Re-inventing the gatekeeper

Saturday, I sat with a small group of longtime print and broadcast journalists whom I admire very much and listened to them complain about the difficulty they experience figuring out whether or not to believe some of what they find on the Web. The essence of the dilemma: No trusted gatekeeper, no clue.

I used to be one of the editors who helped decide what would go in the newspaper the next day and I am proud of the way we tried to evaluate, verify and otherwise make credible the information we published. So I think fondly of that role in that place and that time.

But I as I listened to my colleague’s anecdotes of bad stuff on the Web, I felt rising impatience.  In so many ways, traditional journalism’s inability to see the Web outside the prism of the past blinds us to its opportunities. That’s a road to nowhere, and it’s always difficult to see any good journalist choosing that path.

I suggested to my colleagues that journalists might be gatekeepers by using links to recommend good material and even to point out suspect information. I was thinking about how individual journalists, like my colleagues at the table, might start blogs and discuss stories they found authoritative and those they found wanting.  I don’t think I convinced anyone, in part because I didn’t have a ready example of how this practice might reach a lot of people.

So I was pleased to see a post from Scott Karp about washingtonpost.com’s new ”Political Browser,” which epitomizes what I was attempting to describe on a larger scale. Karp writes:

“washingtonpost.com has launched a new politics page called Political Browser, which features, wait for it… links to the most important and interesting political news around the web. That’s right, the Washington Post, one of the paragons of original political reporting, has dedicated a page to help you find the best of OTHER news organization’s political reporting.

“Crazy? Well, actually it makes perfect sense.

“I spoke with Eric Pianin, the Politics Editor for washingtonpost.com, who explained that The Washington Post sees an opportunity to extend their highly respected politic news brand to filtering the political web.

“And filtering is a BIG opportunity on the web.

“In fact, Political Browser was born of a determined effort by The Post to get into the news aggregation game. Eric told me that interest in news aggregation extends to the highest level of The Post’s senior leadership, including Katherine Weymouth—they have been “fascinated” by the success of aggregation sites like Drudge, Huffington Post, Hotline, and others.

“Eric acknowledged that washingtonpost.com is “late to the party,” but in fact the Political Browser puts the Post way out ahead of many other news sites—while many have begun to recognize the value of aggregation and links, most have been slow to act.”

Karp writes as a person who also has been impatient with the resistance of news organizations to link to material from other news organizations. Competitive news organizations—looking through that old prism—have mostly reasoned that linking will help the other guy, but not them. Google and Drudge (see Karp again) have shown otherwise, of course, and organizations such as the Post are starting to take note. In his Drudge post, Karp points out that linking outward pays back in increased traffic to the originating site. Great.

Even better: “Political Browser” promises to demonstrate one way journalists can reclaim a gatekeeper role on the Web. That matters in the often chaotic, loudest-first, truth-challenged world of today’s media.

Update: Here is an example of helpful aggregation amidst confusion: Matt Thompson provides links to explanations of key questions in the financial mess.

Blogging: Vitamins for the brain

Technorati this week has a five-part series entitled ”The State of the Blogosphere” that is well worth a look.

Part 2, “The What and Why of Blogging,” with findings from a survey of 1,000 bloggers, challenges stale stereotypes of bloggers as people who rant for hits:

“Half of bloggers consider their style to be sincere, conversational, humorous and expert. Although there is a perception of blogging as a means for writing a tell-all or gossiping, ‘snarky’ and ‘confessional’ fell to the bottom of the list of self-described styles among the bloggers that we surveyed.”

Bloggers in the survey have seen benefits from their blogging:

“The majority of bloggers openly expose their identities on their blogs and recognize the positive impact that blogging has on their personal and professional lives. More than half are now better known in their industry and one in five have been on TV or the radio because of their blog. Blogging has brought many unique opportunities to these bloggers that would not have been available in the pre-blog era.’’

Even accounting for the idealized view we all express in surveys, these findings rang true to me as a reader of dozens of blogs each week. Reading the Technorati series got me thinking about what I’ve gained from writing this blog (now nearly six months along). Of course, positive feedback and challenging comments top the list (More! More!).

