A survey of more than 250 business-to-business editors shows corporate digital training and publisher leadership are lacking even as titles become cross-platform brands.

The final, complete report of the ASBPE-Medill-MMC Survey on Digital Skills and Strategies can be downloaded here.

The research covers 16 digital activities, 16 digital strategies, and 12 leadership parameters. The final report contains 20 tables of data, more than 200 open-ended comments from respondents related to several survey questions, and a discussion of methodology.

The survey of 273 B2B editors by the American Society of Business Publication Editors, the Medill School at Northwestern University, and the Media Management Center found that B2B editors have been left largely to their own devices to gain the skills necessary to do their jobs across platforms.

Four out of five editors who answered the survey participated in one day or less of corporate-sponsored digital training during 2009. The median amount was less than a half-day, and 36% said they had no corporate digital training whatsoever.

The research data in the report covers the following questions:

• What percentage of your work is currently devoted to digital?


• What percentage of your work should be digital to benefit your organization the most?


• In general, is your individual digital skill level running behind, equal to, or ahead of your brand's transition to digital?


• How adequate is the digital skills training provided by your company?


• How adequate is your digital skill training relative to your brand's transition to digital?


• In the last 12 months, approximately how much digital skills training have you received from your company?


• At your title/brand, is focus on digital issues affecting the quality of your print editorial content positively or negatively?


• If you were in charge of planning for the near future (next 12 months) of your organization, how necessary are the following 16 strategies?


• For 16 digital activities, how often do you do each as part of your job?


• For 16 digital activities, what is your digital skill level for each?


• For 16 digital activities, how important are each to you doing your job successfully in the next 12 months?


• How much time do you spend engaging in social media as a part of your job?


• In your experience, is time spent engaging in social media helpful or a hindrance to producing quality print or digital content?


• How is amount of time spent on social media associated with social media being helpful or a hindrance?


• For 12 parameters, rate the knowledge or skill level of the person who is your publisher (to whom you report).

Download the report

For more information, contact:
Abe Peck, director, B2B communication, Medill, a-peck@northwestern.edu
Robin Sherman, ASBPE associate director, info@asbpe.org

Alexander (Zander) Baron and Dinesh (Dino) Ganesarajah have been named the Kellogg School of Management's media scholars for 2010-2011, Media Management Center executive director Michael P. Smith announced this week.

The scholars program is funded through a grant from the Chicago-based McCormick Foundation. The scholars will receive full tuition for three academic quarters at Kellogg, where they are majors in the media management program. They were chosen after a rigorous application process by a panel of judges from media and academics. They become the fifth team of Kellogg scholars to receive funding from the Foundation.

"The judging and selection gets more difficult each year," said Center director Smith. "Zander and Dino were chosen from an excellent field of Kellogg students. Each of them brings a real passion for the media and innovative thinking about the media and journalism."

Zander Baron is a 2011 MBA candidate at Kellogg. He came to Northwestern after serving as director of programming and content development at The Atlantic Monthly, where he developed events and content around contemporary intellectual issues featuring top global business, cultural and policy leaders. Before that he worked in marketing and business development for Titan Technology Group in New York. He also served as a legislative correspondent in the office of U.S. Sen. Paul Sarbanes. He holds a bachelor's degree from Skidmore College and a master's from the London School of Economics.

Ganesarajah is also a 2011 MBA candidate at Kellogg. Before coming to Northwestern, he did a new media internship with Advent Venture Partners, Europe's oldest capital venture firm. He also was a new media portfolio manager for the British Broadcasting Corp., where he assessed business opportunities and projects. He also held various positions for London and Bangalore-based Orbis Technology, a technology provider for Europe's top gambling Web sites. He holds a master of engineering in computing from the Imperial College of London. At Northwestern, he serves as editor-in-chief of The Merger, the Kellogg school newspaper.

Consistent with the guidelines of the scholarship, both winners plan careers in media management.

Said Baron: "I came to Kellogg in large part to learn the management skills I would need to run a successful media company. I am passionate about the importance of a strong media in a free society, and I believe a successful organization is one which provides not only breadth, but depth as part of its value to its audience."

Ganesarajah is also focusing on the changes being wrought by new technologies: "I believe the most important challenge facing the news and information industries is the dispersion of the audience away from trusted media channels; i.e., a small set of newspapers, television and radio stations, to disparate new media channels," he said. "A consequence of this dispersion is the increased difficulty media organizations face in generating revenue."

The scholarship is accompanied by a research stipend, which will allow both students to explore solutions to some of the problems facing media. Ganesarajah wants to create a news organization that rather than have articles pushed to an audience, the audience will be able to commission articles of interest from expert writers. Baron's project will assess the many new ideas being implemented across the news industry that are enhancing the profitability of news organizations.

The Scholars Program was created by the McCormick Foundation in 2005 to cultivate a new generation of leaders in media management. Over the course of the 10-year program the Foundation will grant 20 merit scholarships to Kellogg Media Management students and 60 merit scholarships to students in the Medill School.


More information about the McCormick Scholarship Program can be found at
www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/academic/media/scholarship.htm

Or contact:
Michael P. Smith, Executive Director, Media Management Center
847.467.2065, m-smith3@northwestern.edu

Even as their titles plunge into the digital space, B2B editors have been left largely to their own devices to gain the skills necessary to do their jobs across platforms.

So finds a recent survey of 273 B2B editors by the American Society of Business Publication Editors and the Medill School at Northwestern University. The study was co-drafted by Abe Peck, senior director for B2B and Magazines at the Media Management Center.

