Jon Cooper, vice president for content of the Journal Register Company and the new Digital First Media, says a shift from authoritative leadership to collaborative leadership is key to changing a news organization.

Can top newsroom executives give up being the source of wisdom and authority? Can the boss create space and encourage others to step up? This shift is a key determinant of whether an organization can transform.

Indeed, many newsrooms were slow to adapt to digital in the past decade because their leaders could not understand that the transformation had to begin with them. The culture tended to give command to the booming voice that could fill the meeting room. Digital demands a fundamentally different culture, one that is adaptive and collaborative. That, in turn, requires that leaders approach their roles differently.

Cooper said that admitting he doesn’t know it all has been a critical part of his efforts to help lead the transformation of the group of dozens of local news organizations.

“To be at the front of a room and not have an answer is difficult. ‘I don’t know, but we’ll figure it out together’ is an acceptable answer. It took me awhile to figure that out,” Cooper said.

Cooper was well positioned to adopt this attitude in 2007, when he moved from leading a newsroom to becoming multimedia editor for the entire corporation.

“I had to humble myself and ask a lot of people for help. But if you’re willing to learn from everyone around you, it makes the people you’re leading and teaching trust you more.”

As vice president for content since 2010, Cooper has been a point person pushing and encouraging the transformation of the Journal Register Company to implement a strategy of digital first. 

(A newly created Digital First Media company will manage both Journal Register and MediaNews Corp., and Cooper is vice president, content for the new company.)

As a fellow in KDMC’s Knight-McCormick Leadership Institute in 2010, Cooper focused on a plan to communicate the “digital first” strategy across the organization with consistent messaging, strategic delegation of tasks and training and to develop ways to assess whether the communication was effective.

He points to a key accomplishment during his time as VP content at the Journal Register Company and as a leadership fellow in 2010: “The ability to create more of an open leadership, an open and collaborative learning environment, and attempting to remove the fear of failure.”

This is an excerpt from an interview with Jon Cooper for an upcoming KDMC report, “New practices shape transformative news leadership in the digital age,” to be published in early December.

The News Leadership 3.0 blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.