If you missed the post – A call for leadership: Newspaper execs deserve the blame for not changing the culture – by Jonathan Groves and Carrie Brown-Smith go read it.

I’m not interested in blame or arguing over this or that from the past. I don’t think the authors are either. More than anything, can we agree that these two paragraphs are reality?

“In our research of news organizations, in study after study, we have repeatedly found this to be the case. One daily newspaper of less than 50,000 circulation we studied struggled with the change to a web-first organization because, though its leaders acknowledged the importance of the new medium, they did not reinforce that desire through their reward and accountability systems. Print revenue and circulation remained the benchmarks of success, not digital revenue or pageviews. As a result, newsroom staffers struggled to develop the kind of online content needed to expand the web audience.

“Another paper we studied, a metropolitan daily with a circulation of over 100,000, faced similar challenges, as staffers still celebrated getting on 1A and daily rituals like news meetings continued to be print-focused — despite lots of talk about ‘digital first.’” – Groves and Brown-Smith

If that is the reality, and I know in general it is, how do we change it? What actions do we take today. I believe changing actions and routines will change mindsets.

The authors offer these steps:

- Find the change agents with the relationship-building skills to push others to develop new routines
- Put the structure in place to allow employees to experiment and fail in the digital ecosystem
- Give specific information on prioritizing workloads around digital efforts
- Develop concrete reward systems

Here are a few of my own:

- Base every decision on operating a digital media businesses first
- Define your digital workflow and then organize your staff to meet its objectives
- Measure and listen to everything so you can rapidly adapt to changes in the media market and audience consumption
- Engage with everyone willing to talk or already talking about your product and/or service

As the first quarter winds down and organizations have already adapted for sustainability in 2012, the focus at all levels of the business must now turn to profitability and survivability in 2013 based on the known economic uncertainties.

Rather than debate the meaning of digital first and why we’re still asking that question today, what will organizations – especially media – do in the next nine months so more doors aren’t closed come 2013?

Here is my two-step approach:

The business becomes the ecosystem

Collaboration, experimentation and driving shared value will spur revenue  growth. I use Dion Hinchcliffe to further my point when he says, “the value is in sustaining dynamic relationships and not fixed transactions.”

I think most understand the fixed way of running the business of a newspaper, TV station, a startup or whatever doesn’t apply any longer and certainly won’t in the near future. The company must be smartly connected to customers, users, partners and its employees via digital ecosystems to create networked impact.

“Being able to elicit the network (Internet, community, shared data, whatever) to maximum effect to fuel and grow your ecosystem is thus the core competency of the digital era,” Hinchcliffe says.

Shift resources to meet the new digital strategy

Defining a digital strategy seems to be a daunting task. General guidance around the business objectives of an organization with a keen sense of audience metrics may be enough.

Using Hinchcliffe again to spur conversation, he offers a 34-point list of elements to organize the digital strategy around. It includes some of the initiatives already underway including e-commerce, mobile operations, video and content management.

Ultimately, it will be up to each individual organization to determine the viability of each of those elements. But, if nothing else, start with some and shift resources now to build a more sustainable digital businesses before the window of opportunity closes.

The Swerve - Ever wonder how the modern world came to know On The Nature of Things by Lucretius? This book, by Stephen Greenblatt, details the fascinating story in a narrative I couldn’t put down.

The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan - The story that brought down a general. The detailed account of the inner workings and politics or a U.S. Army general fighting the war in Afghanistan.

Enemies: A History of the FBI – The detail provided by recently declassified papers in this account of the FBI is somewhat frightening and encouraging all in one. If you read it, I think you’ll understand that.

Polemics – A hard read for me but eye-opening. A french philosopher reveals in great detail his thoughts on modern politics. I don’t always agree with his take but it has spurred me to think differently. For example: “We have the riots we deserve. A state in which what is called public order is only a coupling of the protection of private wealth and dogs unleashed on children of working people and people of foreign origin is purely and simply despicable.”

