Shishkin is possibly best known for pioneering the “user needs” strategy at the BBC, a model that has been adopted in various forms by newsrooms worldwide to better align content with audience interests and needs. After two decades at the broadcaster, he became Chief Content Officer at Culture Trip, a travel media startup, and went on to consult media and tech companies on digital transformation, content strategy, and innovation in publishing.

In January 2024, Shishkin took on a new challenge as CEO of Ringier Media International, which oversees Ringier’s 80 media brands in Central and Eastern Europe and Africa. One of his first major initiatives was to launch an internal Playbook, a company-wide best-practice guide to digital publishing (more on that below), to ensure a shared vision across the company’s diverse portfolio.

Shishkin spoke to us about his leadership philosophy, why aspects of his current position are similar to his consulting experience, and the main reasons why a newsroom might fail to implement the “user needs” model.

Dmitry Shishkin will join WAN-IFRA’s World News Media Congress in Krakow, Poland, 4–6 May 2025, to share leadership lessons on navigating a lasting transformation.

WAN-iFRA: You are about 15 months into your time as CEO of Ringier Media International. How would you describe the learning curve of really getting up to speed on Ringier as a broader brand, as well as your specific responsibility for the International mandate?

Dmitry Shishkin: The seminal leadership/management book ‘The First 90 Days’ helped me to feel on the front foot when making my initial plans. I also listened a lot. Joining Ringier to look after its non-Swiss media portfolio promised to be challenging by default. 

And although I knew many people in the company beforehand as I had consulted for Ringier before, I knew I was about to start dealing with all the major challenges our sector has been facing – print-to-digital transformation, news avoidance and loss of trust in news, AI impact, the political situation in many countries we operate in, staff retention and upskilling, commercial pressures… 

As Ringier Media International CEO, I needed to learn to deal with them all at once. All these things are hard, but only hard things are worth doing! 

Has it been a seamless or organic transition from all of the editorial leadership roles you’ve had at BBC and Culture Trip, in terms of constantly driving innovation and transformation editorially, to this – on paper, more strategic – CEO position?

I was always quite good at being able to switch from macro- to micro topics, and that trait helped as you’ve got to know the exact details when you impact and change things. I found the transition relatively easy, as a lot of what I do at work, apart from directing things, also has a lot to do with consulting internally. The companies I look after are run by people who don’t need any hand holding, and therefore I see myself as someone they come to for practical advice and strategic direction, and this is not dissimilar to what I was doing when I was consulting media and tech companies between 2020 and 2023. 

Editorial and creative work is still the essence of our business, and yes, it’s not my job anymore to decide what to publish. But what is very much my job is how to do it. One of the first things I instigated when I came was creating and publishing an internal document – Ringier Media Playbook – outlining the best practice in digital publishing, sort of a handout to staff to make sure everyone is on the same page of what “good” looks like. This is one aspect of internal harmonisation of processes and standards we do. 

I read once that irrespective of what C-title you might have, you also have a second one, the Chief Mindset Officer, and I often feel that it’s an equally important role I have. I guide the countries reporting to me via supervisory boards, which I chair, and their GMs are my direct reports, but I see my role as a wider one, which sets the vision, the overall direction, and the priorities. You might disagree with Jeff Bezos on most of the things he does, but he is right when he says that leaders must be stubborn on vision, but flexible on details. I also think that editorial teams under my remit enjoy having someone they recognise as a former editor as their boss.

Read more: Ringier’s Ladina Heimgartner on leadership, AI, and the future of journalism

Ringier Media International manages 80 titles across various countries. Do you have a system in place to identify valuable learnings and best practices from the various brands and markets, and then share them with the broader portfolio?

Yes, we run a system of Senates, where information and best practice, etc., is shared horizontally, based on your speciality. With my editorial background, I decided to chair the Editorial Senate, where editors-in-chief of leading brands get together to discuss collaboration, exchange views, and impact priorities. We also run other Senates, for example, to do with product development, and more recently we regularly run meetings for AI representatives from our portfolio countries to drive the AI topic further across disciplines. 

