What's Needed in 2008: Serious Newsroom Cultural Change

What's Needed in 2008: Serious Newsroom Cultural Change
By Steve Outing - letter to Editors & Publishers
NEW YORK (January 02, 2008)

What we'd like your magic wand to do, news industry people kept telling me, is change the culture at our company and in our newsroom, because it's holding us back and ensuring our ultimate failure.

A useful technique to find out what a company's problems are is to ask its managers and employees a deceptively simple question: "If I had a magic wand with me today, what would you have me do with it to solve one or more of your company's problems?"

This is an old sales technique designed to help the sales person get the prospect talking, instead of having to launch an ineffective one-way sales pitch. With an understanding of a company's real problems, the sales rep is better equipped to discuss how what he/she is offering might be truly useful to the potential client. I'm certainly no sales expert (it's a skill I wish I had), but a former business partner taught it to me, and I saw him use it effectively.

I've been wanting to try this out (for non-sales purposes), so I reached out to my professional contact network of news industry colleagues and asked them the question: If I could wave my magic wand, what would you have me do with it on your company's behalf? The answers might give some insight into what the news industry should be focusing on during 2008.

I guessed that I'd get a variety of responses. But what's interesting is that one theme kept coming up. What we'd like your magic wand to do, news industry people kept telling me, is change the culture at our company and in our newsroom, because it's holding us back and ensuring our ultimate failure.

Newroom Skepticism

"We need to transform our business in a hurry," wrote Jack Lail, managing editor/multimedia at the Knoxville News Sentinel in Tennessee. "We have consultants working with us, but at the newsroom level, for one, there's a reservoir of skepticism. Help us solve that one."

The feeling in newsrooms, especially among the people on the new-media side, seems to be that there are an awful lot of people within organizations that aren't on board with a vision of changing for the future. Even when top management has developed a new corporate vision for a digital, multi-media and less print-centered future, and communicated it to "the troops," implementation is being slowed by many people in the organization -- including mid-level managers -- who still don't buy into the idea that a total transformation of the news organization is necessary.

I'm not surprised. Even at the college level, where you might expect all students to be on board with the notion of a digital-centric, publish-it-right-now, multi-media approach to news, I still run into budding journalists who cling to the hope of finding a traditional newspaper reporting job. Especially in the newspaper profession, the notion -- outdated, in my view -- that print still reigns supreme remains strong.

Yeah, we could use a magic wand to get rid of that tired old thinking.

Helge Ogrim, chief editor of the Norwegian trade newspaper Journalisten and Journalisten.no, says that he'd like me to wave my magic wand and create "a proven concept of high production knowledge flow where journalists and developers (programmers, designers) could maintain high output in their original assignments while simultaneously acquiring new skills and enhancing each others' knowledge and skill."

"We are too easily stuck with what we know and master," Ogrim says, "letting a very few venture alone into new territory. Gradually the chasm between the explorers and the farmers widens."

That's really one of the newspaper industry's biggest problems. Everyone's got work to do to put out the "daily miracle," but in an era when the old industry model is in decline, we can no longer afford to have a workforce where the majority are solely doing the work of "putting out the paper."

The smart news organization in 2008 will be the one that encourages innovation -- no, requires it -- from ALL its employees. It will get everyone involved: in planning meetings; in committees charged with specific research and/or implementation projects. It will create some time in the schedules of everyone in the organization to do the work of innovation, and make that an integral assignment.

Most importantly, it will develop a training program to teach new-media skills to those still lacking, and regularly bring in innovation and creativity experts to guide both managers and employees. With the latter, exposure to and interaction with those experts will be company-wide.

Here's a (crazy?) idea: Bring in a change agent (visionary consultant type) and have him or her spend 30 minutes with every employee, where the two brainstorm how to modernize the person's job. Depending on the outlook and nature of the individual, some of those sessions might be the consultant guiding the journalist to transform his/her work to better serve the modern news consumer; or the sessions rather might be listening to the journalist's innovative ideas and communicating them back to management.

Variation of above idea: Assign everyone in the building to come up with ideas involving news innovation and schedule a 30-minute brain dump (either with an outside consultant or a staff manager assigned to the task). Then pick out the best ideas and start implementing them if they make sense and further the transformation goal. The key to this, I think, is involving everyone. Which is a nice segue to...

Everyone Blogs

One thing that's important in effecting cultural change in a newsroom is to get everyone involved in using new forms of digital media. Imagine if everyone in your news organization maintained a blog, an active page on Facebook, and participated in other innovative new media forms (e.g., Twitter). By actually living the digital life and embracing it (even if you're forced to by your boss), you'll better understand how the modern consumer interacts with media and news.

