Innovate this

Innovation doesn’t come easy to news organizations. They were built to produce a single product and their assembly-line culture is often highly resistant to new ideas (or even old ideas that didn’t work at some distant point in the past). Editors at the Knight Leadership Conference heard from several practitioners of innovation in media, including Chad Dickerson of Yahoo. Dan Pacheco of the Bakersfield Californian, and Bill Gannon of Lucas Films. Here are presentations by Dickerson and Pacheco. (I hope to get Gannon’s tomorrow.)

I think the big message for newsrooms from these talks is that failure is an acceptable outcome. Do it. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, stop doing it. That’s an increasingly tough proposition for editors with dwindling resources, but good advice nonetheless. Learning always has value in the long haul.

Comments