(Vickey Williams)

As 2008 draws to a close, many of us likely are thinking about colleagues who we know will spend the holidays job-hunting. Rather than give way to a serious case of the blues, it's better to look for inspiration for getting through these dark days for the news business and focusing energy on finding success in the year ahead. Here are a few ideas for getting started.


Track those who are trying things that are radically different
Online news guru Rob Curley is making good on a promise he made at the Associated Press Managing Editors conference in September to share what he's learning in the digital evolution of the Las Vegas Sun, including his missteps. His personal blog post here says Curley and crew are trying to drive new audiences by focusing on what he calls the Five P's (passions, practical, etc.) My two favorite elements of their approach: an emphasis on news and information that consumers in that market want most and they're benchmarking everything.

The only point where I'd take issue with Rob's thinking is his conjecture that if they excelled at delivering on "playful," news organizations might someday hold onto audiences for hours, a la YouTube.

Yes, the Readership Institute online user experience research has shown "entertains and absorbs me" is a strong calling card. But the engagement Curley hopes for would be hard to achieve. Cutting down on the "too much" experience and trying to improve on "easy to use" would seem better bets. 

Additionally, web audiences probably wouldn't consider losing track of time on a news site a positive experience. At least that's the message we got from the young people we spoke to a few months ago for the Media Management Center's study From "Too Much" to "Just Right," which looked for ways to engage millennial users online.

Curley's reputation for innovation in growing audiences makes him one to watch in the months ahead. But the experiences of those media companies forced by economics to make radical change will carry lessons as well. I'm thinking about plans announced this week by the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News to abandon home delivery four days per week while redesigning newsstand editions, adding to digital offerings with new niche sites and making full electronic editions available online. (Joint press release here.)

In April, the Christian Science Monitor will drop its daily print edition altogether and move to publishing online only. The Politico-Reuters alliance and a proposed CNN wire for newspapers could surface as alternatives for newspapers unable to shoulder the Associated Press wire rate structure. Positive outcomes - survival would be one - could still come from bottom-line-driven experimentation. 


Set short-term assumptions to keep things moving
A recent leadership post that stuck with me was this one by Rita McGrath of the Columbia Business School, where she acknowledged the difficulty of trying to find new business opportunities during times of great uncertainty.

Fear is immobilizing and news organizations have a record of avoiding risk-taking even in the best of times. Leaders can help their teams un-freeze creative juices by "absorbing the uncertainty," McGrath says. Executives must deliver assumptions that help people set some stakes – even if for the short term – in order to avoid seeing innovation grind to a halt. A homerun strategy in this environment might be impossible, but solid singles are still attainable.

For a newspaper today, her advice might translate to a leader helping an interdisciplinary team (think editor, online sales manager and marketing manager) that has a well-researched plan (that is, backed up with market research and targeting a specific customer segment with news it seeks) set realistic metrics for evaluating a new online product or service six months after launch. As mentioned here before, see the Bakersfield Californian's new product scorecard for ideas.


Foster long-term change and adaptability
At last month's Media Management Center Readership Leadership seminar, our conversation benefitted from the smarts of a wonderfully diverse group of participants.

The class included two publishers, two online content and sales experts, and a college professor, along with an assortment of newsroom executives. 

Participants said they got a lot out of our suggestion to hold up their change initiatives against John Kotter's highly regarded Eight-Stage Process of Creating Major Change, from his 1996 book Leading Change.

1. Establishing a sense of urgency.
2. Creating the guiding coalition.
3. Developing a vision and strategy.
4. Communicating the change vision.
5. Empowering broad-based action.
6. Generating short-term wins.
7. Consolidating gains and producing more change.
8. Anchoring new approaches in the culture.

It's a model for breaking old habits and instilling new ones. Making it work over the long haul in newspapers will mean adopting a host of new practices harped on in this space for years. Those include putting the customer first, sharing market research more broadly, creating interdepartmental teams and fostering collaboration, and breaking from hierarchical management styles to those that foster broader engagement, to name a few.

In Kotter's words, "Successful change of any magnitude goes through all eight stages, usually in the sequence shown... Although one normally operates in multiple phases at once, skipping even a single step or getting too far ahead without a solid base almost always creates problems." 

There are three suggestions for media executives looking for productive ways to steer attention toward the future. What's working in your organization?


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