Our world is changing at an exponential pace and the media companies that will survive and thrive in the future are those with the culture and processes to keep pace with unrelenting change. A unique, resilient culture and efficient, streamlined process are the hallmark of innovative media companies. Here in the San Francisco area, there is evidence in abundance of rapid, significant transformations affecting media and communications.

Silicon Valley experts have already recognized one major transformation: that text messaging has replaced voice calls as the primary means of communicating worldwide. There are currently 7,8 trillion SMS messages sent annually, while there are 1,5 billion monthly users of WhatsApp, and 1 billion monthly users of WeChat. Meanwhile, Skype calls are on a downward trend (300 million monthly users). It is possible that media companies may one day have to reach consumers directly via messaging apps in order to deliver the daily news.

Today, I had the good fortune of meeting with media entrepreneurs in sunny San Jose who are focused on identifying and mentoring the next batch of media innovators who will transform the industry for the better. We discussed “design thinking” – a core component of the accelerator program here in Silicon Valley. The aim of the program is to support media leaders and institutions and build the future of media together. As we’ve always stated at La Sentinelle, a strong media ecosystem remains the bedrock of democracy (whether the current Prime Minister and his cronies like it or not!). It is more important than ever to equip members of the media with the necessary skills and tools as independent news outlets are under threat economically, politically, and culturally, in Mauritius and elsewhere.

Media entrepreneur Corey Ford is one of the experts we interviewed in California’s bustling tech belt. Ford began his career as a television journalist and later co-founded Matter, a venture capital firm. Corey and his team now support media entrepreneurs by investing in them and supporting them through a rigorous, design-thinking-based accelerator program in both San Francisco and New York City. He explained that “after a rigorous selection process where we only select 2% of applicants, we select six early stage media startups to be based in our SF space and six to be based in our NYC space.” Ford noted that the program begins with a week-long boot camp focused on how to build scalable media ventures through a human-centered, prototype-driven process called “design thinking.” The teams then have four one-month design sprints which each culminate in a Design Review. At the review, the startups pitch their ventures to a room full of mentors well before they are ready. The whole idea is to create a safe space for media people to fail and receive feedback so that they can quickly incorporate those learnings! Prominent media groups like The New York Times, The Associated Press and McClatchy are clients of Matter.

We asked Ford, as a design strategist, how his background in design and journalism is helping him to empower media around the world. He said “I’ve learned from the best in the world on how to leverage the power of character-driven narrative in order to tell impactful stories about the most important events going on in the world. I recognized that the media world was about to change very dramatically and we were not ready to change with it. I wanted to learn how innovation worked so I left one of the best jobs in broadcast journalism to head out West to Silicon Valley. I landed at Stanford Business School and soaked up any much knowledge as I could about innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership. While I was there, I stumbled across a little academic start-up where they taught a process called “design thinking.” I had never heard of it before but I immediately saw that it was a creative process that you could use to start a company from scratch…” Media companies that intend to survive into the future may have to consider new approaches like “design thinking.”

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My tour of northern California tech companies continued at IBM’s Watson Center. It was made clear that data engineers and scientists there can help media leaders to unlock the value of their data in entirely new, profound ways. By freeing up employees from repetitive, time-consuming tasks media teams can focus on more creative, higher-value work. Watson believes that with their hard earned insights, decision-makers in media can better predict and shape future business outcomes, while rethinking practices and workflows. The motto over here is that Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning will make (and in some cases already are) significant contributions to the content creation-toconsumption process. Watson is an open, multi cloud platform that enables media companies to automate the AI lifecycle, build powerful models from scratch, and speed time-to-value with prebuilt enterprise level apps. The future is here!

At Watson, folks believe that one can put AI to work in any industry by augmenting the productivity of teams (again, by freeing employees from repetitive tasks) and empowering them to focus on the highvalue of the industry. For instance, with their Video Enrichment program, they use industry-leading AI to analyze multimedia content, and then build easily searchable metadata packages. By understanding video content on that much deeper level, one’s business will benefit across many areas that matter most to your bottom line: stronger viewer engagement; improved content search and discovery; recommendation uplift; and, last but not least, new monetization opportunities.

It will not be easy for all media companies to embrace innovative new ways of thinking and to make the necessary shifts in office culture, but those that do stand a better chance of seeing tomorrow. Speaking of which, the Silicon Valley Chronicles will continue tomorrow as this humble journalist soaks up more of the latest ideas in media and tech, as well as California sun. Until then!