Publishers keep treating a structure problem as a culture problem, says Selma Stern

Selma Stern, who ran subscriptions at Fortune and Business Insider, told the FIPP World Media Congress in Madrid that publishers pay a “change tax” for structures built for print, and that time-limited mission teams are the way out.

Selma Stern’s proudest achievement as a young subscriptions executive in New York was a meeting. Every Tuesday at 10 a.m., she brought subscription marketing, product, technology and the newsroom into one room. For a while, work moved faster than it ever had.

Then the business grew, and so did the meeting. Everyone wanted a seat. Positions arrived pre-negotiated, and people began turning off their cameras. “That’s a really bad sign,” she told the FIPP World Media Congress in Madrid. By year three she was defending a mechanism that had lost its mojo. At her next employer, the cycle repeated.

She wondered whether the fault was hers. Her coach said not: it had happened at two companies, and she saw the same pattern again once she went back to consulting. “We tend to misdiagnose what is essentially a structure problem as a culture problem.” Offsites, alignment meetings and culture workshops help individuals, she said, but they will not prepare organisations for the change already under way.

Employee reviews explain why the Times and the Post diverged

Her clearest evidence came from a single day. On 4 February, her 40th birthday, the New York Times reported record results and the Washington Post laid off a third of its staff. The usual explanations are billionaire ownership and top-level churn, which Stern finds thin. The two papers share a history, a brand type, and much of a commercial strategy built on subscriptions and commerce.

So she read Glassdoor reviews as a proxy for how each organisation works from the inside, ignoring gripes about the coffee and keeping comments about structure. New York Times staff described a well-ordered machine, over and over. Post staff described infighting, confusion and constant turnover, with nobody sure who was responsible for what. One Post veteran of 40 years said of recent changes that “the body is rejecting the transfusion”.

The internet split the corner office’s power three ways

Stern traces the problem to the print era, when the org chart accurately mapped power. Editorial, circulation and advertising each did their job well and rarely needed to speak. Whoever held the corner office held three things at once: formal authority, control over assets and access to information. The internet pulled them apart.

Publishers responded by adding a digital chief, which left an org chart that leaked. Does product or editorial build the product? Who runs A/B tests on paywall copy? “The answer is yes to all of the above,” Stern said, and a static structure of six or seven departments has no clean way to organise it.

AI is repeating the pattern. Every new AI chief adds to the coordination load. Three chiefs have three relationships to manage; ten have 45. The working day disappears into alignment meetings. Stern calls the cost the change tax: “the energy it takes to get work done in a structure that no longer fits the company’s commercial goals.”

Publishers should organise like a film set

Stern’s picture of a structure without the change tax is a film set at 6 a.m. A crew who have never worked together arrives for a new production, and by 7 a.m. the cameras are rolling. The cinematographer does not clear the choice of lens with a guild or with two other organisations. Every film poses a different problem, but the skills needed to solve it barely change. Stern argues that any business touching the internet is becoming that kind of business.

In practice, she proposes a dual org chart. Departments remain people’s organisational home: where they report, where promotions are settled, and where their tools come from. The work itself happens in mission teams that, for a set period, hold authority, control of the assets and access to the information they need. A mission might be taking digital subscriptions to 100,000 or launching a daily podcast. Neither needs a permanent department; both need predictable kinds of expertise.

This is more than a reorganisation, she warned, because it means separating rank from role, which quickly raises questions of power and identity. Management consultancies and armies have long worked this way: people in the field decide in the field, without calling home to align.

Large companies already run two org charts at once

Stern’s evidence that this can work at scale starts at the New York Times, which, she said, calls its news operation the sun and its other businesses satellites; Hannah Yang, its Chief Growth Officer, has credited that structure with the paper’s subscription growth.

Palantir runs a classic dual model: a product organisation builds the software, and forward-deployed engineers put it to work at clients. Sceptics might call Palantir as a consultancy in software company clothes, which is harder to say of Bayer. The German pharmaceutical group, with more than 90,000 employees, has adopted what its Chief Executive, Bill Anderson, calls Dynamic Shared Ownership. Teams work in 90-day cycles, and their leaders do not have to align with every department in the group. Stern said the result is a much faster company, though speed has a cost and the model is no silver bullet.

She closed with a question for the room: do you control the assets and the data you need to do your job? Those who answer no will keep paying the tax, one Tuesday meeting at a time, until the chart is redrawn, and the people with the power to redraw it are the ones the current chart protects.

John Rahim is Editor of The Media Stack.