There's going to be a huge impact. There's no question. We've already seen other publications get pretty well eviscerated for AI generated content, some of which isn't even in any way, correct, but. When we talk about AI in the media, we spend a lot of time thinking about what the user sees, but the fact is there's a whole other side of AI in the media as well, and that's workflow efficiency, you know, in this, as it is in many other industries, it just gets a little bit less light, if you think about in publishing a digital article, the amount of workflow and steps that are involved, that if you can start to apply some AI for better efficiency and better optimization, and I'll give a, what on the surface seems like a really [00:38:00] boring example, which is alt text for photos. All photos need to have alt text.

It's necessary for accessibility reasons. It's necessary for SEO reasons. And it's necessary if your page doesn't load the image correctly for some reason. We could have easily. A dozen articles in a particular story. So that means amongst the very many things that my colleague that's producing the story needs to do, they now need to write alt text for 12 different articles.

But if we have any, we do, we have an AI tool to help with that. And that's a really big efficiency that makes it faster to do that person's job and hopefully optimizes the results of what they're doing. So there's so many more backend type tools where AI can really help us that the user isn't even.

Necessarily seeing or aware of now, obviously there's very many front end things too, whether, and I'm not talking about things we're doing or not doing ourselves, I'm just talking about in general here, whether it is that type of like summary bullet points, finding the salient points, finding what else [00:39:00] to link to, that's going to be related for the user, but also that's going to help the SEO and the performance of that article, things like that, where that's going to be.

All like really helpful and important, image collage generation, things like this, and that's all very different from saying AI wrote this article, there's so many other really great practical uses of it. And obviously this is still like day zero here compared to. us having this conversation a year from now, what we might be talking about for it.

So there is a lot of really great uses as long as the key being that you still need the human hand, right? That this stuff is not automated, that somebody is optimizing this or finding an efficiency doing this, but it's still the person to say, yes, no, or I'm going to change this way. Before it goes out.

Jeff: It's, I think there's a lot of important, I don't know if decisions are the right word going forward for how this gets you rolled out, but a lot of, there's a lot of different branches it can take. And I'm curious to see how it goes [00:40:00] because.

Michael: and you'd brought up trust earlier because you brought up trust earlier, right? And trust is so important as a media brand, as any 

Jeff: Yeah. Oh yeah. 

Michael: And so it comes down to what's the user expectation? Some of the, one of the publications I was referring to, one of the reasons they got in trouble because they had AI articles that had a byline and that byline had a biography and had a photo. So how would the user have reacted to that same story? If it was just disclosed, AI was used to generate this content versus we're creating a fake human being and therefore actually lying to our user about the provenance of the story. I don't think we, we know that the second part of that is bad, right?

I don't think we really know yet how the user is going to react to the first part of that. If you're transparent, is that going to be deemed good, bad, or indifferent? And it's going to be one thing if you're talking about, It's going to really come down to what,

like you could use AI to say this is what happened in the game last night, or this is what this, the stock, quarterly report, [00:41:00] these are the salient points from it, or there was a town meeting in my city yesterday, and these are the things that they discussed up, up on the DS, right?

There's lots of things you can do. That are perfectly, seemingly fine uses of it. And, but is the user going to find that creepy? Are they going to find trust in that or

Jeff: It seems so many innovations, right? There's gray area and there's how you use it. And like you said, it's one thing if you were, there's a lot of opportunities to open up. Like you said, data that might not otherwise go report on. You could report on every school committee meeting in every town in , every state if you wanted and have that available much more easily.

That'd probably be a positive. You can't just make a person up though and have it write a whole opinion piece and stuff like that. So there's, two very wide instances there, but that's black and that's gray area. 

Michael, it's great. Great to have you on, man. I really

appreciate you, taking the time. Always appreciate meeting a fellow Red Sox fan. So go Red Sox. Keep it strong down New Not so much this year, but we'll do our

yeah, we have a lot of [00:42:00] good years.

We, we do a couple of bad ones. 

Michael: Yeah, no, I really appreciate it. It was a lot of fun