Presstime, the monthly magazine of the Newspaper Association of America, asked me to write an opinion piece for Back«Talk, a column inside the back cover. It's on page 60 of the September issue. Here is the text.
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I once worked for a major newspaper that didn't have a news obituary page. So the newspaper formed a committee to draw up standards. It met for six months before a dead person could get into the newspaper.
We can't work that way any more. The world is being remade by people don't form committees that meet for six months to avoid making mistakes.
If newspaper journalism is to survive the growing readership crisis., we have to work like the risk-taking entrepreneurs who are creating Internet businesses today.
Instead of focusing on the many ways something might go wrong, we need to learn how to make things go right. You can't do that in a committee meeting. Planning produces only a plan. Success requires testing ideas in the real world -- and changing them when the plan turns out to be wrong.
Flickr.com, the phenomenally successful photo-sharing website, began as a game site but found its users loved posting their pictures. Myspace.com failed as a file-storage site before it was recast as social networking.
Great ideas can come from quick, small projects. Mark Fletcher, who created Bloglines.com and Onelist (which became Yahoo Groups) has declared that “it should take no more than 3 months to go from conception to launch of a new web service.”
His reasoning? “Being perfect at launch is an impossible (and unnecessary and even probably detrimental) goal, so don't bother trying to achieve it. ... The sooner you get something out there, the sooner you'll start getting feedback from users.”
That sounds much like what we've been hearing from Harvard's Clayton Christensen. Innosight consultant Scott Anthony of Innosight, working with the American Press Institute's NewspaperNext project, has been saying we should “invest a little, learn a lot” and to “be patient for scale, but impatient for profit.”
Thinking small doesn't come naturally to mass media. But as our marketplaces break into niches, we may find our future in exploiting those niches.
This isn't easy. I work for Morris DigitalWorks, the Internet division of Morris Communications. We're supposed to be the fast-moving innovators. But as our business grew from wild and crazy to real and serious, with big obligations to internal and external customers, it's become much harder.
Operational imperatives crowd out strategic imperatives. One way to fix that is to create a small separate team focused on innovation, and build a firewall so operational needs don't hijack innovation resources.
Small, empowered teams can work quickly. BlufftonToday.com, the participative community website, was built by two people working for about six weeks, acting like entrepreneurs, borrowing heavily from the open-source software world.
Some ideas might seem too dangerous to test in an existing newspaper market. How about letting the community take over the editorial function of selecting and prioritizing the news? Sites like Digg.com and Newsvine are interesting, but before we drop one into a newspaper market, we'd better understand the social processes.
So we rebuilt a dormant nonlocal website -- FanaticZone.com -- as a public test. It was another project executed by two people working for six weeks. Then we created a celebrity-gossip cousin, RubyBaboon.com, in 10 days.
These quick tests let us discover how these ideas work with real users before we risk trying them in a newspaper market.
As the financial pressures on newspapers increase, there's a temptation to strip down to operational essentials and focus completely on the bottom line. But if we fail to innovate, it won't count for much in the long run. Those two guys in a garage are out there, and they're coming for our business.