But I think a significant benefit for me is this: Blogging challenges me to keep learning. 

Let’s face it, any 50-something, 30-year print newspaper veteran carries significant baggage and likely wears wide blinders. One option is to retire, mentally, if not officially. Another is to hew to tradition and go down fighting. A third is to take the best of what you’ve learned over the decades, open it up to challenges, think through what needs to change with the new and what traditions must adapt and live on.

If you are a top editor at a traditional news organization that is striving to go online, I hope you are choosing the third course. Part of my third-door formula: Read blogs, talk with the Web savvy, rethink (push back that reflexive judgment), learn and grow. Blogging does that for me. Knowing I will post two or three times a week, makes me seek information from wider sources and think more broadly about how to support journalism in the digital age.

I encourage editors to try it, and discover your own benefits. If you’re looking for an editor role model, check out the blog of John Robinson, editor of the News-Record in Greensboro, N.C. And here’s a post about the value of blogging from John Hassell, online editor at The Star-Ledger in Newark.

Bloggers, please help build a list of blogging benefits and another of blogging challenges. Add your ideas in comments.

Leadership lessons

I recently posted a Q&A with Ken Tuck, Managing Editor of The Dothan Eagle. One of his comments stuck with me:

“When the staff saw the top editors running out the door to shoot video, they knew it was important. Seeing top editors learn how to edit video showed them how important multimedia was to this newsroom.”

I must say the idea of some of the top editors I know running out to shoot video is at once amusing and inspiring. Just as good editors have long tried to model fairness, authority and crack craft skills, why not model multimedia news gathering as a new arrow in the newsroom quiver?

In a larger sense, learning and modeling new leadership practices is key to transforming an organization. In other words, your newsroom is unlikely to change unless the top editor changes.

Libby Averyt, editor of the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, modeled this idea in 2006, when she made a decision not to go to her newsroom on the Sunday her staff broke the story that Vice President Dick Cheney had accidentally shot a fellow hunter.

I interviewed Averyt for ”News, Improved,” and wrote:

“An old school response to a big story on a small paper would be for top editors to call in the whole staff, then rush to the paper to run the show. Instead, says editor Libby Averyt, on this Sunday in February the staff just went ahead and mapped out its Page One coverage and put the news online. Later the staff created a video demonstration firing the type of weapon Cheney used.
“Averyt learned of the shooting when she turned on her cell phone as she left a matinee of Woody Allen’s Film ‘Match Point.’ She called Managing Editor Shane Fitzgerald, who had been in touch with the newsroom and knew what the staff was planning. Averyt headed to an art exhibit; Fitzgerald decided he didn’t need to go into the newsroom either.
“Newsroom traditionalists may find this a startling and undesirable departure from the editor-as-commander approach. But Averyt saw it as an essential step toward the goal of developing a staff that seized the initiative. For the staff to step up, she and Fitzgerald had decided, they would need to step back. ‘They didn’t need me breathing down their necks,’ Averyt says.”

Standing back on a big breaking story sends a strong and highly visible message. It is not the only time to try new practices. Here area couple of examples in the day to day:

- The news executive bemoans the lack of fresh ideas coming out of newsroom discussions. Yet he leads the charge poking holes whenever someone broaches a new idea. Force of habit, no doubt. Result: Not matter what the leadership says, the staff sees skewering new ideas as preferred practice. Leadership challenge: Learn how to ask questions in a positive way that guides the best ideas to fruition or helps the person who had the idea discover for herself why it won’t work. Skills for leaders: Interviewing, coaching, patience.

- Staff members bring even the smallest decisions to the top editor. She rolls her eyes about it in private. But she buys into it in the moment by making the decision, often in full view of the newsroom. Message received: Push decisions up. Don’t take independent initiative. Leadership challenge: Engage staff members in discussions of each person’s role and who should be making different decisions. Be available for consultation without becoming a crutch. Focus on teaching staff to make decisions in context of the larger vision of the organization, not by second-guessing what the editor might decide. Skills for leaders: Coaching, patience, consistency.

Recognize a pattern? If so, change starts with at the top.

