The Return of the Publisher and Decentralization

By Jacob Cohen Donnelly January 12, 2024

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As media companies have grown larger, there has been a natural tendency to centralize operations. At first glance, it only makes sense. Having centralized pods responsible for specific functions—audience, sales, marketing, product, etc.—provides cohesion and efficiency. And so, the natural tendency as a business continues to grow is for it to continue to centralize.

And with the amalgamation of brands into larger corporate structures—think the BuzzFeeds, Vox Media, and other big companies—this sort of centralization was necessary. In many respects, the goal was to accomplish things at the portfolio level.

But what happens when you centralize is you begin to see everything the same way. You begin developing a cohesive business strategy that thinks about the overall corporate structure versus what individual brands can and should accomplish.

As we move into an era where individual brands are going to matter more than the full portfolio, we’re going to need to see more decentralization take place. And what I suspect will happen is we’ll see the return of a title that has been dormant for some time: the Publisher.

The job of the Publisher is to ensure the business health of a specific publication. Other titles for this role are “head of” or “General Manager.” They are the senior most executive responsible for that specific brand. They drive its strategy and are myopically focused on its overall success. Ultimately, this is important because when there are multiple brands in a portfolio, what might work for one doesn’t explicitly have to work for the other.

Consider the the Vox/NY Mag merger from 2019. At the time, I wrote:

Vox Media derives the bulk of its revenue from advertising both on its owned & operated as well as with Concert, its premium ad marketplace. Vox Creative, its studio, also has strong production capabilities both for clients as well as the portfolio of sites.

New York Media used to make 85% of its revenue from advertising, but has been able to diversify enough into e-commerce (which Vox desperately needs) and subscriptions so that now only 60% of its revenue comes from advertising.

Just because New York Media has a healthy subscription business does not mean that Vox can simply roll that strategy across the entire organization. You could argue that it would actually be detrimental to a brand like SB Nation to introduce a paid subscription; the content and audience are better monetized other ways.

But the only real way to make these sorts of intelligent decisions is to have business leaders incentivized to the individual publications.

Interestingly, this is what Dotdash Meredith does (though it doesn’t refer to them as Publishers). If you visit the leadership team, there are nine people listed under “Brand Leadership,” the vast majority carrying the title “SVP & Group GM, Category.” In other words, they are the Publishers of their respective brands.

In an interview, Dotdash Meredith’s CEO, Neil Vogel, said:

We have always been decentralized; been a core belief of ours from the jump. Brands and businesses need to make their own decisions. We can for sure benefit from overall scale and skills, but it has to be directed locally. Our GMs are like mini CEOs of each business.

This is especially true now that there are multiple different types of businesses in the portfolio. Food & Wine can support both a digital and print subscription product. EatingWell, perhaps not so much. If the business was run truly centralized, it might lack the flexibility to make those sorts of decisions where one brand has one business strategy and the other has another.

Naturally, this doesn’t mean that the strategies have to be completely disconnected. Dotdash Meredith can still roll out an organizational-ad product like D/Cipher, which allows the entire company to target ads more efficiently. But when it comes to business decisions—should Food & Wine’s festival grow bigger, for example—the decision needs to be made closer to the ground.

The only way to accomplish this is to inherently lose some control from the top. It, ultimately, becomes an empowerment issue. As the CEO of the overall portfolio, can you relinquish enough control to let your mini-CEOs manage their respective brands as they see fit? It’s not absolute anarchy, but it cannot be a top down command structure either.

So, why isn’t it done like this more often?

A big reason is because it’s expensive. There are nine brand leaders at Dotdash Meredith. Let’s assume that each one makes $250,000. That’s over $2 million in cost. Consider that each of them likely have heads of edit for each of the publications, who cost a pretty penny. They have operations people specific to those brands. These costs all add up.

And in many respects, it is easier to see these guaranteed fixed costs than to imagine the potentially much higher upside of a more decentralized operation. Dotdash Meredith knows it’ll cost over $2 million a year. But before the strategy worked, did it know its brands would perform so much better by being “directed locally?” Ultimately, the business needs to believe that this model works and be willing to make the investment, even if it appears to be more expensive at the start.

What roles sit underneath these “mini-CEOs,” though? That, ultimately, depends on how the business is run. I’m a firm believer that to run an efficient media business, three people need to be sitting at the table together: editorial, audience, and sales. The heads of these respective teams need to be working together. And so, you could argue that these Publisher/GMs/mini-CEOs should have editorial, audience, and sales reporting into them.

Pushback on this could be that management of sales teams is different than management of editorial and audience teams. When I was Publisher at Morning Brew, I had only ever sold small ad campaigns in my career. And so, what did I know about managing an eight figure sales team? Frankly, very little.

On the other hand, if you fully centralize sales, you are leaving a key part of the business’ success out of the hands of these mini-CEOs. And so, I think there needs to be a compromise where there are sales specialists that may report into a centralized sales leader, but whom are compensated based on the success of the brand they are responsible for selling. Again, this adds cost, but it also ensures that each brand has a chance to thrive.

The return of the Publisher—or whatever title you want to call it—is a return to an era of true decentralization where each brand executes a strategy specific to its audience. It increases costs, for sure, but I would argue that it also increases the likelihood of success.


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