Sales of The Spectator are not just at an all-time high, but growing at the fastest rate in 30 years. We’re growing, we need help and are looking for a digital guru to provide it. The job is now known, in the industry, as Head of Product. It’s a rather unromantic way of describing what I’d say is one of the very best jobs in journalism. A new position for us, a senior one, that will give someone the chance to join and shape the magazine at the most successful stage in its 189-year history.
Our industry is changing, fast. Last week, for example, set a new record for people signing up to The Spectator – and nothing much happened last week. What we first thought was a post-Brexit boom (and what American titles think is a post-Trump boom) looks like being a radical but more fundamental change in journalism.
Six years ago, people would not have paid for publications given how much there was for free in the internet. Now, they do. iTunes and Netflix have firmly established the principle of paying for content, shaping a new market. The sheer amount of guff on the internet, and the advent of fake news, has also helped. It has established a basic principle: if you want something worth reading, you need to pay for it. The turmoil in advertising means that The Spectator is not swimming in cash, but we’re swimming – more than a lot of titles can say. And we’re confident where our future lies: ‘to convey intelligence’. The mission statement in of the first edition of The Spectator, 1828, is our guide now.
In short, where you get your news and analysis from has never mattered more. Coffee House, which started as The Spectator’s blog, is now more of a live comment section. But when people sign up, they invariably choose the print and digital option. Here is how print sales of various publications did last year:-
So there is no tension between digital and print. On the contrary, the success of the former is fuelling the extraordinary growth of the latter. So we’re planning a new website, one that will pour petrol on this fire.
Our strategy is simple: we tempt people on to our website. Ask them to come for the beer, then stay for the shouting. Once on our site, they see what else they can read. Those who have the idea of The Spectator being a stuffy magazine obsessed with the Tory party can find out that we have the best writers on a wide variety of topics: on books, the arts, and more. Our writers’ politics range from left to right, their circumstances from high life to low life. We have columnists who support Brexit but also have (as the deputy editor of the New Statesman kindly remarked) the best writers who oppose these writers.
I think that sums us up rather well. We make no pretence at neutrality: our motto is ‘firm but unfair’. We seek to offer the greatest quality of argument that money can buy.
The right applicant for this job should look at our website and ask: is it fulfilling the above objectives? Is The Spectator’s proposition, so clear to its subscribers with their 92 per cent renewal rates, as clear as it could be from the website? Is the onward journey unit working as it should? How best to convert traffic to subscriptions? What kind of metrics are most useful, and how to collect them? Is the subscription process as frictionless as it should be and if not, how to improve? Is the load time too long? To describe our website as a marketing tool is to put it too crudely: we’d put as much attention it if it didn’t generate a single subscription. But it does generate most of them. So the Head of Product would work with the editorial and marketing teams, who share the same goal.
This is a science and an art. The art is to have a website that looks as good as the print magazine; a website the subscribers want to spend all day on. One new readers find too addictive to walk away from. But how to do this? It requires a familiarity with the technical details, being familiar with the best tricks being used. The editorial objectives and the commercial objectives are fused as one: we don’t want to maximise clicks, but to maximise the people who think our journalism is worth paying for. How best to do this? There is a technical answer to this question. An answer that we’d like our Head of Product to provide.
One of our great advantages is that, with an editorial staff of 12 and a total staff of 60, we’re small enough to cohere as a team. We have no technical backwater, no tension between advertising and editorial, none of the energy-sapping turf wars that stymie larger publications. We talk to each other, all the time. The Product Director would, of course, make sure our advertisers are given the show they need. But spend every day asking how the website can be improved to be of better service to subscribers, better use in recruiting subscribers,
This will be one of the most important positions in The Spectator, and crucial to making sure our next steps are the right ones. So if you’re the best in the business, please apply. If you know someone who is, ask them to apply. If you love journalism and know how to make digital sparks fly; if you reject as false the choice between technical efficacy and design beauty, then this is the job for you.
To apply, and for more details, click here.
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