Have you pushed change in your newsroom by changing your own practices and approach to leadership? Please share your experiences in the comments.

Weekend reading: Link love

I am playing catch-up after a couple of weeks on the road. Here are links worth checking out if you haven’t already:

-- Scott Karp at Publishing 2. 0 argues the value of links in drawing audience. Karp focuses on traffic on the Drudge report. Like Drudge or not, the site has big traffic, and Karp argues that its heavy offering of links has something to do with that (and via its links, Drudge also is a top sender of traffic to major traditional news organization sites).

“There are two main reasons why news sites are reluctant to send readers away by linking to third-party content. First, you shouldn’t send people away or else they won’t come back to your site. Second, a page with links that sends people away has low engagement, which doesn’t serve advertisers well.
“But if you actually look at the data, both of these assumptions are completely wrong.”

Here’s the post and a follow up.
Karp builds on good thinking about linking from Jeff Jarvis. Here’s Jarvis.

- More recently, Jarvis looks at the big picture on member discontent with the Associated Press. The money graf:

“The AP is not bad (no matter what foolish things it may have done in the blog kerfuffle recently). It’s just expensive. Papers the size of the Cleveland Plain Dealer say they pay $1 million a year. As they get more local, as reverse syndication models come to the fore, as they have to tighten budgets, the industry-supported AP syndication model is mortally threatened. Still, this isn’t about the AP. It’s about the new architecture of news and media.”

Read the full post here.

Steve Yelvington sees change ahead as well:

“It’s clear that we’re coming to a major fork in the road, one that could profoundly reshape the way nonlocal journalism is created and distributed in America. What’s not so clear is what’s down that road, or even how many forks we’re going to face.”

-- At Medill and the Readership Institute, Mary Nesbitt offers a little antidote to the woes of the industry - Incoming students!

- Innovate This offers still more reasons to check out Twitter.

Escaping the velvet coffin

“It’s going to come down to freeing yourself of the print model but not abandoning it.”—Lauren Rich Fine on the business model of the news industry @ONA08

The final panel from the Online News Association conference last week tackled the business model for the struggling print news industry. The panel comments and ensuing discussion offered a telling snapshot of the bind in which many traditional news organizations find themselves: How to you keep producing the print newspaper, which still brings in most of the revenue, while adopting strategies and practices that push more and better content online?
A big part of the conundrum, of course, is resources. The print newspaper model is very labor intensive, not particularly efficient, and increasingly costly to produce and distribute. News organizations are cutting people and other costs. An equally big part of the problem—I argue—is attitude and culture—people steeped in the newsroom of old have a lot of trouble discerning outmoded practices and letting them go so they can move on to more useful work.
The tension around the question of print was abundant at ONA. The panel on the business model focused on how to save a hypothetical local newspaper with an infant Web site. Members of the audience questioned why the panel was talking about print newspaper at all. Sorry folks, it’s way too soon to abandon the print newspaper. Instead, editors must increasingly define it as a niche product for a very specific audience (and charge that audience more for print) while moving as much journalism and other user resources online as quickly as possible.
The challenge feels something like this nightmare scenario: You are locked in a velvet coffin. Your challenge: Houdini like, you must extricate yourself gracefully, without damaging the fine, ornately carved wood or velvet lining. Oh, and you have to get out quickly, because the coffin is shrinking and its walls are closing in all around you. Any minute now, your once comfortable coffin becomes a vise from which you will never be free.
With all respect to those in the ONA crowd who were frustrated with the print emphasis, I liked the business model panel for its focus. In a refreshing move, the organizers asked panelists to look at a specific news outlet so we got more than wise generalities.
Here’s the scenario: The Hometown News is losing money on a traditional platform. Its business is ad- and circulation-supported, primarily. Less than 7 percent of company revenue comes from hometown.com. The newsroom is facing immediate cuts of 20% due to layoffs and buyouts. No new money for capital improvements and equipment. Web traffic, circulation, and credibility is stable, however blogger, aggregator and other. Public opinion of the entire brand is suffering. Hometown News publishers and editors are confused about where to invest new resources, should they get any.
Here are ideas from the panelists (based on my notes and the session powerpoint (courtesy of Amy Webb)):
Eduardo A. Hauser, CEO, DailyMe.com:
“Content creation cannot be tied to a platform. It must be multiscreen.”
- Consider separating journalism from other functions. “Although journalism and newspapers seems inseparable, they are not. Paying for journalism is different from paying for paper and ink delivered to the home.”
- Slowly increase the price of home delivery. “I suspect many people who were going to cancel their newspapers for cost have already done so.  I also suspect that the largest churn is coming from recent subscribers.”
- Examine news gathering costs. “Keep reducing the cost of the news gathering organization.  Focus on achieving the right balance between audience interest and investment in national and international news gathering.”
- Grow use of electronic editions and reduce print-on-paper and delivery. “Regional and local newspapers are losing money on select editions, not always on the entire week.  So -for example- the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday editions may be losing money, but the rest of the week is not. Newspapers need to find a way to create a balance between editions.  Can Hometown drop select subscriptions from home delivery and, instead, drive their readers to the web?”

