(Vickey Williams)

Last week's gathering of newspaper company CEOs at API has attracted a lot of virtual ink, largely from industry bloggers who weren't invited to be part of a conversation on the crisis that has some ownership groups on the brink of bankruptcy.

Reports of what the 50 or so execs discussed are thin. Gazette Communications CEO Chuck Peters ran a liveblog of the event at the American Press Institute, but had to adhere to ground rules intended to support candor by not tying comments to his fellow attendees' identities. The blog captured a few sparks of ideas but mainly the frustrations of thinkers like Jeff Jarvis and Mark Potts, who would have liked to have taken part but were left to speculate on what might be being discussed.

The daylong gathering won't be the group's last, CNHI CEO Donna Barrett told Steve Outing, and achieved the goal of opening a constructive dialogue among newspaper executives.

At Thursday's session, Kellogg School of Management Professor James Shein and Steve Miller of Delphi, both "turnaround" experts, urged the newspaper executives to go beyond the cost-cutting taking place now, and get on the road to reinvention.

API's recap of the meeting contained nine suggestions from the business experts. For me, three stood out:

• Act like an entrepreneur; stop thinking first about why a new approach won't work.

Amen to that last phrase. My work with newspaper change initiatives over the last seven years has convinced me that we're masters at snuffing out fresh ideas before they're born. Anyone working at a newspaper today who finds himself tempted to "play devil's advocate" during a brainstorming session should resist the urge.

• Be honest with employees, and get ideas from those on the front lines.


• Don't sit and cower and weep about your problems. Inspire.

The two above are related in my book because they relate to "people factors" within news organizations, which Readership Institute research shows is twice as likely to impact the bottom line than economic factors. Other industries in major decline have found able partners on the front lines – those closest to the consumer. Getting that input means a) leaders have to break from old ways that told them they were supposed to have all the answers and b) changing expectations ("Your job is no longer just about production; we need partners in problem-solving").

For anyone who's seen Peters' blog (or my colleague Rich Gordon's posts here and here mentioning the Crunchberry experiment going on within Gazette), it's no surprise he was an atypical attendee at the API confab. Peters says he'll revisit last week's event on a future blog post.

With 13,354 layoffs and buyouts in U.S. newspapers this year (thanks to Erica Smith's tracking at PaperCuts), the criticism of last week's gathering seems to center on a suspicion that among CEO ranks, there aren't many people like Peters who are willing to practice with new forms of communication and look for ways to divorce news from newsprint.

I say a crisis-driven conversation is better than no conversation. And some critics seem almost angry that the newspaper company leaders haven't shut down the presses already. It's likely newspapers will exist with one foot in print and one in digital for years to come. Print advertising has plummeted, but to walk away while there's still a pulse would be foolish.

My worries are different. First, we can hope there was more focus on meeting audience needs – be they news consumers or advertisers – than is signaled in the recap report.

Secondly, CEOs won't get their best thinking done with each other. Among the major contributors to the feeble condition newspapers face in this digital age: waiting for someone else to perfect a fool-proof, take-it-to-the-bank model to mimic, and thinking the all-the-news-for-everyone model would continue to work. Tailored solutions for delivering the experiences specific consumer segments desire are required. That means the CEOs' answers are in their own markets.

A newspaper that consistently shows its smarts at surfacing audience needs and meeting them is the Bakersfield Californian, whose new-product scorecard is the subject of a recent growing audience case study produced by the NAA.

Additionally, a new study by the Media Management Center draws from the experiences of successful technology leaders and recommends "Six Competencies of the Next Generation News Organization." They rest heavily on the skills needed to personalize products and to build and serve communities of interest. The good news: Newspapers should be uniquely equipped to do these things.

Reading accounts of the API event made me think of researcher Pablo Boczkowski's Digitizing the News. The book recounts miscalculations by newspaper companies in the '90s when first confronted with the Internet. Online news was approached the same way as print news. His sad conclusion: An opportunity for "the creation of newness turned into the creative production of sameness."

We don't need to find a new route to the same destination. Better to hope 50 newspaper executives are pursuing 50 approaches to surviving the crisis.


By Vickey Williams (vickey-williams@northwestern.edu)
Vickey Williams is director of the Media Management Center's Digital Workforce Initiative.

Nice post, Vickey. Keep pushing water uphill. I'm right there with you.

Posted by  Annette Schulte at November 19, 2008 10:00 PM

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