The necessity of triage

Last week, I wrote about how Google's 20 percent policy* fosters innovation and suggested that news organizations similarly consider giving their employees time to imagine and experiment with new ways of attracting and retaining readers. I also noted that most news editors would probably scream bloody murder at me for suggesting that they give their staffers a full day a week to work on something other than feeding the news beast, at a time when so many newsrooms are struggling to meet daily news demands. And I wrote that, in order to ensure that the operation even exists tomorrow, newspapers have to be willing to sacrifice some daily news demands today.

Happily, I'm not the only one who thinks this.

Chris O'Brien is a business reporter who's covered Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News for most of the past decade. He's also working on The Next Newsroom project, to design an ideal newsroom from scratch.

There must have been something in the Bay Area water last week because O'Brien expressed many of the same thoughts as I was having, over on the MIT MediaShift Idea Lab blog. Specifically, he wrote:

If 100 percent of your newsroom's time is devoted to just producing your current products, then you're already doomed.

And he said:

No one can simply order up innovation on demand. Wish as you might, the innovation fairy won't sprinkle pixie dust on your newsroom while you sleep. But you can encourage innovation, nurture it by lowering barriers, supporting those employees with entrepreneurial drive, and providing a fertile environment for their ideas.

He also noted that myopia regarding how to innovate is not unique to the newspaper business. It's characteristic of any business that enjoyed a long period of uncontested domination:

It's the classic fate that strikes any once-dominant company when the world turns upside down. It happens all the time in world of technology. Look no further than Microsoft, which after more than a decade, is still trying to adapt its business to the Web, as evidenced by its ill-fated bid to buy Yahoo (another company that's failed to innovate). The Redmond giant can't let go of a legacy product (Windows) enough to reorient itself to where the market and its users have gone.

O'Brien's prescription is one many Silicon Valley technology companies use to create the future and ensure the continuing health of their businesses:

1. Make it a priority


2. Create a process


3. Foster new collaboration


4. Offer incentives


5. Evaluate and learn

Again, this might seem overwhelming to news leaders already feeling strapped. But hopefully it's actually encouraging. It gives permission to editors to to do what needs to be done, even if--or, rather, especially when--doing so requires violating the canon. Previously, newspapers held firm to the notion that they needed to be the institutions of record, that they needed to cover everything newsworthy going on in their communities, that to miss a story was an almost unrecoverable shame.

In this new world, however, news organizations need to triage. They need to be willing to let go of some stories today, some news coverage today, so they can focus efforts on ensuring the survival of the institution as a whole.

* Google gives its employees one day a week to work on a project of their choosing.

Photo courtesy of otisarchives1. Creative Commons license.

How about Googling up?

When I was laboring in the trenches of Silicon Valley, one of things I admired about Google (who was a next door neighbor for a while) was that they gave their people one day off a week to work on a project of their choosing. And not just some project they had chosen from a list drafted by the Google leadership. Just the opposite. They were allowed to work on any project that they dreamed up that rocked their boat. Any idea that entered their little heads that they thought might be cool to try to bring to fruition. The projects, of course, had to be something to that might be useful to Google. Employees couldn't go off and build macrame birdhouses or 12-layer wedding cakes. But as long as it was something that might one day be useful to Google, it was fair game.

The policy was based on the idea that letting smart people work on stuff that they dreamed up and were passionate about was much more likely to produce useful inventions than a top-down process where the muckety-mucks, or even a committee, decided "what we should build next." People working on their own projects get to say to themselves, "Hey, what tool would I like to have?" And then they get to figure out how to make it happen. And since they're invested in, or at least inspired by, the project, they're much more likely to figure out a way to make it work.

The reason why the Google 20 percent policy works is that, in the world of knowledge or creative work, not all hours are created equal. On an assembly line, one man-hour essentially equals another man-hour. At the end of 40 man-hours of work, you have a number of widgets equal to 40 x the standard rate of widgets-created-by-a-person-in-an-hour. Knowledge work isn't like that. Creative work isn't like that. The output from one hour of an indifferent, or demotivated, employee's time does not equal the output from one hour of a motivated employee's time. You know this. Think how much more you get done when you're jazzed about a project, and how much more excellent the outcome is, than when you're indifferent about it.

So what does this have to do with newspapers? I previously wrote about how, if I were a newspaper publisher today, I'd organize 100 newspapers in a massive R&D project. This is a related idea. If I were a newspaper editor today, I'd seriously consider giving my staff one day a week to work on any idea they wanted as long as its ultimate goal was: Find ways to attract and retain readers. (And it goes without saying, of course, that I'm talking about attracting and retaining readers online. Print is on its way out. It's just a matter of time.)