Lauren Rich Fine, Media Analyst, Practitioner-in-Residence, Kent State
“Create something people value and will pay for. If you don’t then you are stuck with the advertising model.”
- Push readers online. “Wean readers from print over a very long time but emphasize the pdf version. Contemplate giving away kindles and other similar devices in return for logging on at least once a day. Ultimately, a paper with(out) printing and distribution is very economic, but without readers it really doesn’t matter.”
- Redesign the print product.  Redesign front page to be highly local. Explore reducing or eliminating sections on given days and focus sections.
- Let national, international news become more of a commodity, i.e. use newswires, but try to present alternative points of view (perhaps like the magazine The Week and or online sites such as Huffington Post).
- Focus staff on Web site. Heavily promote content on the website. “Emphasize best of blogs, most viewed articles, etc. Heavily promote ability to contribute news and comments online. Use as much as possible in print with name attribution. Heavily promote a pdf version of the paper so readers remain beholden to true editing, ability to easily navigate and still browse all of the news. This also maintains all the previous ad positions. Heavily promote individual reporters; get them back in the community. Have them set up Facebook pages and put their articles in their status updates. It is all about dialogue.”
- Outsource printing & distribution.
- Attempt to let go reporters and have them rehired at non-union Web site.

Thomas Brew, Deputy Editor, MSNBC.com:
“I do believe print (revenue) can get to a place where it will sustain itself and online will be a lot more than it is now.”

- Realign resources. “HTN should spend its own resources strictly for reporting local news and information. Every other content category - national, international, major league sports, food, lifestyle, entertainment, etc. should be from syndicated content sources. Any editor or reporter not associated with local should be laid-off.”
- Merge newsrooms. “The print and online newsrooms should be combined, but not in a wholesale way. The editorial functions should segmented by media type - text, video, and images, with specialists in each of these areas producing content components that are used for print, desktop, wireless, etc. Most of the “print” journalists will be reclassified as “text” journalists.”
- Shift printing. “Printing should either be spun off as its own business that contracts with other papers for additional business or shut down and contracted out to other papers.  Either way, the capital and unionized labor tied up in the printing operations needs to be shed.”
-- Reward innovation. “Profit sharing!”

Wendy Warren, Editor and VP, Philly.com
“Once you uncouple content and distribution you can cretate all kinds of structures in the newsroom and advertising and all kinds of different products. The world is open… it makes you think anything can be invented and by the people who you have right now.”

-- Radical restructuring. “Break up the company, reduce the newsroom.” “Hometown News immediately should begin to explore dividing the company into a content-generation business and a printing and distribution business. Each of these businesses would serve current customers - but would be charged with winning new customers as well.”
- Product options: Slimmer, rethought daily newspaper, news-filled, constantly updated, free Web site, targeted microsites, some of which could be for paying customers, a free newspaper, video shows for the site, for television partners and for syndication.