Every time we (our COO and I) visit portfolio countries, we’ll have a very specific set of agenda items to pursue – apart from the group-wide projects, obligatory to all, each country has two specific projects a year to implement, something non-negotiable, so to speak. And because these projects, one way or another, touch many countries, information is shared in that manner, too – from subscription and first-party data to product relaunches and new revenue initiatives.

You spent a lot of time developing and championing the “user needs” concept within our industry over the years… it seems such an obvious strategy for news organisations, but where does it often go off the rails?

Yes, it’s actually so rewarding to be known as that “user needs guy” in our industry, and to see how far and wide the concept has travelled. I was particularly happy to hear that Ringier has prioritised the user needs work on the group level, even before I joined. 

The implementation of the user needs model can fail for three reasons. Firstly, it needs to be done strategically as your organisation’s mission statement. Your newsroom’s “why we do things” should be directly connected with your audience’s needs. 

Secondly, it needs to be always creative, after all we are in the creative business. If someone offers you three options of an “Educate me” story, push them to offer you the fourth and the fifth, as the first three might have already been done by your competitors. 

And the third one is consistency – if it doesn’t work after two weeks and a few articles, you did not create a proper project around it. I have seen user needs models work for the last ten years in all types of newsrooms irrespective of their size or beat or business model. If you apply the model strategically, creatively and consistently, growth comes. 

What has surprised you as you’ve observed newsrooms globally embrace (and adapt) the concept?

Funnily enough, having done it in various settings for the best part of the last decade, it still makes me smile every time I see positive results. I should not be surprised, but I am – not because I am not expecting it to work, but because it’s so rewarding to see the model thriving in so many different settings. The beauty of the model is that newsrooms embrace it naturally as the topic of conversation never leaves the editorial topics. After all, user needs are nothing more than angles, but no one before had an idea to capture angles’ impact via data. 

Also, I am very excited to see the development of user needs models in niches, which is the next big thing for media to concentrate on. I remember how delighted I was when I joined Culture Trip upon learning about their desire to create a travel content user needs model. We know the model works in any founding setting, or in any geography, but let’s go further and develop these models in niches – sport, finance, food, culture, etc. The overlap with the main model will be significant, but according to the Pareto principle, there is always going to be 20% within the model, which will be different. What is that 20%, I can’t wait to know. 

You are a voracious reader of books, also on leadership. What are some of your favourites?

I even wrote an article about this a few years ago, outlining the best leadership books I always recommend. If you push me to select the top three, I’d go for these (and I mentioned The First 90 days earlier!) 

By the time I read Why Should Anyone Be Led by You: What It Takes to Be an Authentic Leader by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, I had, perhaps, some five years of leadership under my belt, without really thinking about it properly. This book helped me a lot to structure my thoughts and techniques; it advanced my strategic thinking on the subject of leadership. It was the first time I really started to pay attention to trying and being authentic, bringing my whole self to work, not being afraid of coming across as vulnerable. The subject of leadership has been overhyped in the last few years, and it feels like the true meaning of it has been lost – this book certainly lands all the right messages effectively.   

Once you have figured out your own strengths and competencies, you really ought to know more about the dynamics of leading and influencing others – and the best book on the subject, without a doubt, is Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek. You can master all the tricks of the trade (“what” and “how”) but without explaining the “why” behind your strategy, you won’t get far – giving people meaning is the most fundamental part, the very base of any successful project, company or innovation. The book – and his famous TED talk – is applicable to companies of any size, commercial or non-profit, and people who follow those who start with “why” do so because they want to, not because they have to.  

Arguably, the most impressive and thought-provoking book is Redesigning Leadership by John Maeda, a technologist and a designer, who served as the president of Rhode Island School of Design. In this book, he shares his own learnings on how he moved his own mindset from that of a highly talented, empowered individual to that of a leader of a group of such accomplished people. He writes about the art of a meaningful conversation, pulling people together for their mutual benefit, being transparent and honest, learning on the go, experimentation, feedback and critique.

Hear from Dmitry Shishkin at the World News Media Congress 2025