Posts about newsrooms

The new news mindset

November 30, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis
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It’s so great to see more and more news executives face the tough questions in the business and recognize the fundamental and urgent change upon them. Chuck Peters, CEO of a newspaper and TV company in Iowa (and the guy who created a blog bridge to the outside world from behind the closed doors of the recent API news CEO meeting) wrote a good post this weekend about the need for a new mindset in staff, a new understanding of the value of news organizations, new jobs and tasks for everyone, and a new and more open relationship with the community.

Peters summarizes the state of mind of news organizations:

As we work to develop this new game, or business model, within our own company, conflicts arise. Those who see the future, but can’t articulate it, are frustrated. Those who see the future and want to make it happen quickly are very frustrated by those who don’t even perceive the need for a new game. Those who don’t perceive the need for a new game are frustrated by all the commotion.

“We cannot continue to focus on products,” he says wisely. “Products are just nodes on the network, promotional flags to local intelligence, in context.” He also argues that they must change every job:

It is my strong belief that an organization such as ours, with over 500 employees, cannot expect that we can change all the mindsets and pursue a new game by simply repeating the forces and ideas driving the change in a series of seminars or links to interesting articles. We need to change the tasks, titles and organization so that we are doing new tasks, in new ways, and making the results of our efforts available immediately to our communities as we begin the larger task of organizing all this information elegantly.

‘We don’t hire editors anymore’

February 22, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis
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That’s the provocative headline I saw in Folio’s report from its conference and a speech by Meredith president Jack Griffin. The fuller context:

As a result, the company invested in its interactive and integrated marketing businesses–spending roughly $600 million since 2002 on launches, acquisitions and building out its existing Web sites, Griffin said, as well as redefining its editorial hiring approach. “We don’t hire editors anymore,” he said. “We hire content strategists.”

I’m not sure what that means. But it made for a good headline.

What would you kill? Jocks?

February 17, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis
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Michael Fioritto was nice enough — and skilled at Excel enough — to compile results from my little survey that asked you what you’d kill from a newspaper’s budget. Keep in mind that it’s unscientific as hell and that respondents could pick as many suggestions as they liked. I need to do a proper survey and probably will at my New Business Models for News conference (this one was just a demo of Google Forms). In any case, when Michael did the tabulation, 425 people had responded and here’s what they wanted to ax:

Financial tables 43.06%
Sports section 21.65%
Sports columnists 8.00%
Entertainment section 3.76%
Movie critic 3.76%
Business section 2.59%
Syndicated features 2.59%
TV critic 2.59%
Music critic 1.88%
Book critic 1.65%
Comics 1.65%
Foreign bureaus 1.65%
Lilfestyle section 1.41%
Washington bureau 1.18%
Editorial columnists 0.71%
Copy editors 0.47%
Online site 0.47%
Top editors 0.47%
Editorial page 0.24%
Photographers 0.24%

Financial tables are obvious (which is why it’s all the more appalling that all papers haven’t killed them).

What fascinates me most is the large number who want to kill sports. I’m one of those who doesn’t read the sports section (you always knew I was neither a real man nor a real American). So I just throw it in the back seat. But sports sections are also expensive to produce — lots of staff — and bring in few endemic advertisers. Granted, some people buy the paper to get the sports section alone. But this makes me wonder whether sports should be a separate product. If it’s a great one, perhaps you could charge even more for it than you charge for the paper. Could it work as a free paper? Well, the lack of related advertising could be a problem there. Should sports live only online with the opportunity to have more media and interactivity? Should newspapers go out of the sports business? Those seem to be the questions to ask.

Just do it

January 19, 2008 by Jeff Jarvis
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At the Guardian Media Group’s online offsite yesterday, I watched a live demonstration of the benefits of following Howard Owens’ dictum for nonwired journalists.

I keep nattering on about the need to retrain newsrooms. And I assume that this should entail at least all-day sessions with folks like me earning a few bucks for training the newsroom. That probably does still make sense (at least the part about paying me).

But GMG digital czar Simon Waldman accomplished the primary goal — demystifying all this web 2.0 stuff and making it obviously easy — in an hour-and-a-half exercise pitting teams of execs against each other with a short list of tasks:
* Take photos and upload them to Flickr.
* Make a video and upload it to YouTube.
* Start a wiki page and add links and a photo.
* Start a blog and embed the video and photos.
* Join Facebook and join a group there.
Granted, many of the people in the room were online folks and all of them cared about digital; that’s why they were there. So in any newsroom, I’d take a lesson from that and similarly stack the deck, sprinkling online veterans among the unwired folks to offer help. The sure sign of success is that these content folks got past the tools and did what content folks do, bringing editorial oomph — and a few ads — to geeky tasks. And so everyone learned they could do it. And they had fun.

Howard’s bigger assignment includes tasks related to RSS, SMS, Twitter, and Del.icio.us. So make that the graduate course. But there’s no reason that every news organization could not and should not do what GMG did yesterday.

(Disclosure: I write and consult for the Guardian.)

The fount of all news

November 12, 2007 by Jeff Jarvis
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Peter Horrocks, head of the BBC Newsroom, writes about the consolidation of its news operations across all media. Now one newsroom serves radio, TV, and online and he’s its boss.

Practically every news operation I know of is struggling with this now: to consolidate or not?

I was on the side of separation at the beginning of the web and for good reasons. At Advance, where I used to work, we set up separate online operations to make sure that what was made for the web was appropriate to the web (not just a PDF of a newspaper) and to assure that the web gained its own value (and wasn’t just given away to advertisers as value-added). That worked.

But I’ve come to think that consolidation is inevitable. Any news organization has to get to the point where there is no difference between old media people and new media people. That takes much training and more mixing of tribes than the end of a season on Survivor (but just as much loss and pain).

This is, of course, easier said than done. At the same time, more technical skills are needed; one could consolidate too much and, in the words of one of my students, turn every journalist into an eight-armed monster — and do a halfassed job in any medium. And revenues are going down. And managers try to wrangle two completely different business models for industries in completely different life cycles under the same roof with the same people.

But at the end of the day, whenever that will be, we know this: Every journalist needs every tool to gather and tell every story how best it should be told. Every reader/listener/viewer/user should be able to get the news however, whenever, and wherever he or she wants. News operations won’t be able to afford the inefficiency of separate staffs all putting out the same news. And that’s why I think consolidation is inevitable.

So that takes yet another new management skill: mixing two or more cultures and operations into one (and hiring the right kind of people to help and, yes, getting rid of those who can’t and won’t come along). I think that training needs to be aimed not only at eliminating the line between old and new skills, it also needs to show new ways to do journalism better, to give an understanding of the new ecosystem in which media live, and to instill a culture of innovation.