I can picture, of course, an army of newspaper editors telling me I'm friggin' crazy if I think they're going to give their people one day a week to work on some project of their own, when the paper is already short-staffed due to layoffs and the ever-voracious Web. But here's my response. And I say it, really, with the greatest respect and compassion for the position newspaper editors are in: The Titanic is going down. You can either use your staff to maintain the ship, or you can use them to build a lifeboat. In scenario A, it's going to go down and take most of your people with it. In scenario B, there's a fighting chance that some will survive and that a more seaworthy vessel will have been built. Newspaper reporters are smart, creative people. Given the chance, I imagine they will come up with some pretty neat ways of presenting stories online or with some pretty cool tools that will draw in more readers than the standard slap-up-our-print-stories-onto-the-Web approach that most newspapers are taking today.

What we can learn from NBA.com

Fast Company is always a great source of ideas on innovation and adaptation to changing conditions. The June 2006 issue (which I came across while culling my ever-growing stash of magazines) did not disappoint. There on page 97 was a story about how the NBA was using the web to hook a whole new generation of hoops fans. Their innovations sparked some interesting thoughts about things the news business could do online to similiarly attract and keep readers.

Here are a few things NBA.com did:

-- They realized that unlike TV watchers, Internet users weren't interested in watching a whole game over the Internet. So how to give them something they would want? Slice and dice game footage to give fans the ability to watch short snippets, especially snippets of the specific players or plays the fans were interested in.

-- NBA.com made it possible for fans to have specific snippets beamed directly to their handheld devices, based on preferences they had set for specific teams or players. Again, slice and dice and serve up specifics, rather than the whole 2 1/2 hour game.

-- They started to monetize the services by embedding short ads in the clips. And again, though the article didn't go into it, I'm guessing those weren't simply repurposed 15- or 30-second spots from TV. I'm guessing the ads were specifically designed for the devices (Internet or handheld) to achieve the advertisers' goal (brand impressions) without providing a bad experience for the user (like forcing them to watch a 15-second ad in order to watch a 15-second clip).

-- At the time of the article, NBA.com was also toying with the idea of sending text messages about specific developments, when a player had hit a certain number of points, for example. Clicking on the message would take the user straight to a live broadcast of the game. That way, the fan could tune in only if the game met certain conditions the fan considered interesting.

Newspapers could learn a lot from NBA.com.

The first thing is the whole mindset issue. The NBA didn't just look at the Web and say to themselves, "How can we use this thing to do the exact same thing here that were doing on TV?" (ie: broadcast games) They realized it was a different beast and that fans would want to use it differently.

Slate editor Jacob Weisberg once told me that one of the problems some print editors have had in transitioning to the Web is that they look at the Web and see words and so they assume that a reader wants to interact with the content there in the exactly same way as they interact with a print newspaper. And that all the editors have to do to make the Web work for them is to convert their print stories into digital form. Some of them don't get that a reader approaching the Web is going to want to do different things than a reader approaching a piece of newsprint. The difference is subtle, Weisberg said, but it makes all the difference in whether an online site succeeds or fails.

Second, the NBA realized that the nature of the Web made it possible to deliver things that had never been possible to deliver via television. With TV, broadcasters can only send a single thing out to the entire audience. So they choose the thing most interesting to the majority: the entire game. In the digital world, however, it's possible to serve up different things to different members of the audience, based on what those individuals request. Had the NBA simply used the new medium to do the old thing (send a single thing to the entire audience), they would have missed the real opportunity on the Web (the ability to enable individuals within the audience to receive only those things most valuable to them).

Indeed, noted the Fast Company article in explaining how NBA.com was different from its peers: "The strategy at most entertainment companies looking to capitalize on the new networked gadgets is just to peddle out the same old stuff in new places." The NBA's key insight was that people wanted to do different things on the new devices.

Specifically,
* In the old TV world, the user desire was simply: "Show me what is going on now."
* In the new digital world, there were two new desires:
-- "Show me only those aspects of past events that I care about"
and
-- "Notify me if a certain event has taken place or a specific condition has changed, so that I can take a particular action that is important to me"

Understanding those new needs, NBA.com built on the old content (game footage) and on activities they were already doing (following games in real time) to create new types of content (player snippets, play snippets, event-driven text messages) to meet those new desires.

So, off the top of my head, what similar kinds of things could newspapers do to attract and keep readers?

-- What if readers could sign up to get news only about certain public figures or certain issues they cared about? In San Francisco, for example, if they wanted to get alerted every time there was a new item about supervisor Chris Daly? Or about parking regulations? Or about a business in a specific industry? Or even a specific restaurant?

The New York Times is already doing a version of this with its Keyword Alerts, which enable readers to tell nytimes.com to send them only those stories that include the readers specify (like "Afghanistan," "interest rate," or "Manolo Blahnik," for example). More newspapers should be doing this.

-- How else could the news be sliced and diced and delivered to readers in ways that make sense on handheld devices? It can't, of course, be a matter of just shoving an article or a blog post down the pipe. It would have to involve reshaping the content into a snippet that was useful to someone who's receiving it at work, while riding the bus home, or at a baseball game. I don't have the answer, but I'm sure it's there.

-- And how else could the news be provided to meet the desire "Notify me if a certain event has happened or a condition has changed, so that I can take a particular action that is meaningful to me"? Again, I haven't thought this one through, but I'm sure there's an answer. Or many.

