In praise of experimentation

NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof started Twittering in November.

Here’s what I love about it, as reflected in a tweet on Dec 3:

@sashak and @myoung Thanks for the welcome. I'm trying to avoid going extinct. Help teach me how to do this....--ndk

Kristof has no idea what he’s doing… and yet he’s trying it anyway. That’s the kind of mindset we need in the news business: Just try it and figure it out as you go.

Here’s the second thing I like about it: “Help teach me how to do this.”

Gone is the traditional journalistic “we know best” arrogance. (Not that I’m accusing Kristof of being arrogant. I've never met the guy, but he actually seems like one of the most down-to-earth journos out there.) In place of that distance-creating arrogance are:

a) The admission that he’s ignorant (or, put another way, a beginner),

b) A recognition that the folks out there can probably help us journos find our way to the future, and

c) A willingness to help them help us.

All of these are incredibly valuable mindsets for finding our way forward. Kristof's courageous dive into something he doesn't quite understand--but realizes might hold a key to the future--is a model to emulate.

It's OK not to know

According to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, 95 percent of newspaper editors and publishers feel like they can't predict what newsrooms are going to look like in five years.

And apparently, they think that's a problem.

"I feel I'm being catapulted into another world, a world I don't really understand," Virginian-Pilot editor Denis Finley told Pew.*

But you know what, that's OK. That's what innovation is all about.

When I first landed in Silicon Valley in the late '90s, nobody knew what the future of the Internet was going to be. They had no idea whether a certain kind of website would have a future. Whether a certain business model would pan out. Whether they would be able to find customers or an audience for a specific use of the web.

Not only was that not a problem, however, it was part of the fun. I can remember interviewing for a job at a specific Internet company, a new one that was doing something that had never been done, and thinking to myself, "By working here and coming up with new ways of doing stuff, I'm going to be creating the paradigms that websites are going to be using for years to come."

Of course, the difference was that there wasn't an "old way" of doing things that we were breaking away from. We weren't at risk of breaking any paradigms. No paradgims existed.

And this is what I think is the crux of the problem for traditional jouralists. Their paradigms, which served them extremely well in the print era, are the ball and chain preventing them from diving into the digital world, moving forward confidently, and actually discovering how to use the web to deliver great journalism.

There are two paradigms in particular: A canon, and a bias against failure.

The canon, of course, is everything that we think of as constituting "good journalism." Being "objective." Keeping attitude out of copy. Inverted pyramids. Publishing only once you have all your ducks in a row. I've talked about that before and will talk about it again, so I'll put this aside for now.

The bias against failure is equally problemantic. This is the longstanding view that any error was cause for monumental shame. What reporter hasn't dreaded filing a correction, knowing that too many of them would constitute a firing offense? What editor hasn't raged upon being scooped? What journalist hasn't died in their chair when a source called up to tell them they got the story all wrong?

And yet, in this new world we're entering, there's going to be nothing but failure. Maybe that overstates the case a bit. But by definition, when you're trying something new, you're experimenting. And when you're experimenting, many of your experiments will fail. That's how you find what doesn't work--and, eventually, what does. As Thomas Edison once said, "I haven't failed. I've just found 1,000 ways that don't work."

So here's my advice to all the editors out there biting their nails over the fact that they don't know what the future is: Relax. Relax, experiment, learn, try again. And you will get there, eventually, even if you don't know where it is you're going.

* Via Maui Time Weekly, Via AltWeeklies.com

Photo courtesy of Dementia_X. Creative Commons license.

Before you can find, you must first let go

AdvertisingAge's 3-minute video roundup today features Newsweek senior staff writer Johnnie Roberts telling the audience at last week's "Future of Media" panel that everyone at the magazine, editorial and business alike, is descending on this year's gaggle of interns, hoping they'll reveal the secret to making social networking work--presumably because Newsweek folks think that's the key to making the Internet work for magazines.

Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. It is encouraging that editors and biz folk are reaching out to the younger, and perhaps savvier, folks in this biz, instead of trying to figure it all out on their own.

But what's wrong with the picture is a bunch of senior staff hoping to find a goose laying a golden egg -- the idea that the key to survival is to find something out there and bring it in here and then, boom, you're done.

The paradigm is wrong.

Yes, there's plenty of good stuff out there. But traditional news organizations will never be able to leverage it effectively until they first let go of outdated ways of thinking about news. You can't stuff new tools into old ways of thinking and expect that they'll work.

Andre Gide once said, "In order to discover new lands, you must first be willing to lose sight of the shore." In order to find the future of news, traditional newspeople must first be willing to say goodbye some of the things they know and hold sacred. Ideas that were entirely appropriate in the old world--on the old shores, if you will--but either won't work or are actually counter-productive in the new one.

The idea, for example, that news must be delivered seriously. That you can't have a voice, a personality, a point of view in your writing. The idea, for example, that you always have to write authoritatively, as if you know the score, never sharing with your audience the parts you do understand and the parts you don't. The idea, for example, that news is broadcast. We tell you. You listen. Rather than a conversation.

It will only be in letting go of those things that don't work, that traditional newspeople will be able to begin the journey to the new shores. And it will be hard. Because they will have to let go of the old long before they grasp the new. They will have to spend days, weeks, months, even years perhaps, bobbing in confusing seas, not really getting it, feeling horribly off balance. The exact anathema to what traditional newspeople like to feel.

And yet, they are entirely capable of it, if they only allow themselves to give it a shot. For what, after all, is digging up a story than that very experience? The starting out, not really getting it, not being able to see the story, but just continuing, continuing, continuing, asking more questions, and gathering more information, until finally the picture becomes clear. We do this every day in our reporting. We simply must find the courage to do it in our business as well.

Photo courtesy of tiarescott