How expert focused organisations can become better publishers

With a shifting political landscape, it's more important than ever that NGOs and think tanks glean both the surplus talent and hard-won lessons of the publishing industry.

All organisations are now publishers. In days gone by, the differences between normal organisations and publishers were clear - not least because being a publisher used to mean having access to extremely expensive and bulky equipment like printing presses - but those differences have collapsed over the past 20 years.

The majority of publishing can be done with basic software and an internet connection. A significant minority of publishing can be done with a smartphone. Companies and civil society orgs are increasingly investing in their own publishing capacity, partly as an outgrowth of investing in IT equipment for other tasks, and partly because it means potentially cutting out the middle man when it comes to public relations. Why risk getting your message twisted up by one of those pesky reporters when you can just put it out yourself?

That's especially appealing if your audiences are increasingly turning away from news coverage* or, as with many think tanks and NGOs in the Brussels Bubble, your audience is narrow and specific. Hell, there's probably significant overlap between those two.

The primary difference between traditional publishers and modern organisations, now, is the workforce. Software and an internet connection can only go so far.

You still need specialised skills both to produce interesting stuff that your audiences actually want, and also to effectively distribute that interesting stuff to your target audience when they're simultaneously being bombarded by every other company, NGO, think tank, influencer, trade association, brand, and politician on the planet. We have swapped a highly mediated information ecosystem for complete media saturation.

Publishing your latest PDF report on the website isn't going to cut it.

However, on the traditional publisher side, we have been seeing major changes to the workforce. Not only have we gone through two decades of massive layoffs (as highlighted in the data below), we have two decades of young people seeing all those layoffs and deciding to go another route before they even enter the industry.

In theory, this closes the gap even further - now tons of publishing talent is available for organisations of all kinds. The problem is that most organisations aren't set up to make the most of either the publishing talent or capabilities now available to them.

There are a few reasons for this. The most common is internal bureaucratic issues. Complex reporting structures that necessitate endless rounds of revision/watering down by legal, corporate affairs, marketing, the office dog etc - all this vetting makes the eventual product unappealing to outsiders; a camel. Long and unwieldy processes also make the act of getting content out the door incredibly slow and painful, as comms staffers are forced to chase the 10th completely necessary sign off before publishing anything, while the original authors become increasingly frustrated that their work still isn't on the website.

That frustration is a killer - comms teams need buy-in and trust from experts to get good content out the door. Without expert input, you end up with bland marketing that doesn't speak to the really important audiences. It's a symbiotic relationship.

Organisations in the modern information ecosystem are expected to be publishers, but their internals structures and rules don't allow for that. All to often, they also don't truly value the opportunities that being a publisher brings. Brussels comms people, how many times have you been told to 'make it look pretty' or 'do a spellcheck and then put it on the website'? Not understanding the challenges of publishing in such a noisy information ecosystem, and not valuing the expertise required to do that well, is another way this crucial symbiotic relationship can break down.

Bring great publishing talent into this kind of a situation, is a recipe for frustration and high turnover.

And those are just the internal problems. In a place like Brussels, where technocrats rule and many organisations are representative or wider networks or members, there are also external factors preventing organisations from being good publishers.

The EU bubble has its own language, a set of secret and unintelligible terms that denote in-group status with the EU institutions, who are typically your key audience. To survive in the world of EU policy comms, you need to be able to speak about trilogues and plenaries and consultations and non-papers**. This is the cost of doing business. But making use of that secret language is a distinct barrier to any team that needs to create buy-in with colleagues or, more importantly, audiences outside the Bubble.

Lack of internal agency, complex rules and processes, ecosystem constraints - these issues stack up to severely limit the publishing impact of many organisations.

You go fast, we go slow

I have spent a lot of my career working with experts - and, for the last 7 years, within the Brussels bubble - acting as a 'translator' to get their messages out to the wider public. Over time, I have developed a rule of thumb for the process of getting high quality content out the door and into people's feeds. You go fast, we go slow.

You go fast

Experts very often get in their own way when producing blogs, articles, reports or whatever else. They've typically spent a lot of their life excelling in academic contexts, pouring over every tiny detail and getting rewarded for writing that is precise, narrow in scope and with a lot of depth.

