(Michael P. Smith)

One of the strategic footholds – a practice media companies must embrace in order to be successful in this hypercompetitive environment – is being customer-focused.

That sounds simple but it is a moving target because people make up markets and people change as media become much more pervasive. The problem most media companies face is catching up while the target continues to shift. These companies wish for a system they can enforce or a technology they can buy.

Companies that have caught up with the market have done so by taking simple steps and making customer focus the way they live and breath each day. When pressed for an example, I return to Grupo Reforma in Mexico.

For more than 10 years, Grupo Reforma's newspapers – El Norte in Monterrey and Reforma in Mexico City – have made the use of reader councils as a way of life. The councils have allowed Grupo Reforma to go from No. 2 in their own province to No. 1 in the country, in the words of editor Alejandro Junco de la Vega.

Here is what he told a group of journalism educators:

Each year, we inaugurate a new set of councils, and for the ensuing year, the members of those councils play a critical role in our papers. They determine the stories we run, the questions we ask, and the direction we follow.

They are our compass, and they are our conscience. As a means of maintaining ethical standards, I have seen few systems that have as strong an effect. Why? Because our business is laid bare. We share everything.

And, watching everything, the boards have their say. Their influence is deep.

But that influence is not confined to our papers. Indirectly, these councils are also influencing the direction of a nascent democracy: They don't tell citizens what to think, they tell them what they ought to think about.

After all, how do you make change? First, you set the agenda. You raise the questions. You alert people to a problem. And then you offer them a potential solution--another way of doing things, a better way.

This has been our journalistic paradigm–day in and day out–for 15 years now.

It is the editorial councils who have had a large influence on the questions we have raised, the problems we have publicized, and the potential solutions we have explored.

There is a lot of weighing and balancing to be done:

• Do we raise this question, or do we raise that one?


• Do we focus on this problem or pay more attention to that one?


• What solutions do we offer? What interpretations are there?

The editorial council members have tackled these issues from the many perspectives they bring, and they have tackled them with the earnestness of people who understand how much is at stake.

He explained the logistics:

I can't stress enough how significant a part of our operation these councils are, and perhaps it might help to demonstrate that by describing the sheer scale of the system.

Our newspapers are broadsheet, with several sections. Each newspaper section has an editor, each editor has an editorial council, and each of those boards is made up of 12 community leaders. Every single one of them comes from outside the paper.

And each week, each of those councils of 12 meets with each one of the 62 section editors. On top of that, we have thematic editorial councils in the subjects of Energy, Rule of Law, Education, Agriculture, Tourism, Transportation and Piracy.

So what does that give us altogether?

Seventy editorial councils, each made of up 12 community leaders. In other words, 840 specialized ombudsmen across the country speaking for its citizens. Almost 13,000 people in the span of 15 years.

The size and breadth of this effort overwhelms most editors in the United States. Or they think they can replicate the same thing with online councils. That would be a nice experiment, but something gets lost when people are not face to face in the same room.

Another thing that makes this effort so remarkable is that the readers become so emotionally bonded to the newspaper that they become advocates for the newspaper in the community.











By Michael P. Smith (m-smith3@northwestern.edu)
Michael P. Smith is executive director of the Media Management Center.