Clay Shirky does a nice job exploring the biggest challenge currently facing news companies: that for the most part they are populated with people unaware of how profoundly the internet changes everything.
Most people working in news organisations think their company will continue in roughly the same form but will publish a website as well as a newspaper. Or will continue in the same form and publish a website and a mobile site and to social media sites as well as a newspaper. Or will continue in the same form and publish everywhere online and to a Kindle instead of a newspaper.
I know this because I have thought the same for the longest time and I see it in conversations I have with people in the business.
At the very beginning of the newsroom integration project at the Telegraph, at the stage where we were exploring ideas and models, I was resistant to a lot of the new ideas and information I was receiving and had no idea how online worked. I used gmail, google and that was about it. I had no concept back then of online communities, for example, or the conversational nature of online or of the power of links and of self-publishing.
All I knew was print, and that felt like a lot to know because it had taken me years to build up expertise in newsgathering, reporting, sub-editing, page layout and production. And I was still learning. Heaping a load of learning about online on top of that seemed a big ask. And I know it felt like that (or something like that) to a lot of people working in the newsroom once the project reached them, and that people in newspapers in New Zealand are feeling it even now.
Once I spent a little more time online I started to understand what the fuss was about. Graphs showing the decline of newspaper circulation and rise of web activity helped, as did talking to people involved in the online world and starting to see the world through their eyes. I went on to become a chief change agent at the Telegraph. But throughout it all I still fundamentally thought like a print person. I thought of the news company continuing basically as it was but with additional outputs and more engagement with readers.
It wasn’t until I left print completely and spent the last couple of years mucking around and reading widely online, started blogging myself and realising first-hand the power of links, of self-publishing, communities, conversational media, shared knowledge, niche publishing, the breadth and depth of knowledge and content available online, that I really started to understand how profoundly different the internet makes everything.
Not just in the buzzword areas of social media and audience engagement and the like. But in the most fundamental areas. Take distribution. The mainstream media used to own distribution. If you wanted to get a message into the homes of all New Zealanders you had to go through TV, radio and newspapers. There was no other way short of a nationwide mail-drop.
But the media doesn’t own distribution anymore. The internet provides lots of ways to get into the homes of New Zealanders – search, social networks, specialist websites, blogs, podcasts, YouTube and games to name a few. Press releases go straight online and organisations like the police and councils can, for example, publish health and emergency advisories directly if they want and are no longer completely reliant on the mainstream media to distribute their messages. Nor are advertisers.
That’s arguably mainstream media’s single biggest selling point gone. Pick apart other aspects of the news cycle and you will find similar unpalatable truths lurking.
The trick, then, is to pick apart every aspect of the news cycle to see what, if any, aspects of it are still truly owned by your news company and which aspects you are confident you can continue to do better than anyone else. Then restructure your company to focus on those aspects. I guarantee your news operation will become a lot smaller and more focused in the process – and it won’t look anything like it does now.
Another way to think about it is this: if your news company died would you reinvent it in much the same form? Would you reinvent it at all?
The trouble is, there aren’t many people working in newspapers who’ve had the luxury of a couple of years away from print mucking around online. I realise many people may get the picture quicker than I did, and there are certainly journalists working in print and broadcast who are embracing new media and doing great things with it. But I’d be willing to bet they’re in the minority.
The question is, can any news organisation make the really big, bold decisions required to reinvent themselves when most people working for them, from management through advertising, IT and the newsroom floor, think all they need to do is cut a few costs, move a few desks, create a couple of new job titles and add a few more web-based outputs to their existing operation?
Here’s a snippet from Clay Shirky’s piece but it’s worth reading the whole post for the big picture.
The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift. As a result, the conversation has degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses.
“The Wall Street Journal has a paywall, so we can too!” (Financial information is one of the few kinds of information whose recipients don’t want to share.) “Micropayments work for iTunes, so they will work for us!” (Micropayments only work where the provider can avoid competitive business models.) “The New York Times should charge for content!” (They’ve tried, with QPass and later TimesSelect.) “Cook’s Illustrated and Consumer Reports are doing fine on subscriptions!” (Those publications forgo ad revenues; users are paying not just for content but for unimpeachability.) “We’ll form a cartel!” (…and hand a competitive advantage to every ad-supported media firm in the world.)
Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.
…
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.
When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.
We don’t know who the Aldus Manutius of the current age is. It could be Craig Newmark, or Caterina Fake. It could be Martin Nisenholtz, or Emily Bell. It could be some 19 year old kid few of us have heard of, working on something we won’t recognize as vital until a decade hence. Any experiment, though, designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.
For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail.
All Evolving Newsroom
If your news business died would you reinvent it?
Clay Shirky does a nice job exploring the biggest challenge currently facing news companies: that for the most part they are populated with people unaware of how profoundly the internet changes everything.
Most people working in news organisations think their company will continue in roughly the same form but will publish a website as well as a newspaper. Or will continue in the same form and publish a website and a mobile site and to social media sites as well as a newspaper. Or will continue in the same form and publish everywhere online and to a Kindle instead of a newspaper.
I know this because I have thought the same for the longest time and I see it in conversations I have with people in the business.
At the very beginning of the newsroom integration project at the Telegraph, at the stage where we were exploring ideas and models, I was resistant to a lot of the new ideas and information I was receiving and had no idea how online worked. I used gmail, google and that was about it. I had no concept back then of online communities, for example, or the conversational nature of online or of the power of links and of self-publishing.
All I knew was print, and that felt like a lot to know because it had taken me years to build up expertise in newsgathering, reporting, sub-editing, page layout and production. And I was still learning. Heaping a load of learning about online on top of that seemed a big ask. And I know it felt like that (or something like that) to a lot of people working in the newsroom once the project reached them, and that people in newspapers in New Zealand are feeling it even now.
Once I spent a little more time online I started to understand what the fuss was about. Graphs showing the decline of newspaper circulation and rise of web activity helped, as did talking to people involved in the online world and starting to see the world through their eyes. I went on to become a chief change agent at the Telegraph. But throughout it all I still fundamentally thought like a print person. I thought of the news company continuing basically as it was but with additional outputs and more engagement with readers.
It wasn’t until I left print completely and spent the last couple of years mucking around and reading widely online, started blogging myself and realising first-hand the power of links, of self-publishing, communities, conversational media, shared knowledge, niche publishing, the breadth and depth of knowledge and content available online, that I really started to understand how profoundly different the internet makes everything.
Not just in the buzzword areas of social media and audience engagement and the like. But in the most fundamental areas. Take distribution. The mainstream media used to own distribution. If you wanted to get a message into the homes of all New Zealanders you had to go through TV, radio and newspapers. There was no other way short of a nationwide mail-drop.
But the media doesn’t own distribution anymore. The internet provides lots of ways to get into the homes of New Zealanders – search, social networks, specialist websites, blogs, podcasts, YouTube and games to name a few. Press releases go straight online and organisations like the police and councils can, for example, publish health and emergency advisories directly if they want and are no longer completely reliant on the mainstream media to distribute their messages. Nor are advertisers.
That’s arguably mainstream media’s single biggest selling point gone. Pick apart other aspects of the news cycle and you will find similar unpalatable truths lurking.
The trick, then, is to pick apart every aspect of the news cycle to see what, if any, aspects of it are still truly owned by your news company and which aspects you are confident you can continue to do better than anyone else. Then restructure your company to focus on those aspects. I guarantee your news operation will become a lot smaller and more focused in the process – and it won’t look anything like it does now.
Another way to think about it is this: if your news company died would you reinvent it in much the same form? Would you reinvent it at all?
The trouble is, there aren’t many people working in newspapers who’ve had the luxury of a couple of years away from print mucking around online. I realise many people may get the picture quicker than I did, and there are certainly journalists working in print and broadcast who are embracing new media and doing great things with it. But I’d be willing to bet they’re in the minority.
The question is, can any news organisation make the really big, bold decisions required to reinvent themselves when most people working for them, from management through advertising, IT and the newsroom floor, think all they need to do is cut a few costs, move a few desks, create a couple of new job titles and add a few more web-based outputs to their existing operation?
Here’s a snippet from Clay Shirky’s piece but it’s worth reading the whole post for the big picture.