Tom Abate, a longtime newspaper reporter who blogs as MiniMediaGuy, says that with a magic wand: "I would give every daily newspaper employee, starting with reporters and editors and working down to the mail room, a blog. And some instruction on the dos and don'ts. And then instruct the editors to read the blogs.

"Ideally these staff-written blogs should be a collection of detailed conversations about all the beats within the paper. And the editors should read those blogs as clues to future stories. Some issues may ripen on the blog and become stories for the mass audience in print. Astute editors also will spot trends by pulling together disparate blog items that all show, for instance, citizens creating local charities, or whatever," Abate says.

(Abate also has a great blog post) that covers some of this thinking:

I'll go further and suggest that a newspaper's staff should be hanging out and participating wherever the public has started gathering. Tens of millions of people are now using social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and others. That's hardly new: MySpace has well over 100 million users; Facebook has 59 million active users. With that kind of mainstream acceptance, it's unconscionable for journalists not to participate in that online environment. At the least, social networks are a great source of networking and story ideas. And at best, they will give journalists understanding of how to better serve the Internet consumer in new online environments.

(Here's a blog item I wrote recently about journalists using Facebook.)

Fix The Dysfunction

"My wish: That you could fix the incredibly dysfunctional culture in the newsroom," wrote an editor from one of the large metro newspapers in the U.S., who asked not to be named. In the past year, that paper's top management decided to put the web first in all ways and went into major restructuing mode. The paper's website, this editor reports, went over the last half decade from a small group of people to "the total focus of our news gathering efforts."

But the big problem is that the newsroom culture hasn't changed enough to support the kind of innovation that the paper's leaders are trying to implement, the editor says. "Somehow the people who do the work always get overlooked in the 'fixing.' We are ignored. We are shifted around like widgets. Our experience is disregarded. Our ideas are received with indulgent pats on the head. ... I get the need for young voices and fresh approaches. But the environment, the existing culture, has to allow and encourage innovation. All the 'process mapping' in the world won't fix that. 'Culture' is much harder to fix than 'process.'"

From my perspective, the newsroom restructuring that, like at the paper above, incorporates the online operation into the entire newsroom infrastructure, is key to newspapers' survival. But another problem is those newsrooms where online is still a separate entity.

From DenverPost.com, Joe Murphy, senior developer, asked that I wave my magic wand: "I'd get you to convince management we need three times as many people working on the online team (that means six developers, six producers, three dev/producers, and three breaking-news day-shift producers). We've been 'barely getting by' here for about a decade, and I'm pretty sure we could build some ground-breaking local web apps and information with some more space between us and the grindstone."

As more publishers come to the realization that digital publishing must be at the center of the news operation -- publishing out to a variety of formats, including print -- I wonder if that's enough. Definitely, newspapers need more developers, and we can wave the magic wand at that. But I'm thinking that it also should be used to put the online operation at the center of the entire news operation for those that haven't migrated there yet.

A Big Wave Solution

Continuing in the theme of changing the newsroom culture, let's also think about using our magic wand to make the most profound changes all at once. Howard Owens, director of digital publishing at Gatehouse Media, asked for this: "Reporters and editors would take seriously their roles as community conversation leaders, concentrating on getting it right on the web first -- web-first publishing, blogs, video, participation -- and using the print edition as a greatest hits, promote the web site vehicle. Old packaged-goods-thinking about the newsPAPER would disappear overnight."

Owens' comment hits on one theme that I've covered many times in this column over the years: turning news into less of a lecture and more of an interactive, two-way experience and conversation between journalists and readers.

But overall, he's really hit the nail on the head in a succinct comment. But, of course, it would take a magic wand to really implement those changes quickly. Each of his points -- news as a conversation and journalists as community conversation leaders, web-first publishing, print edition as greatest hits -- represents a drastic change from decades of this-is-how-we-do-things in the newspaper industry.

I fear, based on the answers I received to my simple question, that there's still lots of resistance to the changes that many of us think are necessary for the long-term health of the newspaper industry.

As you enter 2008, I urge you to focus on cultural change within your newsroom. Get everyone involved in the task of reinventing the newspaper. Give them time in their schedules to participate. Assign tasks -- to everyone. Build a new culture of innovation that involves everyone. Bring in creativity and innovation gurus if necessary, and expose those experts to everyone in the company.

If my little "magic wand" experiment showed anything to me, it's primarily that the minority of "forward thinkers" in many newsrooms are pushing the reinvention process forward. It's time to get everyone involved, and everyone on board.