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NYT Now, which launched last year, is an app that provides a selection of New York Times stories, plus aggregated content. The NYT Now team is staffed with a combination of internal and external hires, with editors and developers working closely together.
That just leaves one thing on the personnel side: who to lead this “ragtag band of people,” as Latour put it. He thinks the best results come from a person who knows how the organization works, and at the same time who can envision success and move it into reality, “who delivers something fresh.” That’s an unusual comb...
As for the where: The Minneapolis Star Tribune moved to new offices this year. Editors for both print and digital sit together at a “hub” in the center of the newsroom. The Journal has a similar setup in New York; other newsrooms are starting to provide space for engineers and product designers on the floor as well.
Don’t put your newsroom startup in a corner or in the basement, Latour implored. The Journal has two digital teams working in the middle of the newsroom on a mobile initiative and the new WSJ.com. Developers and digital designers moved into the newsroom in May, and the digital designers now also report to it. Mobile an...
It’s the execution that counts.
If building a startup within a legacy news medium is one way to spur innovation and the transformation to digital, changing your day-to-day operations is another track. It alters your workflow, papers that have made the change tell me, and it alters the newsroom’s way of thinking.
Meetings do matter. Sometimes it’s on a small scale. At The Boston Globe, the managing editor for digital has a Monday morning meeting with the head of products, the head of editorial, and a representative from the sales department.
The Sports section announces a chat about hockey and both pre-game and post-game blogs. The Features Section will be blogging about fish sandwiches. The business desk will run the crop forecast outlook for corn.
A day later, at the The New York Times: Different venue, same idea. The most important meeting of the day, the 10 am news meeting, was officially retired this spring. Up until then, it was called the Page One Meeting and editors pitched their stories accordingly: The emphasis was on the print paper, and on page A1.
Now the meeting has a new name — the News Meeting — and a new feel. A social media editor starts by putting up the website and the mobile app on a big screen, and walking the group through what happened the previous day.
There are close to twenty editors sitting at the oval-shaped table and another ten sitting on the second row. The Paris and London Bureaus are on speakerphone and Clifford Levy, who led the team that developed NYT Now, is looking at his Chartbeat dashboard on a laptop.
All the pitches are focused on digital. The editor for National has a story on the prosecution of Senator Bob Menendez for that evening, but he’s asked “why wouldn’t we put it up right now.” The Business desk offers a story on the New York Auto Show to go online and the Culture Desk has a review of the new Whitney Muse...
No one mentions sections, page numbers, or even the front page. A smaller group will decide on that later today — it’s not relevant for this (most important daily) meeting.
The meeting ends with the photo editor presenting a compilation of pictures to possibly be published online: A Cold War bunker in Norway, Secretary of State John Kerry during the Iran nuclear talks in Switzerland, and a “cuddly and fluffy angora show bunny“. The image is still on the screen when the room empties.
Be sensitive to office politics; implement a no-jerk-policy. People naturally fear change, so explain (and explain and explain) and assist in building a new skill-set for colleagues outside of the startup. At the same time, educate your new hires about the history and the shared values of the organization. Have brown b...
The masthead stays on message. The newsroom leadership should back the startup and not get flustered when mistakes happen — because they will, and they should. This public display of high-level support is crucial and thus criticism is dealt with informally and privately. The rest of the newsroom should not be made awar...
It’s sometimes difficult to get an organization’s leadership to recognize the fact that the company needs to transform digitally. The problem is structural, according to Harvard Business School professor Kotter: The organization is set up to publish a new paper every day. it’s not set up to figure out how to make that ...
Even if a newsroom’s leadership realizes the need to innovate digitally, there are still hundreds of journalists to take into account, and not everybody is there yet.
David Skok is managing editor for digital at The Boston Globe, which has recently launched two news startups — Crux, “covering all things Catholic,” and Beta Boston, covering tech news in the region.
Skok believes in Clay Christensen’s RPP theory: It’s about resources (people, budgets), processes (workflow, digital-first), and priorities (editorial and managerial). When all of these are in place, the company can more easily adapt to change.
Sree regularly gives talks to newsrooms and reminds them of the U.S. railroad companies that didn’t realize how serious it was that their business model was under pressure from airlines. They assumed they were in the railroad business, when in fact they were in the transportation business — and see where they are now.
Similarly, Sree said, journalists aren’t in the print paper business anymore. They’re in the news, information and data business.
The Huffington Post’s Koda Wang, who oversees the company’s global expansion, urges newspapers to stop thinking of themselves as newspapers: “The idea of a fixed print format is long obsolete.” And so the thinking in the newsroom has to change accordingly.
