Why startups will find the future and newspapers won't

"He concluded it would be easier to start from scratch rather than try and change a longstanding culture."

This from a story about a Philadelphian banker who left a name-brand financial institution to start the first green bank on the East Coast. Green banks work on "triple bottom lines." In addition to evaluating the financial bottom line of a loan, the also consider the borrower's impact on the environment and on people.

Such an idea runs counter to the aforementioned "longstanding culture" of most banks. Banks are traditionally about making money. To ask them to potentially compromise their ability to reap the largest amount of money possible is anathema to their very programming. Which is why the Philadelphian decided to start his own venture, rather than try to make it work within the walls of the name-brand institution.

The same could be said about the world of journalism. Much of what needs to be done to find the future of news runs directly counter to core principles in the newspaper world. The idea that news first and foremost belongs on newsprint, for example. That stories should be written in inverted pyramid-style. That the reporter is the voice of authority. That the news organization is in control.

Sometimes longstanding cultures are simply too entrenched to enable the requisite revolutionary ideas to grow and flourish. Which is why the future of news will likely be discovered by the succession of startups that are already emerging, rather than by newspapers themselves.

Photo courtesy of FreeRangeLife. Creative Commons License.

The dangers of relying on insiders (to save you from dire straits)

Slate's new online magazine, a business and financial news hub called The Big Money, had an interesting piece yesterday on the mutual demises of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch--and offered an insight into why one of them was able to find safe harbor through acquisition while the other simply imploded.

The difference, suggested writer Henry Blodget (yes, he of the Merrill Lynch securities scandal, but who has since rehabilitated himself as a business and tech writer), lay in the fact that Merrill has been helmed for the last year by an outsider brought in to save the company, whereas Lehman continued to be led by a long-time insider.

The story suggests an important lesson for news organizations and the challenges they face.

Granted, financial organizations are imploding due to a crisis of their own making, whereas news organizations are being battered by external forces. But the net effect is the same. Both industries have been facing dire straits. It is possible that the lesson from the Merrill / Lehman parable is that a clear-headed, dispassionate outsider may be better able to find the way forward than one whose understanding of the world--and identity--is wrapped up firmly "inside" the box.

In the news business then, the way forward may be found by news organizations that bring in outsiders--to lead, to set priorities, to make the hard decisions about what beloved elements of the news business will be jettisoned and what supposed travesties will be adopted--rather than relying on long-time journos to try to invent futures for the institutions they hold dear.