What’s your (post-)media job: Research Director

Statista is a 1400-people-strong multinational company launched in Hamburg that specialises in market research. The model is primarily B2B; companies pay for access to analytics produced by Statista to understand their own and prospective markets, research competitive landscape, and learn other business insights. According to the company, it provides “insights and facts across 170 industries and 150+ countries”.

As Director Research Digital, Vadim Makarenko leads a department that produces research on digital industries. He oversees four teams which are responsible for different sets of industries – advertising; media; internet; technology & telecoms. In terms of organisational structure, his direct reports are the four leads for each team. Makarenko himself reports to the Chief Content Officer, as do other research directors responsible for other thematic fields. The department consists of roughly 25 to 30 people.

Makarenko’s job is primarily a managerial one; he leads the department and sets its agenda. He estimates that 70% of his time goes to management and administration: tasks like team coordination and working with the sales team to help support client requests. Editorial work – such as editing the outputs created by his department and participating in brainstorming sessions – takes the rest 30%.

Statista’s researchers produce several types of products. The most basic one is a chart accompanied by short text. Then come “dossiers” (reports on an industry or a trend that consist mostly of charts) and “topic pages” (industry overviews). The most sophisticated and labour-intensive product is called “DossierPlus”, which is an in-depth report; Makarenko compares it to a traditional consultancy report or, in journalistic terms, to a big feature story. For example, Makarenko cites recent reports on Reddit, which analysed the platform’s business model and its evolution from a forum to a social media company, and on the free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) industry.

In some ways the job is similar to journalistic work. Makarenko’s team produces content and has a strong incentive for their work to be as accurate and informative as possible (arguably, the business incentive to get everything right is even stronger than for many news publishers). Makarenko’s own responsibilities are “something like being an editor, but not in a newspaper, [rather] in an analytical company”, he says.

“It’s not journalism”, however. The business model and audience are different, and researchers led by Makarenko don’t go out into the field to speak with people; they work with datasets and crunch numbers.

Switching industries – Makarenko’s experience and advice for others

Over the past two decades Makarenko had two major career shifts. Ten years ago, a fellowship at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism got him thinking about how to build a data journalism team and prompted him to switch from his role as a reporter covering the media business to building Gazeta Wyborcza’s own data desk. More recently, it was the pandemic that gave him the space to make an even bigger change – leaving Gazeta Wyborcza and moving from Poland to Germany in order to take his current job at Statista.

Makarenko says that the biggest driver for him to make the leap was curiosity and the eagerness to try himself in other areas. “In journalism, there’s a strong conviction that people are one-trick ponies… once a journalist, always a journalist”; for Makarenko it was a personal challenge to prove himself outside the news industry. 

To take the job at Statista, Makarenko had to move from Warsaw to Hamburg – thus not only changing industries, but also moving to another country, whose primary language Makarenko doesn’t speak. This was the most challenging part of the transition; but working for a multinational company where English is a lingua franca helps.

A number of skills Makarenko learned working for Gazeta Wyborcza are applicable to his current position. The first set is data skills – “dealing with data, visualising data, cleaning data, all things you can do with data”. The second one is project management, basic managerial skills like planning a project, setting milestones and getting the team to stick to it. “It’s not really obvious for people in newsrooms because newsrooms are very reactive, while project management is proactive”, Makarenko says, but it has helped him quite a lot in his current position.

Makarenko’s advice for journalists looking to make a leap both outside and within the news media industry is just that – learning to work with data and get to know project management. Both skills are “in short supply in newsrooms”, and they are a great addition to journalists’ traditional skills as powerful storytellers. 

To take an outsider’s look, Makarenko’s career offers one more valuable insight – the benefits of changing a job within one’s organisations even without venturing outside. Especially in big newsrooms like Gazeta Wyborcza, with the right combination of curiosity and proactiveness, there might be opportunities for journalists to try something else and gain new skills, whether it’s editing, managing or dealing with clients.

What to read and study if you are interested in working with data

Courses:

• Knight Center Journalism Courses – Makarenko says he’s a “great fan” of the platform because the courses “are of great quality and free at the same time”.
• Courses on Coursera (such as the one on GIS data acquisition and map design, which starts this week)

Books and other works:

• The Data Journalism Handbook “remains the first choice for those interested in data journalism”.
• Edward Tufte’s Visual Display of Quantitative Information, “an eternal classic”
• Alberto Cairo’s books (Truthful Art, Functional Art and How Charts Lie)
• Everything published by Martin Stabe and his team at Financial Times. Makarenko says he printed out their visual vocabulary and placed it on his desk.

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