— Visibility and repetition help. Ishmael recommends “always over-communicating.” Tailor different messages for different groups: vendors, journalists, the board of directors that needs to sign off on an investment.
— Don’t get frustrated. As Kotter said, “You’ll never win everyone over.” You don’t have to get the entire newsroom behind this industry-changing model. Your goal is 50 per cent plus one.
That brings up a question I’ve encountered in many newsrooms: Doesn’t all this innovation hurt our core business?
Niche verticals at legacy papers can create a “safe space,” in the words of the Times’ Blake Wilson, to experiment without alienating readers and without foregoing the institutional culture.
One of the classic traps of innovation is the expectation that every startup has to succeed. But not every idea has to be a blockbuster. Small successes can also lead to new revenue streams (and a larger scaled transformation in the newsroom).
Jim Moroney, publisher and CEO of The Dallas Morning News, bases his transformational strategy on two assumptions. The first is that print advertising revenues will continue to decline. The second is that, for a local newspaper like the Morning News (with a 250,000 Sunday circulation and 8 million unique website visito...
Moroney doesn’t want to downsize the newsroom more than it’s already been downsized. It was 600 reporters strong in 2001; today, it’s half that size.
The Dallas Morning News has experimented with different solutions. It put up a complete paywall — with no meter — in February 2011. That didn’t work, so Moroney took the paywall down.
Now the Morning News is trying a range of other ideas. It offers events like “One-Day University,” where professors give classes to readers. It started a content-marketing agency. And it now owns the craft beer and indie music festival Untapped and the food and wine festival Savor.
The paper also found room to innovate in arts and culture. This year it launched GuideLive, a mobile-friendly site with an infinite scroll of things to see and do in the area.
This, Moroney says, is all about sustaining innovation. His strategy is not to disrupt his own company, but to try and find enough sources of revenue to sustain it.
Here’s my interview with Dillon, lightly condensed and edited.
Freek Staps: Don’t people want a calm working environment above all?
Karen Dillon: What gets people out of bed in the morning is their intrinsic motivation in work: Am I respected by my colleagues? Am I growing and given the opportunities to grow? Can I believe in the mission of the company? All of these can be unclear in times of change.
There are very few people who can deal with all that change in the newsroom without having some kind of natural, personal reaction. You can expect to see different kinds of behavior from your colleagues, and also from yourself. They might be checking out personally; they might be so angry that they’re not capable of jo...
Staps: If you are an employee who does this, how can it hurt you?
Dillon: What’s especially hurtful is that you might apply a lot of your energy to eying others. You’re telling yourself other people get better assignments, there’s this woman who can come in at 10 am every morning, and why is he in that meeting while I’m not? Let me tell you: if you use any of your energy to compare y...
So stop that. There are very few people who naturally think: How can I join this transformation, be a part of this? But do try to actively engage, ask questions that are not hostile to understand better what’s happening. Make sure you’re eager to learn, as opposed to only bringing skeptical questions. You want to be a ...
Staps: What if the newsroom’s strategy isn’t clear?
Dillon: The strategy might still be forming, and that’s okay. Actually, the majority of companies that succeed in the long run have changed their strategy along the way. They had a strategy before, let’s call that the deliberate strategy. But along the way a better strategy become clear, the emerging one, and that one ...
Staps: What if a reporter decides not to join the new way forward and stick to print?
Dillon: You mean to just stay here and fade out? That’s a pretty limiting strategy. If you want to wait until your retirement, [that might work] if it’s just one year or two years out. If you have a decade to go, that’s just plain stupid because you’ll lose control of your own choices. Say you like to write longer arti...
There’s a more basic question: Don’t you want to be happy? If you act difficult and obstinate, chances are you won’t keep the respect of your colleagues. You’ll be considered a jerk and pretty soon you’ll be miserable. You can’t guarantee that you’ll continue to have a happy and successful career if you aren’t at least...
Short-term mutinies actually can work, but in the long run you’re still losing because change is inevitable — in any company, and especially in quality journalism right now. So it’s better to root for success, to figure out how to do great work, and start to shine yourself.
Staps: How does the leadership keep office politics in check during all these changes?
Dillon: Make clear what your overriding values and goals are, both by voicing them and through everyday choices. Don’t say, ‘This experiment is the future of this newsroom,’ but then go and do five things in a week that give print the upper hand. With that, you’ll undermine yourself.
