(Mary Nesbitt)

The mood was positive last week at the annual convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors: life stinks so let's stop moaning and get on with it.

A friend wondered if newsrooms have it in their DNA to change fast enough. I don't know -- but suspect it depends, in part, on leaders' ability to unleash the creativity of the people already working there and to attract young people who make up in energy, freshness, fearlessness and technological agility what they lack in on-the-ground seasoning.

That's a high hurdle because newspapers are all about control, as the Readership Institute's culture study in 2000 (and confirmed in the 2004 New Readers study) showed, and all about paying your dues. Yet some case studies presented at ASNE demonstrated how focused efforts can change the internal culture for the better, along with the product(s) and results with consumers.

The reports were part of a multi-pronged, Knight Foundation-funded initiative that took a variety of approaches to training, developing and otherwise unlocking the potential of entire newsrooms and individual journalists.

News, Improved: How America's newsrooms are learning to change by Michele McLellan and Tim Porter describes the initiatives -- which, all told, reached about 35,000 journalists -- and the key findings. (See also their essay on Jay Rosen's PressThink blog.)

Two of the projects -- Tomorrow's Workforce and The Learning Newsroom -- administered culture surveys to the 27 participating newsrooms before the training and development work began and then 18 months or so later. About half of the newsrooms reported important progress away from risk-averse, defensive cultures that typify the newspaper industry as a whole toward constructive, customer-focused, change-seeking ones (and not all results are in yet.)

All reported improvements to content and some were able to point to higher readership. Now, coincidence is not causation, nor is correlation, but RI research with 100 newspapers showed that those with less defensive, more constructive cultures also tend to have higher readership. So here seemed to be some anecdotal evidence that working purposefully on culture in the context of an overall business goal -- getting more people to consume the journalism -- can bear fruit.

Amid the positive news comes a red flag from Vickey Williams who directed The Learning Newsroom project (and who joins our Media Management Center staff next week: vickey@mmc.northwestern.edu). In her report, All Eyes Forward: How to help your newsroom get where it wants to go faster, Williams notes that under-30s say they intend to leave not just the newspaper but the industry within a couple of years because necessary changes aren't happening fast enough.

(To check whether the trend in the small sample of 10 newsrooms was borne out elsewhere, our research colleague Robert Cooke took another look at RI 2000 and 2004 culture data with 140 newspapers, and confirmed it. He also compared newspaper data with other organizations and found that younger newspaper employees are more likely than their peers elsewhere to be planning to leave the current job or the industry within a couple of years.)

It's not that they don't love the job or the journalism, but the atmosphere in which it is practiced isn't encouraging. Further, young people who express stronger intentions to leave also say:

• Their newspapers lack a vision for the future, don't communicate it well or gain commitment to it
• Conflicts cannot be discussed
• Bold ideas to improve content cannot be suggested
• The quality and impact of the newspaper cannot be candidly addressed

Now, aren't these issues committed newsroom leaders can do something about, and pretty quickly? News, Improved and All Eyes Forward show how it's been happening and how you can do it too.


By Mary Nesbitt (m-nesbitt@northwestern.edu)
Mary Nesbitt is managing director of the Readership Institute.