I haven’t included all the ideas, as many were overlapping. Much of the wisdom of the panel, I thought, came in ideas about how to shed costs (as painful as that sounds), particularly by rethinking printing and distribution of the print newspaper. While I agree that newsroom staffing has yet to find its level in the new world—and that level will continue to decline—rethinking production and distribution promises to at once cut costs and help re-focus and perhaps energize an increasingly smaller news-gathering operation.

(Historical note: I am not the first to apply the term “velvet coffin” to a newspaper. When I was a baby journo in Southern California in the late ‘70’s, reporters for the Los Angeles Times referred to their workplace as “the velvet coffin” because it paid well and had great professional status but offered few opportunities (they felt) to break through and shine. Who knew?)

Links: Audience research

Two new studies from the Media Management Center are worth a look:
- ”What It Takes to be a Web Favorite” concludes that news Web sites must make a user’s short list of favorites or be overlooked.
- ”Attracting Millennials to Election News Online” says young people feel the election news sites bombard them with too much information and too many choices.

Also, wsj.com is launching new networking functions for its online subscribers. Here’s a New York Times story. Stay tuned.

A marriage of old and new

This is the second of two posts from e-mail interviews with small newspaper editors I conducted in preparation for a presentation next week on culture change for the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association. (See previous Q & A here.)
J. Todd Foster is managing editor of the Bristol Herald Courier in Tennessee. (Foster and I were colleagues years ago at The Oregonian.)

Q. Describe the culture change that has taken place in your newsroom in the past few years?
A. Our company, Media General, adopted a Web-first mentality about two years ago. I have spent the past 21 months implementing that philosophy. I first had to overcome my own prejudices and competitive intensity to realize that we still owned the story whether we broke it first on the Web or in the newspaper. For more than a year now, all breaking news here goes to the Web first and immediately with a down-and-dirty version of the story, usually about four paragraphs.
MG’s Publishing Division mandated in 2008 that every newspaper train 80 percent of its journalists to post stories and photos to the Web by the end of the year. We trained 100 percent of our newsroom by the end of January 2008. Reporters are trained to post their own stories if they are in the office, but only after at least one editor does a quick read. That ensures quality. If reporters are out in the field, they are to call in via cell phones; an editor crafts a Web version and slaps it on the Web.

At the same time that we have embraced the Web, sometimes kicking and screaming, I immediately adopted a print focus on investigative and enterprise reporting. We do more of it than any paper our size (just under 40K circulation) that I know of; for example, two of my seven news reporters are dedicated to investigative reporting and long-term projects. They will turn quick daily hits when needed, but their focus is on hard-hitting investigations. So while we have gone Web first, we’ve also sacrificed a little quantity in the daily paper for quality.

Q. Please list two or three factors that helped you change the culture of your newsroom?
A. I made it clear to my newsroom that no one loves newspapers more than I do but that we had to change the way we operated to survive. I also reminded them, gently at times and not so gently on other occasions, of how many quality journalists are out of work. I set clear-cut goals whereby the Web-first mission was non-negotiable, but I backed it up with plenty of staff training and reinforcement. Some of the old-timers were resistant to change, as they always are. But I constantly hammered home, on a daily basis at first, the need to write a quick Web story version and to ensure it reached the Web. But I made sure the bulk of reporting time was for the print edition, which still pays the bills around here and will for a long time, if not forever.

Q. What results have come from culture change in your organization?
A. Rather than just focus on quick hits and breaking news, I integrated multimedia investigative reporting into the mix. For example, when I first arrived in October 2006 I personally began gathering salary data from 65 local governmental entities in our two-state, 5,000-square-mile coverage area. It took hundreds of FOIAs, constant threats to sue, cajoling, persuading and just sheer persistence to get all 65 agencies to adhere to the open records laws in Virginia and Tennessee. After 13 months of gathering this data, I sent it to some of our technical folks in Richmond to compile a searchable online database. In December 2007, our readers were able to access the names, salaries and titles of every local public employee in the area. Our Web site, which is operated by a third entity apart from the newspaper and our sister TV station (the newspaper and TV station provide 95 percent of the content for TriCities.com), then added the same data from several Northeast Tennessee towns and counties not served by our newspaper. In all, we’ve had more than 600,000 page views, a quarter million in just a few days right after we launched. The online database includes about 24,000 public officials. We also used the project as a way to test compliance with open records laws in both states. Those agencies that dragged their feet paid for it in the stories that accompanied the database launch.

