Newsroom change: Forget the crowd, find the change agent(s)

Ryan Sholin has terrific advice for pushing change in the newsroom: Don’t waste your time trying to change the whole newsroom at once. Cultivate the early adopters.

I’ve seen this approach work in newsroom after newsroom, as Tim Porter and I described in ”News, Improved.” Once the early adopters go to work, the discussion can move from the abstract (and fear-inducing) notions of change to concrete examples of new forms of journalism. Conversely, I have been in many newsrooms where executives thought that merely telling their staffs en masse to change meant they would. That’s a formula for frustration.

As Sholin says: “.. you can’t mandate mindset.  But you can grow culture.”

What approach has worked for your newsroom? Do you have a way to identify and foster early adopters?