What “digital first” means to a business journal publisher

Ian Anderson, the new publisher of the Tampa Bay Business Journal, talked with Business Journal editor Alexis Muellner about his plans.

Here is an excerpt:

What is your approach to the evolving digital media environment? Having a digital-first mindset should be as natural as breathing for any news shop today. At this point, it needs to be innate, not just for news organizations but for everyone. Everything takes place on your phone now. My ride to the airport, my dry cleaning, my meal delivery. Even groceries are digital first. I haven’t been to a grocery store in two years because of Shipt, and I’ll never need to carry around a 30-pound bag of dog food again. Life is good.

Expand more, please on what does “digital first” mean to you now? There has never been a better time to be a storyteller. We’ve never had more tools, more mediums to tell a story — whether it’s visually through photos, through podcasts, through text and roundtable discussions. If we think about how a story is going to be read on our phones, that is key. For so long, we’ve thought about how things get laid out in a spread or on your desktop but “digital first” has become “mobile first” and at the end of the day, for us, we have to ask, is what we’re doing worth paying for? If there’s a reader seeing us for the first time and they are coming in through a search engine or signed up for an email and are new to town, is this worth paying for? This flight to quality is empowering for our newsrooms.

Read more here.