Simon started off at Shoe and leather News, before ending up at Media Week and later joined the Guardian, where he was the launch editor of the Guardian Unlimited in 1999 and eventually director of digital strategy and development. Now he’s the product director of Love Film. In the meantime he’s been writing a book called Creative Disruption.

He spoke about what led him to write his book. He said: ‘It’s really about what it’s like when an industry is shaken to disruption.’ He loves the web and journalism but also has a ‘keen business streak’.

Simon started off by talking about how the web has changed the business rules for the media. Simon said that there are four aspects to this:-

1) Entrepreneurs and new entries - outsiders do things to change your industry. Simon gave the example of Reed Hastings and Net Flix and how that has changed the video/DVD hire business.

‘You should think about the problems you can solve for other people,’ Simon said.

2) The economy - a lot of structural changes in newspapers were hurt by the downturn. The classified sector isn’t likely to come back, for example.

3) The people: We have desires and concerns and we now have tools to change things in ways we couldn’t before.

4) The growth of devices: New technological devices bring profound changes to our behaviour. Simon gave the example of wifi and the way it has changed the way we consume content.

Simon pointed out there has been a great deal of change. For his book, Creative Disruption, he decided to look at businesses that are struggling to deal with change, including IBM which declared the biggest corporate loss in history in the early 80s.

Simon said that there are three things businesses have to do to survive that he has learned from his research:-

1) Transform your core business - biggest challenge is to make sure your business as a whole is working well.

2) You have to move into new areas to find big ajacencies.

Simon talked about Encyclopedia Brittanica, which was once a very profitable business, but has been hit by the success of competitors. Brittanica 20 years on has lost 80 per cent of its revenue. Simon said he suspects that kind of shake-up is looming for other business.

An important message, Simon said, was to get away from trying to understand how you can fund what you want to do, but it’s crucial to think of what you can do to answer the questions that people need answering.

He said there’s a difference between most people and entrepeneurs, because entrepeneurs are happy to go off and do things quickly. He believes that, with the great changes that we are experiencing now, entrepreneurs have a fantastic opportunity. But it’s essential to move rapidly to take advantages of these changes.

Simon then went on to talk about advertising. Most businesses will always want to be based on some sort of advertising. The piont is that it is no longer possible to have the same position because there are so many competitors.

You have to think what you are going to do to think how your businesses will grow their business, not yours. Advertising has to be phenomenally hard fought for. At the Guardian it was not about not doing subscriptions, it was about doing advertising phenomenally well. He believes that there is growth but it is essential to do the job really well.

To sum up, then:

• There’s a ton of change, there’ll be a ton more.
• He said that now is a fantastic time to be entrepreneurial, but think about how you build a proper business - not one that’s there to support your own desires.
• And, above all, do brilliant things. He said: ‘You are so lucky to work in this time of spectacular change.’

Questions

Paywalls: Simon then took questions, including, firstly, one about his thoughts on pay walls he said it was ‘very desirable but very difficult to achieve’. But Simon accepted that, ‘practically, it may be the only option for some businesses.’

‘The challenge isn’t whether you charge,’ he said. ‘If you take a macro view of the business [a paywall] is quite small.’ He said the two major newspaper groups haven’t been concerned with them. He cautioned against getting ‘stuck on’ paywalls.

Portfolio vs one revenue stream: Simon agreed with a questioner that B2B magazines, which are portfolio businesses are better placed to survive in bad times. The problem, he said, is to get single-issue businesses - like newspapres - to kick-start that kind of change.

Costly content: He also said that there is still a place for professionally produced content. He said that it was professional journalists who get to the hard-to-reach places (such as Bandar Aceh during the great tsunami, where there were no ‘citizen journalists’) and tell important stories.

Newspapers: He also pointed out that many newspaper businesses are not doing it purely for the money. Newspapers are not the businesses they once were, because more people can compete. Now, he said, journalists would have to ‘get on deal with it’.

He said it’s remarkable that people still buy newspapers - and it was important to think about why they were still, in many ways, successful. He said it’s not worth debating where things will end up, but to make your business better today and better tomorrow.