Photo courtesy of spcoon. Creative Commons license.

Minding the gap

Last week, The News Hour noted that with the termination of the Los Angeles Times' standalone Book Review section, only three newspapers still had separate book sections: The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and the New York Times.

The News Hour invited Steve Wasserman, a past LA Times book review editor, to comment on the demise of book coverage in print and the explosion of literary commentary online.

Wasserman took the position that this demise is catastrophic: "Despite the robust nature or at least very excited nature of the conversations on the Internet, the best criticism still being written today is being published in magazines," he said. "It will be a long time before the Internet gives us a forum in which people unsupported by institutions can deliver us that kind of literary criticism."

In these few phrases, Wasserman makes himself both right and wrong.

He may be correct that the caliber of online criticism does not match the best of what is in print. I say "may be" simply because I don't follow this world, either in print or online. I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. And he may also be correct that it will be a long time before this caliber exists online. Again, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. (Though I suspect that at least some independent online reviewers would challenge him on that, perhaps including Kassia Krozer, editor of Booksquare.com, who was also on the show.)

Where he's wrong, though, is in the big picture. Just because there will be a gap between the demise of quality print-based reviews and the rise of quality online criticism doesn't mean the demise of print is a calamity. It just means exactly what he said: There will be a gap.

This is what happens when one industry dies and another emerges to take its place. It takes a while for the new industry to pick up all the slack left behind by the old industry. Whether you think that's a calamity or not depends on your viewpoint. I'm pragmatic, so it doesn't bother me. The gap is only temporary. I have faith the new industry will take on the old roles. I have faith.

Photo courtesy of austinevan. Creative Commons license.

What we can learn from the Orlando Sentinel

The Orlando Sentinel, it turns out, has taken a novel approach to ensuring its survival: It turned basic notions of how to run a newspaper on its head.

-- They taught their reporters to think of themselves as "news gatherers" responsible for delivering for both Web and print

-- When it came to breaking news, they taught their reporters to think "Web first"

-- They eliminated editing layers and increased front-line accountability

“We were very newspaper-production driven,” Sentinel editor Charlotte Hall told the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. "I wanted to see ourselves in the new world as driven by news gathering across platforms."

Yay!

Here's what I like about this:

-- The Sentinel realized that many of its modus operendi (modi operendi?) were merely artifacts of the constraints imposed on journalism when journalism gets delivered in paper format once a day.

They realized that, when you have multiple means of delivering journalism, you can jettison some of the givens you previously took for granted.

-- They broke out of the mindset of being newspaper reporters. And instead, they taught themselves to think of themselves as "people who gather news and disseminate it in different ways." Mindset is hugely important. Everything you do follows from who you think you are. When the Sentinel taught its people to think of themselves as newsgatherers first, it probably liberated them from some of the thinking that was blocking them from operating effectively in the new world.

Photo courtesy of sskennel. Creative Commons license.

They get it!

The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism has some exciting news:

57% of journalists at large newspapers say “web technology offers the potential for greater-than-ever journalism and will be the savior of what we once thought of as newspaper newsrooms.”

Only 4% worry that the demands of the Web might undermine journalistic values, especially accuracy.

Yay! Mindset is everything. Without the right mindset, we journalists can't find our way forward in this new space. This survey shows that journalists are shifting their perspectives and adopting (embracing?) the mindset that is fundamental to find the future of news.

We're on our way!

Photo courtesy of Eponabri. Creative Commons license.

What we can learn from GM

GM is madly scrambling to regain its footing, as the bottom falls out of its SUV business. Oil prices are through the roof with no sign of ever coming down again, and American consumers are taking note. GM is quickly ratcheting back its SUV sales projections and laying off workers and shutting down plants in the face of the new reality.

Sound familiar?

It's exactly what newspapers are going through. Environmental conditions change. Things that an industry previously could count on to drive its business are no longer there. The industry has to figure out a new model going forward.

The question, then, is: What can the newspaper industry learn from how GM's handling its situation?

I don't know what the answer is. I haven't done the digging to figure out what their strategy is and to evaluate how likely I think it is to succeed. But here's my point: There is something to learn. It might be that their strategy offers a roadmap for our industry. They may have insights on how you reprioritize initiative and reallocate resources. They might have insights on how to extract productivity from a reduced workforce. They might have insights on how to identify untapped value within the existing system.

Alternatively, the lesson could be that there is no hope. There is no strategy that's going to take one model that was so dependent on certain conditions into a new world where those conditions no longer exist. It may be that GM won't survive, that instead, smaller auto manufacturers that are designed to exist in the new conditions to rise up and take its place. Similarly, it may be that there is no future for the newspaper model and that newer models, like TalkingPointsMemo or CBS Marketwatch will rise up to take its place.

Maybe GM has figured out how to cross over to the future. Or maybe they're figuring out that there is no future. Who knows. But the folks looking for answers in the news business could do worse that looking under the hood at GM to see if those folks, those business folks, have any useful insights.

Photo courtesy of Hamed Saber. Creative Commons license.