Our focus on investigative/enterprise reporting has carried over even to breaking-news events. For example, in February 2008, a jilted lover killed four people at a Bristol, Tenn., apartment complex before taking his own life hours later and several miles away. Our breaking news coverage attracted the attention of CNN, which linked to our site and drove more than 250,000 page views to TriCitties.com in about two hours. Our exhaustive enterprise reporting, which delved into why the tragedy happened, continued drawing Web readers to the story, which we sectioned out into its own build out, with all the stories in one place, along with photographs, 911 tapes, etc.

Q. What advice would you give to editors who find their staffs are reluctant to try new practices and adapt to digital journalism?
A. I would advise against turning talented print reporters and writers into Web brief writers. Emphasize the speed of the Web but give the staff time to turn out resourceful print versions. In other words, embrace the new technology but go old school by throwing more resources into deep-dive journalism. That’s a tall order in this day of dwindling staffs; my advice is to give up some quantity and government process stories and focus on the kind of investigative/enterprise journalism that drives readership and ultimately, in my opinion, will be the newspaper industry’s salvation.

---

Like Ken Tuck at The Dothan Eage, Foster has relied on proven tools for culture change: Strong communication, training and leading by example. A significant part of that communication is clear differentiation between what goes online and what goes into the print newspaper, allowing the newsroom to honor investigative traditions while embracing the speed and reach of the Web.

Have these and other strategies worked in your newsroom? Please share your experiences in the comments.

Training for change

I’m doing a presentation on culture change for the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association next week. Since most of the people in the audience will be publishers of small news organizations, I asked a couple of small newspaper editors to discuss their successful strategies for culture change. I’m posting responses today and Thursday.

Ken Tuck is the managing editor of The Dothan Eagle in Dothan, Alabama. Tuck’s newsroom participated in Tomorrow’s Workforce, which I directed, in 2004-2006 and saw rapid growth in Web traffic and even some print circulation growth during that time.

This is an edited Q&A with Tuck:
Q. Describe the culture change that has taken place in your newsroom in the past few years?
A. The Dothan Eagle newsroom has totally transformed into a will-skilled multimedia newsroom. There were some challenges to this transition, but the newsroom totally bought into the idea three years ago. It has paid off in a good working environment, increased circulation and increased page views and unique visitors.

Q. Please list two or three factors that helped you change the culture of your newsroom?
A. Training was a big key. We used in-house training. That was a big hit and a morale booster because it showed the staff we were so confident in their abilities that we asked them to train others. We also sent staff members off to training. They brought what they learned back and shared it with the rest of the newsroom. The key to training was not just training editors, but providing training for every position in the newsroom.
Another key was leading by example. When the staff saw the top editors running out the door to shoot video, they knew it was important. Seeing top editors learn how to edit video showed them how important multimedia was to this newsroom.

Q. What results has culture change produced?
A. It produced unmatched coverage of our region. We don’t have any competition in print, but we blow away all broadcast media with coverage of our region. The fact that we are No. 4 in the nation in circulation growth for the past 12 months, and that our Web site is growing faster than any other in our company, is quantifiable proof that our culture change has produced excellent results.

Q. What advice would you give to editors who find their staffs are reluctant to try new practices and adapt to digital journalism?
A. Lead by example. Once you do, they will see that it’s important and the way we do journalism now. Provide training for them. That will also show them how important it is. If staffers still don’t want to change, then it’s time to let them go and recruit journalist who are.

--

Training. Leading by example. Two components of a successful culture change regimen.

Weekend reading

-- Knight Citizen News Network has a module on search engine optimization.

- Poynter’s Jill Geisler offers ”Five Myths About Managers.”

- Stan Tiner in Biloxi, Miss., (via Howard Weaver) describes his newsroom’s foray into video for Gustav.

- Recent journalism graduate Nick Rosinia offers tips for job-seeking graduates (via Mindy McAdams). Share this with your copy editors.

