(Limor Peer)

It's time to re-assert journalistic authority.

I don't mean the kind of authority vis-a-vis the public as in, "we are the most authoritative news providers" (scholars such as Barbie Zelizer have covered that ground particularly well - see for example here and here).

I am talking about authority as a sense of confidence and conviction, of taking charge and being proactive, of trusting yourself to do what's right and to lead the way. This has to do with news organizations re-asserting their vision and figuring out, by and for themselves, how to behave in the digital world.

But it's not so easy to see the way.

There are some good reasons for that - Clayton Christiansen pointed to institutional and other inertia-related reasons for why successful companies faced with disruption are likely to respond in seemingly rational ways that only work to further their demise.

There's also just a lot of noise that makes it difficult to think straight. We constantly hear about successful efforts, new "cool" ideas, and the phenomenal success of entities that didn't even exist a few years ago. There is so much advice and so much activity out there that many may be feeling paralyzed by it all, in effect letting other forces shape them.

The core problem is that there is no clarity of vision. This is exacerbated by two things: The allure of technological innovation and news organizations' herd mentality.

Many of the solutions and experiments that news organizations come up with are technology-driven. That is, they are more a facsimile of a technology-based concept that has worked elsewhere than a thought-out, strategically-aligned, novel move. Recently we have seen blogs (everyone's got to have blogs!), user-generated content (creates a community and it's free!), and social networking (that's the way to get young people!). I am not saying any of these are the wrong things to do, but they reveal the fact that there's not enough clear, original thinking that counter-balances the influence of digital technology on decision-making.

Now, there is a school of thought that says that we are pretty powerless in the face of a technological tidal wave (known as technological determinism and publicized by, among others, Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan). But that does not have to mean that there is no room for human agency: in his book "Understanding Media," McLuhan mentions the Edgar Alan Poe story about a sailor caught in a strong current who survived because he was able to observe the patterns of the water and found his way out. He said in a 1969 Playboy interview:

It's inevitable that the world-pool of electronic information movement will toss us all about like corks on a stormy sea, but if we keep our cool during the descent into the maelstrom, studying the process as it happens to us and what we can do about it, we can come through.

In the news business, however, to "study the process" too often means looking to others to see what they're doing. News organizations are notorious for their herd mentality and what you often get as a result are not very good decisions.

So, here's a good question (from a comment to a post on goodexperience.com):

If a business is taking its strategy from what everyone else is doing it's probably too late and overdone anyway, why not do proper research and take an angle that is relative to its strengths and what their customers want?

Doing "proper research" really shouldn't be all that complicated or expensive... Here's what I would consider essential to help news organizations "think straight" as they observe, participate, and try to shape the current all around them. None of this is new:

Listen extensively - this means working with people you typically didn't think of working with, such as your customers and your employees. The information you get from talking and listening to your customers (whether you do a survey or an informal focus group) is invaluable and many companies already do. Opening up the organization to employee input can also generate innovative ideas (see "Ideas are Free"). And speaking of ideas, it's sometimes helpful to survey other fields and industries. As this interesting quote from the blog getfreshminds.com puts it: "It's amazing how being open to seeing parallels in other fields can lead to new solutions for the same problems."

You will need to do some hard work to synthesize all this input and reach new insights about what you are doing and how it relates to your customers. As you're listening, you also have to work to distill a vision of who you are as an organization and what you consider the absolute core of what you do. This should be a dual and dynamic process, one informing the other.

Having done the research, you then must take the next step - making real, sometimes radical, changes. For example, realizing that people use your Web site mostly during the work day means making hard decisions about schedules, work flow, and expectations. This kind of process is exactly what the Atlanta-Journal Constitution went through, according to Stacy Lynch, former Director of Innovation at the AJC and a leader in its newsroom overhaul (Stacy gave a talk at Northwestern earlier this month).

In the end, what research can do for you is limited if you don't have a good dose of common sense, healthy intuition, and enough confidence to create and own your vision.


By Limor Peer (l-peer@northwestern.edu)
Limor Peer is research director for the Media Management Center and Readership Institute.