December 09, 2008
Our new leadership report is out today!
KDMC offers a collection of tips, tools and takeaways from seminar experts for newsroom leaders in the digital age
The Leadership Conference is a highlight of Knight Digital Media Center’s annual training calendar. Newsroom leaders come to the center to hear from experts in digital media, innovation and newsroom change. They return to their newsrooms with strategies and ideas for moving online.
Today, KDMC is pleased to release a report compiled from the July 2008 Leadership Conference and an earlier leadership gathering in 2007. The report is organized as a series of lists and bullet points—tools, takeaways, quotes and action steps, for example—designed to spark new thinking among newsroom leaders and link them to resources that will help them develop their ideas.
I hope you’ll take a look at the KDMC Leadership Report. Here’s a sampling:
From Takeaways:
Stacy Lynch, a consultant and project manager for the Media Management Center, warns traditional news organizations against “the sucking sound of print” as they transition to online while attempting to maintain the newspaper.
“Print will take over every ounce of energy you have,” Lynch said. The brutal truth is there’s nothing in print that has no value. Everything has a little bit a value. Every cut hurts. You just have to figure out what hurts less.”
From Tools:
Key performance indicators provide more meaningful information on site traffic than simple counts of visits or visitors. Dana Chinn, a faculty member at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism, details KPIs and their uses:
Often, that KPI is not a simple number such as time on site or unique monthly visitors. Instead, the most meaningful information may be from a ratio or comparison of two different numbers.
From Culture changers:
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.
Also see Quotes, Reading, Action Steps
We envision a report that can grow and evolve as the challenges of newsroom leadership change. Please add your ideas in the comments.
By Michele McLellan, 12/09/08 at 1:00 am
Posted in Audience development | Business model | 08 Class: Leadership | Culture | Multimedia | Interactivity | Innovation | Emerging roles and jobs | Leadership | Metrics | Management | Project development | Search and SEO | Social Networks | Staffing | Training | Tools for journalists
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