Steps toward change

Here is a list of steps for making your organization more adaptive and innovative. It’s based on reporting by Lauren Hertel of the University of Florida from KDMC’s 2007 leadership conference, on my reporting from the 2008 conference and on work I did for ”News, Improved: How America’s Newsrooms Are Learning to Change.” It’s an open list. I hope you’ll add your change strategies in the comments.

Steps to organizational change
Culture change is a key challenge for news executives. In conference discussions, these steps emerged as integral l to bringing change to traditional organizations.
1. Communication is critical to culture change. Unless leaders are clear and consistent in their message, the staff will be slow to come on board. Write a short elevator pitch spelling out two or three significant goals, make sure all senior editors are repeating it - several times a day.
2. Change will only come from the bottom up. Command-and-control hierarchical systems of management have worked well for getting the daily paper out on time, but executive pronouncements do little to build long term change. The old structure burdens top editors with making too many small decisions instead of working on long term strategy. Perhaps more significantly, it discourages initiative - and possible innovation - from the ranks.
3. Newsrooms must spread ownership of the Web site. Many organizations depend on a small cadre of web workers to maintain their websites and it seems more efficient in the short term.  But to build a Web culture, job assignments must give everyone a stake in the web.
4. Leaders must empower experimentation. In perfection-oriented news organizations, top executives must make it safe for staff to try new things, including some that fail. Editors must create teams focused on innovation that offer protection from daily production needs for creative groups.
5. Training is not option. Doing new things in new ways requires learning at all levels of the organization. But training must be strategic and reflect the needs and goals of the organization. It should include skills training as well as knowledge about how people use media and media business literacy.
6. Accountability is critical. From top editor and senior managers on down, each staff member must understand her role in meeting new goals and see rewards for effort and consequences for not trying.
7. Scaling newsroom projects is more efficient. Everything from multimedia to database creation must be planned for scalability, because one-shot projects waste precious resources without providing enough utility for readers.
8. Outsourcing is a viable option. Every new tool does not have to be developed in the news organization.  In fact, many off-the-shelf tools are perfectly suited to newsroom tasks and are inexpensive to use.
9. Staying competitive requires better coordination between the newsroom and advertising department. Innovation from the newsroom innovation is meaningless unless the other side of the building can sell it.
10. Look outside industry for inspiration. For too long newspapers have looked at each other for innovation.  It is time for fresh ideas, and many of them can be found in government, Silicon Valley, universities and other places.

Let the early birds soar

I am working on a presentation about workforce culture change for the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association.  We know that newspaper culture is one of the most defensive and change-resistant ever studied. Fear, economic uncertainty, buyouts and the excitement of the Web, have combined to force change in newsrooms in the past few years. But for those who want to press ahead with positive change, one of the most important lessons is that the people in an organization don’t all move at once or at the same pace.

Waving a magic wand or issuing booming proclamations will not result in the organization changing en masse. Instead identify people who create new things (innovators) and the people who are eager to try them out (early adopters). Make them successful and then build on their successes.

Here is a chart I found on Mindy McAdams blog that illustrates this very well. Check out the Rogers Adoption/Innovation Curve here.

This shows how few people in a given organization are ready initially to initiate or embrace change (perhaps 15 percent). The sweet spot is when the “early majority” joins in, bringing adoption to about half. Following that, about a third are labeled “late majority.” They’re skeptical but will eventually follow along. (I happen to think this cohort is larger than one-third in many newsrooms.)

It’s important to remember that a certain number of people - about 15 percent - may never adapt. Unfortunately, intensive and well-meaning efforts to bring them along may be a waste of time, effort and training dollars. Instead put some of that effort into managing these people into new careers. They will be happier and your organization will be better off in the long term.

But first and foremost, the key to culture change is to identify innovators and early adopters, the ones who will try new things on their own. Encourage them, especially when their peers inevitably start sniping about their new-fangled notions. Tout their work. Ask them to teach others. That’s how you build culture change brick by brick.

How have you empowered innovators and early adopters in your newsroom? What are your strategies for culture change? Please share your thoughts in the comments.