Outside of academia, those tendencies often backfire. Draft deadlines get pushed back, and then pushed back some more, and then some more. The content gradually becomes more and more niche, harder to parse, and, very often, less practical. This is done with good intentions - they want to deliver high quality outputs - but it throws off everybody else in the team. No single person is expert enough; you need other inputs to make something really sing: strategic review, technical checks, editorial flow, messaging etc... Delaying that draft until it's just right means all those other people get less time to improve it.

Lesson: 80% done and on time is far better than 100% and late.

We go slow

Organisations that seek to influence decision makers with, primarily, knowledge products (rather than political, social or economic capital) have to guard their reputation above all else - your ideas have no chance of breaking through if your brand has become a toxic commodity.

This is in tension with received wisdom on how to get results. On both social media and in the traditional media, you typically get better results if you can be on the pulse of what's happening. When brand reputation is paramount, these traditional paths to success become problematic.

A good way to thread the needle is to stockpile content. Publish when it will be (most) impactful, not simply when it is finished. Can it be tied to a notable event? An announcement? A step in the legislative process? If not, learn to wait for a strategic trigger that will provide a greater chance of making an impact. It's not an easy impulse to cultivate, but it's worth the effort.

Lesson: Unless you have good answers to 'why this' and 'why now', there is no rush to get your content out the door.

Navigating a shifting political landscape

With a rightwards shift heading to Brussels and, very likely, manifesting in various key EU capitals, I predict that the tendency of advocacy groups to speak to their own echo-chamber is going to become a chronic problem.

A common comms complaint in Brussels is that press releases, blogposts and even entire reports are written primarily for insider audiences. A lot of this comes straight from the top: the Commission itself is perhaps the worst offender, as I wrote about at length last year. The tendency is for people to churn out content to show their bosses, investors, funders or colleagues that they're working really hard. This is not a good way to reach and engage new audiences.

Discussions abound in EU lobbying circles about whether the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), now the fourth largest in the Parliament, should be "on the menu"*** - generally the focus of attention are the traditional centrist groups as they tend to be the ones responsible for moving legislative files along while the likes of ID, ECR and The Left mostly heckle from the sidelines. It's possible that this calculation will shift.

This is especially relevant with the formation of the new Patriots For Europe group, made up primarily from the old extreme-right group Identity and Democracy and a handful of other previously un-or-misaligned parties, which has leapfrogged ECR to become the third largest group.

It remains to be seen whether any dealmaking with them will be necessary, as the tradition of a 'cordon sanitaire' seems likely to exclude them from any active voting blocs, but that puts further stress on the centrist coalition of the EPP, S&D, Greens and Renew, so the likelihood of ECR being brought in from the cold has probably grown. We'll only know for sure once EU politics gets back into for full gear, which won't happen until later this year.

Such choppy, uncertain waters might seem like a good reason for NGOs and think tanks to back away from the challenge of becoming more effective publishers, but that would be a mistake. In a world where political allegiances are being reformulated, where old certainties are slipping away, where the "acceptable" bounds of discourse are being routinely violated, there is a huge danger of expert voices disappearing.

In fact, a wait and see approach favours groups that are unbound - from ideology, from previous coalitions, from facts etc. - as they are the ones that can change tact, allies, and recommendations the easiest. Experts have a lot to lose by shifting positions; opportunists do not. That leaves experts with few options. Either go on the front foot and attempt to shape the emerging discourse or sit back and hope that the new consensus happens to work in your favour. I know my preference. And, frankly, without learning the lessons of publishers, that first option isn't available.

So, here's my call to leaders in advocacy groups, think tanks, NGOs and the like. It's still Summer. Brussels is dead. Now is the time to shift internal behaviours, find and empower publishing talent, and take the "you go fast we go slow" maxim for a spin.

This is part of a monthly series aimed at examining the underlying narratives of European affairs, with a healthy dose of media criticism along the way. Read the previous article here.

Note that these are personal takes and do not represent the position of my employer.

*News avoidance is a major concern and it's something I have written about repeatedly.

**Don't get me started on the mess that is the Council of the European Union, European Council, and Council of Europe.

***Please note that the post I linked to was written before the Patriots For Europe group was formed.