November 21, 2011

Transformative leadership: Focus the mission

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Carolyn Washburn, editor of The Cincinnati Enquirer, says cutbacks require that news leaders define their “unique role” in the news ecosystem - as a watchdog, for example. To focus, smaller newsrooms also need to stop doing some things.

As late as 2007, many local newsrooms were just beginning to awaken to digital. The first wave typically focused on breaking news (enter the “continuous news desk”), multimedia (remember the “MoJo” - the mobile journalist who could do it all?) or niche sites (such as Gannett’s recently shuttered MomsLikeMe.com sites).

The early waves of buyouts and layoffs brought an era of “Do more with less.” That faded quickly as newsrooms discovered that less really is less - and then even less as cutbacks mounted.

As local news organizations have shed a third to half of their newsroom staffs, a fundamental new reality has dawned: Local news organizations can no longer be general news sources in either print or online.

Instead they must reassess their place in the information ecology and hone their mission.

“We hit a place where the staff started to get smaller and we really started to think about what our role is and what we can let go,” said Carolyn Washburn, editor of The Cincinnati Enquirer, who participated in the inaugural Knight Digital Media Center 2007 leadership program as editor of The Des Moines Register.

“We think all the time about what our unique role is and what we can get from the community. This has raised the bar for our journalists, because they need to provide things that are more unique. Incredible storytelling. More investigative work. More data-driven journalism,” Washburn said. As traumatic as cutbacks are, “we can help people still do powerful work.”

Washburn drills down further with questions that help focus the journalism.

For example, Washburn quotes a question from a Gannett colleague about whether journalists are needed to add context to a piece of information: “Can we add intelligence to this information?” If not, why spend time to develop a full story?

Other questions: “Are we doing digest or depth?” And, “we have started an engagement initiative, for instance. We ask ourselves, ‘Now, what is the engagement value of this story? What do we hope people will do with this information?’ “

This is an excerpt from an interview with Carolyn Washburn for an upcoming KDMC report, “New practices shape transformative news leadership in the digital age,” to be published Dec. 5.

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

By Michele McLellan, 11/21/11 at 4:00 am