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy

Product approach

• Provide a unique experience
• Focus on a strong brand, good performance, good design and provide easy to use services
• Define business objectives
• Be transactional
• Make it fun
  • Gamify local news and information if you can

Audience approach

• Recognize mobile users are task driven and formulate everything around that
• Know what users are doing on mobile devices in the market
• Sharing+Location+Socializing

Mobile content strategy around local news and information

• In general
  • Define what’s in and what’s out. Don’t be everything to everyone.
  • Adhere to the business objectives
• News
  • Daily flow of information for just mobile users
    • You picks
    • Community’s picks
    • Traffic/weather/breaking news
    • Easy submission tools where content goes live immediately
  • Quote of the day with some context
  • Events to go to right now, later today, tomorrow, next week
  • Daily poll
  • Social flow of local news, information and people
• Sports
  • Information unique to mobile users
    • Scores
    • Video highlights
    • Games, player recaps
    • Best of local personalities/bloggers
  • Best sports performance of the week
  • Athletes/games to watch this week
  • Events
  • Social flow of local/national/collegiate sports news, information and people
• Search
  • Local search for things to do right now
  • Local business directory of places to eat, drink or get service right now

Business model

• Location based opportunities based on preferences, behavior
• Coupons
• Deep discounts
• Virtual goods
• Buy photos

Analytics

• Measure the quality of the interactions
• Measure real-world interactions
• Reward influence in real-time

Some links I referenced for this post:

• The Mobile Moment: A content strategy and transactional goals
• How social media can jumpstart your mobile strategy
• Mobile Trends for Marketers, Product Marketers and Product Managers

Are you Experienced? – At a minimum, everyone using social media and participating in innovation should understand that they are new tools, not completely understood, and often lack participation and involvement by the people most experienced in life. – Jeffrey Phillips

Cooperation vs Collaboration – How can we ensure that collaboration and cooperation coexist without threatening the organic, self organizing nature of connectives? – cloudhead

I’m amazed at the number of times reporters at media companies use the same sources or cover town meeting the same way they have for years. Being a part of a highly engaged  and active community is a personal choice and requires living, working and playing in different ways with new behaviors.

Every workday is going to end with an hour of learning… reading Kawasaki and Godin and Ries and Trout, talking with invited experts, meeting with members of the community about what worked and what didn’t worked. Everyone who joins the program (and survives for a year) will come out with an almost supernatural ability to take a dead, lifeless site on the internet and make it into the hottest bar in town. That’s a skill worth learning for the 21st century.

Modern community building – Joel Spolsky

Modern community building -Fred Wilson

NASA Shuttle Launch Photos

The need for culture change in newsrooms is well documented, including most recently from Doug Fisher citing Earl Wilkinson.

I won’t recite past specifics on why or how it can be achieved. Ultimately, it’s a personal decision where each individual must decide to change.

Here’s an idea I floated a couple of weeks ago to a team at work. I want to launch something new every 30 days. I’ve never done that before. The items in bold listed below seem like good places to focus.

Culture change in the news industry involves a collection of practices that break from the past, some obvious and some not-so-obvious — yet all not generally practiced in our industry even today:

• Listen to the market.
• Prioritise expenditures to your USPs.
• Outsource, link or cut what isn’t your USP.
• More sales feet on the street.
• Invest in research.
• Digital first.
• Focus relentlessly on your differentiators.
• Sell market solutions, not space.
• Dialogue, not monologue.
• Embrace the crowd.
• Be willing to fail, but fail fast.
• Go on the offense for readers and advertisers.
• Speed over perfection.
• You can’t be all things to all people.
• Respect the platform for its unique value.
• Go where the growth is.
• Be relevant.
• Place many small bets.
• Low-cost innovation.

The last thing I was apart of that went out to the market launched June 13. I guess I better get going.

Why INMA will keep talking about culture change at newspapers

I’m doing some research today while working on a project request for a new mobile app (mentioned in this post) I’m pitching and came across this example of a mobile content strategy implemented by a hotel:

One major difference is telling multiple stories (web) vs. telling a single, focused story at a given moment (mobile). To make this happen, along with the functionality, the editorial structure had to change significantly. For example, for the mobile site, content that encouraged booking was prioritized, and the language became less marketing, more instructional. – Three things about mobile content

Do you have an example of a mobile content strategy that you’ve implemented?