What is the MACU?

Standing in other people’s shoes to work together is essential as we bring different ways of working together and focus on our audiences. Image: Diversity quilt by Oregon Department of Transport https://flic.kr/p/7aAJ3K

Focus on the MACU.

That’s one of the most important things I tell our teams at The Wall Street Journal, and it’s a mantra that leads to positive results.

The MACU refers to: Members, Audiences, Customers and Users.

You see, media companies have decades-old divides in the organizational structure, meant to protect the news operations from commercial pressures. They often do, in a good way.

But sometimes organizational divides get in the way of conversations around common goals and ways of working.

Take the MACU, for instance. In marketing organizations, you’ve got entire disciplines that have developed subscription models around “members.” In newsrooms, there are audience development teams that help reporters and editors think about “audiences.” Circulation operates call centers where agents talk to “customers.” Product designers and engineers focus on “users.”

These are all the same people: the MACU, as I like to call them.

You may think this is all semantics, but we’re in a time of great transformation of media consumption and, frankly, what we call our audience — or our customers, subscribers, readers, viewers, listeners, members, users — says a lot about what we are doing as an industry. Are we creating text or video or audio? Are we technologists or content creators? Are we offering content as a public service or as a paid subscription? Are we creating communities and ongoing relationships or are we involved in transactional sales?

Short of answering those weighty questions, it’s important that — at least for now — we are bringing all those different mindsets together at the beginning of projects. Creativity and progress occur when we step out of our silos and think broadly.

The department I run at The Wall Street Journal — Digital Experience & Strategy (DXS) — has made great strides in promoting MACU-focused thinking and bringing out the best in all the disciplines we work with.

Besides creating a common vocabulary, some of the top things we have done to get everyone focused on the MACU are:

1. Cross-disciplinary teams focusing on the MACU — We’ve created a number of teams with people from different disciplines working together from the start towards common audience-oriented goals. These teams are both structural — our New Audiences team, for instance, has reporters, editors, community interaction specialists, a developer and a designer — as well as in cross-company working groups that are plotting our path forward.
2. Common data — We have created a center of excellence around content insights, bringing together data scientists around the company to align methodologies and share findings. When decision-makers leading News, Marketing, Sales and Technology are looking at the same data, it dramatically improves alignment.
3. Our organizational structure — We treat being MACU-focused so seriously that we designed our organization around it. In DXS, we have five main groups set up to follow insights around our MACU through the product development and content strategy process. The process starts with our News Insights team — data scientists and user research experts. It flows through our Content Experiences team — where testing, innovation, and development of storytelling formats and newsroom tools are undertaken — and then onto our Audience Touchpoints, Audience Groups and Programming Strategy teams.
4. Sharing audience-focused wins — One of our teams sitting at the nexus of news and product is the Audience Voices team. That team regularly brings reader feedback into our journalism. One recent initiative, the Reader Feedback Form, began as coronavirus became widespread. We posted it across numerous stories and received more than 30,000 questions from readers. For instance, you can see the form on the bottom of this coronavirus Q&A. As we hear from readers on this form, which we embed throughout select stories, we turned those questions into stories, such as this one on small business owners during the pandemic.

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably working in a role where you’re thinking through how cultures converge in new ways in your company. I’d love to hear about how you’ve brought them together and whether MACU-focused thinking applies to your job. Email me at louise.story@gmail.com

Louise Story is the Chief News Strategist and Chief Product & Technology Officer at The Wall Street Journal. She leads the WSJ’s Digital Experience & Strategy unit, which manages the Journal’s product, design and technology work as well as its content strategy.