Eighty-eight percent of editors who identified themselves by job function were at the executive or senior level. Four of five editors who answered the ASBPE/Medill Survey on Digital Skills and Strategies participated in one day or less of corporate-sponsored digital training during 2009. The median amount was less than a half-day, and 36% said they had no corporate digital training whatsoever.

Moreover, two-thirds of survey respondents found what training was offered to be very or somewhat inadequate for an array of digital tasks, making training satisfaction the lowest-ranked of a dozen leadership initiatives taken by their publishers.

"The lack of company-sponsored training, let alone adequate training, is a major concern," said ASBPE associate director Robin Sherman. "Apparently, what skills most senior-level editors do have were learned and paid for on their own."

"Why would organizations place editors and publications at risk as a result of so little training?" Sherman asked. "Or put it another way: How much more revenue might a publisher generate with an editorial labor force better skilled in digital technologies and publishing strategies?"

Conducted over November 2009, the ASBPE/Medill survey captured the platform shift in editorial work across B2B publishing. Thirty-eight percent of responding editors currently spend at least half their time with digital content, while 62% think that spending at least half their time with digital content would most benefit their organization. Respondents split almost evenly over whether the focus on digital issues was having a positive or negative effect on the quality of their print editorial content.


Necessity of Digital Strategies
Editors were asked how they would rank various strategies if they were in charge of planning for the near future.

Improving digital content and digital training were rated as "very necessary," followed by researching readers/advertisers, resisting any loosening of editorial ethics, leveraging content between brands, and redefining the skills necessary for editorial and art staff.


Digital Behavior, Skills, and Job Success
From a list of 16 digital activities, those that were very or extremely important for editors' job success in 2010, writing and editing Web content, managing workflow/workload between Web and print, and writing and editing e-letters ranked highest.

Those deemed least important for personal success over 2010 were (from lowest):

• Developing virtual trade shows/conferences
• Coding
• Creating online slideshows or photo galleries
• Recording, shooting, or editing audio and/or video; and
• Mining online databases.

Editors were candid in reporting shortfalls in their personal digital portfolio. Twenty-seven percent of respondents put their individual digital skill levels "behind" or "way behind" their brands' transition to digital.

Moreover, a large number of editors never engaged in activities that are taking on increasing importance within B2B:

• Virtual trade shows (82% never engaged)
• Online slide shows (58%) and audio-video (54%)
• Webinars (55%)
• Coding (51%)
• Database mining (50%).

One of three respondents never blogged and more than one in five never worked with social media.

Forty-nine percent of responding editors said that the need for more training in the skills of business journalism over the next 12 months was at least "necessary."


Quality of publishers' leadership
Business-side leadership also came in for criticism. Many responding editors were pessimistic about their publishers' "knowledge and skill" for moving forward in today's dynamic B2B environment. Among the 12 publisher-level activities surveyed - digital and otherwise - all had an average rating of less than "good" (less than three on a one- to- four scale).

Senior-level editors felt that publishers fared best at being "open to new ways of doing things; not being afraid to take some risks," placing that ability at just under "good." "Stays current on trends about your market" and "has a clear vision of the future of your brand and its content" were rated next highest.

On the low end, "provides adequate amounts of training" had an average rating of less than "fair," with "really understands what it takes for editors to run our digital media" and "provides adequate support and resources for editorial staff" rating just above that level.


Moving Forward
"Many of these findings represent major disconnects for B2B even as the role of a B2B content person is rapidly evolving," says Abe Peck, director of business-to-business communication for Medill and an ASBPE Lifetime Achievement honoree. "As the editor's job sheds pro forma tasks in favor of cross-platform leadership, it is crucial for content leaders and publishers alike to maximize new skills alongside their traditional ones."

The survey had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 7%. The full results - including additional tables and anecdotal remarks - will be posted by April 1st on www.asbpe.org, and linked to www.mediamanagementcenter.org and to www.peckconsultants.com.

Sherman, Peck, and Medill methodologist Bob LeBailly will discuss and take questions about the findings at ASBPE's National Editorial Conference in Chicago this July 21-23.

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Methodology for the ASBPE/Medill Survey on Digital Skills and Strategies
Invitations were emailed to 4,847 people on a list of ASBPE members and non-member B2B editors. Between November 2nd and December 10th, 2009, a total of 338 people answered the survey for a response rate of 7%.

An initial screening question eliminated 48 people who said they were not a staff editor or writer for a business-to-business print or digital publication. Among the 290 who indicated they were B2B staff editors or writers, 17 stopped answering the survey after the initial screening question. The results are based on the 273 remaining B2B staff editors and writers.

The 95% confidence level was used in this study. Results labeled as statistically significant have a 5% or less chance that they could be attributed to sampling error (drawing a oddball sample).

The survey questions received between 203 and 269 non-missing responses (e.g. people who answered "don't know" or left a question blank are missing responses). Percentages from these questions have a margin of sampling error from plus or minus 6.0% (for questions with 269 responses) to plus or minus 6.9% (for questions with 203 responses). So using a plus or minus 7% margin of sampling error is safe to use for all questions.

This means that sampling error should cause no more than a 7% difference between the results in our study and the true value in the universe in 95% of samples. Our finding that 81% of B2B editors received a day or less of digital training in the past year has a 95% chance of falling in the interval between 74% (81% minus 7%) and 88% (81% plus 7%) in the universe from which the sample was drawn.

There are other potential sources of error besides sampling error that are not addressed by the margin of sampling error.

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For more information, contact:
Abe Peck, director, B2B communication, Medill, a-peck@northwestern.edu
Robin Sherman, ASBPE associate director, info@asbpe.org