Best practices for innovation and initiating culture change in newsrooms
It may seem counter intuitive but creating a culture of innovation requires structure and processes that give autonomy to act quickly and the freedom to take risks.
That’s one of the takeaways from a new report from the American Press Institute. “The best practices for innovation within news organization” by Craig Silverman is an in-depth report examining practices and ideas from some of the most innovative news organizations and news leaders. It is one of two studies about innovations released by API last week.
The best practices report is likely to be useful to anyone in any type of newsroom or media company. The 14 people interviewed for the study lead product teams, are in charge of legacy newsrooms in transition, fund journalism innovation projects, teach and research innovation, run digitally native newsrooms, and more. The report provides examples of the different cultures, structures and processes.
Silverman has organized the report into four themes with each segment offering actionable advice and methods to move innovation forward in your organization.
• Leaders must set, enforce but also nurture priorities.
• How to create a culture and structure for innovation.
• How to generate and pursue ideas.
• How to gather feedback, measure and iterate.
In the API's second report, it unveils a program in development to help news organizations tackle underlying issues of transformation. The action plan is based on new research described in API’s new report “A culture-based strategy for creating innovation in news organization” by Jeff Sonderman and Tom Rosenstiel.
The program approaches the challenge of innovation first at the human level by identifying the needs, behaviors, motivations, and problems of different types of people across the many functions of news organizations and companies. The findings were synthesized into personas that represent the experiences of key players. These personas help define the core challenges to journalism organizations. The research was done with the support of a grant from the Knight Foundation.
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