The editor-in-chief has to be willing to disrupt himself. If he thinks [this startup] is the future, he should allocate the resources to it. Don’t call it ‘the experiment’ and then look for every opportunity to limit the resources and investment you’re willing to make in ‘the future.’ Don’t pay those reporters less tha...
Staps: When do you start to worry about office behavior?
Dillon: When you notice groups excluding others — for instance, not being invited for lunch. Or when people are ‘forgotten’ to be invited to events. Even more visible is how many people you actually see, working. Does the office empty out early? Are people doing minimal work? Are people laughing enough?
Staps: What are the signs that a transformation to digital is succeeding?
Dillon: As soon as you see cross-boundary friendships forming, that’s good because it usually results in cross-pollination of ideas. Also, look out for surprising colleagues who offer to write a story for the new publication. It means that the old boundaries are not that strong anymore. By then, you’re getting somewher...
Think of the reader’s needs. What job do you need to do to best serve the reader? Your app, website and social media content should be seamless.
Reporters need to be knowledgeable about the financials of the company and the industry as a whole. Use readership data (engagement time, pages per session, number of visitors or subscribers) to promote change and to help solve conflicts. Editorial choices are not made solely on the basis of what readers want. The news...
The Times struggled with that in the creation of the NYT Now app. All of the new content sometimes felt like homework to new readers who didn’t have a history with the brand, said Blake Wilson.
NYT Now saw some successes and some failures. One of its goals was to find a significant new audience. That worked; there are no signs that the app cannibalized the Times’ paid audience, Wilson said. The second goal was to monetize the app by charging $8 per month. That didn’t work so well: The New York Times announced...
NYT Now uses bullet points and a conversational tone to sum up stories. Those bullet points were a matter of debate in the newsroom. But Wilson said that many mobile readers on news apps simply scroll down to get a glimpse of the headlines, reach the bottom, and scroll back up without ever clicking on a headline. By ad...
“The audience has given us permission to take what we’re doing further,” Wilson said.
Meanwhile, the Globe kept the audience in mind when it had to reframe the way it thought about delivering a story.
In the old days, the Globe’s goal was to deliver the best print story. All the other media — Facebook posts, Twitter, video, even the Boston.com and BostonGlobe.com websites — were supposed to promote the paper. Print was everything.
The challenge now, Skok said, is just to create a story, in any shape or form, and help it reach its intended audience. Twitter helps publicize that story. So do Facebook, Snapchat, “and, by the way, print as well.” The Globe is not a platform-specific publication anymore — it’s a story-telling machine. In this model, ...
The Minneapolis Star Tribune’s website attracts seven million unique visitors per month and is the second most profitable part of the company, after the Sunday paper.
On the day I visited the Star Tribune, Arizona senator Harry Reid announced he wasn’t going to seek re-election. Terry Sauer’s team gave the Harry Reid story the second-best position on the website, right below a story about a fire in the suburbs that caused a death. When he checked Chartbeat, he was surprised to see t...
“Cats and lists have actually always been a part of newspaper history,” Sree agreed. “Papers have tried for centuries to lure people in.” And throughout that time, there have been many other changes that were criticized at first, too: Color, new sections, different story formats like interviews.
All of these decisions should be informed by data.
Sree proposes that, every day, a journalist should send the entire newsroom an email about the daily numbers and what they actually mean. Which stories performed best, and why? What can we learn from the use of certain kinds of headlines? Did the amount of time spent by readers on a specific story reveal a curiosity ga...
All of this is, in Skok’s words, the “unsexy” work of making your newsroom a more product-centric and user-centric organization. It may not immediately reward you with a Pulitzer prize, but it might help get your organization better aligned with a more digital time.
Freek Staps helped found NRC Q and is the co-managing editor for online at NRC Media in The Netherlands. He completed this work as a 2015 Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow.
Photo by Daria used under a Creative Commons license.
POSTED Aug. 25, 2015, 1:28 p.m.
Staps, Freek. "Want to create a more digital newsroom? Find your inner startup." Nieman Journalism Lab. Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, 25 Aug. 2015. Web. 25 Apr. 2019.
Staps, Freek. "Want to create a more digital newsroom? Find your inner startup." Nieman Journalism Lab. Last modified August 25, 2015. Accessed April 25, 2019. https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/08/want-to-create-a-more-digital-newsroom-find-your-inner-startup/.
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My dog has been eating 4health for a few years. A year or so ago he experienced explosive bowel movements after eating the grain free beef stew - the clerk at Tractor Supply was unaware of any issues. A few months ago I bought 2 bags of the hip/joint bones (he had eaten them before and no problem). After eating a few o...
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