There is a lot of talk, actions and decisions being made at the media company I work at in Iowa because of the tactical and organizational approach of separating content from product.

The vision that spurs the strategy of the company is clear. Organize and act for speed and flexibility. We want to reach people where they want, how they want and when they want. We want to enable users to tune a device of their choosing to find information and engage with communities. We must play a focal point in the local information ecosystem, and a key part of that is creating and participating in many nodes within it.

The network is not one of stages but of tribes, and this is a better metaphor for new media. Tribes have leaders (or many leaders), and it is the leaders themselves, not their stages that give them authority. – Terry Heaton, March 2009

I am in no way implying that separating content creation from product development is a faulty approach. Quite the opposite. Collecting content in the first instance with key elements tagged to easily find relationships that can contribute to the nodes is one tremendous step in the right direction.

Information architecture for news by Stijn Debrouwere

But I want to nudge the conversation toward  a newer focus: collecting content for audiences. For example, media company A wants to participate and engage with audience and community B. How can the entire organization take a high level solution view to use our resources, skill, technology and the known and unknown platforms, products and devices to accomplish that goal? (Read a few lessons learned from an audience-first approach.)

But that’s only one piece, I admit. We ultimately want to have fun and make money, right? So we must look from the enterprise level at content as a way of doing business.

What would happen if a content strategist, content collector or information designer, user experience guru, influence marketer and product manager all got in the same room to tackle the example above? Five skilled people spending five minutes and are empowered to make decisions who then deploy, listen, adapt, deploy, listen, adapt, and so on.

Now that would be fun.

What do you think?

As sometimes happens, I was focusing on the wrong problem given the situation and worrying about what I can’t control. Don’t misunderstand there is still a tremendous need for quality, relevant and engaging content. But creating content is not the role of the team I am associated with. Our role is to seek out quality content from multiple sources to package it in smart and enticing ways and use smart tools to feed the engagement process.

As Judy Sims points out convincingly in comparing AOL’s new strategy against media company strategy, some potential ways to do that better are found in these areas:

• Media companies need a culture of smart online product development
• Embrace that fragmentation is a good thing
• Create a wide range of content verticals targeting multiple niche audiences

Sims notes an important point Clay Shirky made in his talk on internet issues at newspapers:  “one of the 3 non-economically based reasons that most newspapers will eventually fail is that the bundle of information they present online is “incoherent”.

The New York Times is being torn apart right now by its own readers. The number of people who go to the Times’ homepage as a percentage of total readership falls every year — because you don’t go to the Times, you go to the story, because someone Twittered it or put it on Facebook or sent it to you in email. So the audience is now being assembled not by the paper, but by other members of the audience.

Brad Garlinghouse, the president of internet and mobile communications for AOL says it best: ‘how do we take messaging to the next level?’

The importance of moving the culture and the essential task list in the online product development realm is demonstrated by this exchange. (Find the entire Q & A here)

Q: Can content-bases strategies scale? Content businesses don’t seem to get all the love that tech companies do.

A: I don’t know what our valuation will be but people in the media business look at Silicon Valley companies with envy. We have the opposite view. Let’s take some tech and be serious about it, around our content.

What makes tackling this issue interesting and fun is how we choose to scale the possible solutions. Our future relies on the things we try and the environment in which we do it.

Newspapers produced the mix of content that would appeal to the broadest audience possible. As the web allows for narrower and narrower niches of content, maintaining the old bundle cannot work.

So here are four simple tasks I can up with that can help shift the culture and move momentum in the areas where I have some influence. What do you think? Is this a good path?

• Seek out numerous community contributors across a wide range of spectrums, engage them and use and promote their content. Professional journalists are just one source of content. (A message to journalists: “For journalism, you’re not just hiring the person, you’re hiring their community too.” – AOL chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong.) If you’re a journalists, you better have a community.
• Develop a model similar to what’s going on at The Daily Blank. Check it out. It’s worth it.
• Create a kick-ass user experiences around multiple topics, whether automated or manual
• Follow the product develop discipline
• Divide and conquer

At the same time, I helped hire a mobile journalist to work for GazetteOnline.com in Cedar Rapids whose responsibility was to create, collect and present information for a digital audience.

Within a few months, the mobile journalist flourished in both content collection methods and audience growth by using the latest tools and technology to publish information quickly, while also equipped with new tasks to meet the growing needs of that digital audience. The position did that, in part, by spending 85 percent of the time outside of the traditional newspaper newsroom and focusing almost exclusively on the wants and needs of a digital audience.

At the same time – and even to a certain extent now – journalists who spend a majority of their time in the newsroom still have not yet reached the level of producing digital-first content for digital audiences.  There have been huge strides made, but we struggle with the new mindset, fear and the “sucking sound of the core” like many other places across the industry.

Howard Owens, who runs The Batavian – a digital-only local news and information source, recently wrote that the original sin of media companies was in keeping its online operations “tethered to the mothership.” He instead argues that web products should be businesses on their own.

Here is his realization:

“Instead of thinking about how to generate more cash, I needed to figure out how to create a news operation that could exist profitably based on a reasonable expectation for local online revenue.”

Here is his proposal:

• Minimally staffed on both the sales and content side.
• Both staffs would operate in a building far away from the newspaper office.
• No newspaper content would feed the web site, and the online staff wouldn’t consult or work with the newspaper staff on stories. There would be a total wall of separation.
• There would also be a total wall of separation between sales staffs.
• The separate business unit would be competitive with the newspaper, not complimentary.

News tasks lead to new mindset

My colleague at Gazette Communications, Steve Buttry, writes that mindset is more important than organization in referencing the points made by Owens.

Howard has some excellent advice on starting an independent online operation and most, if not all, of the online spinoffs from newspaper organizations did not do things the way Howard is saying they should have. My point is that organization is not as important as mindset. And spinning digital operations off did not change the mindset.

I agree that mindset trumps organizational structure. But the only proven way that I’ve seen mindset change in a newsroom environment is by creating new tasks – (the show, don’t tell philosophy) – with clearly defined expectations and incentives and consequences attached to them. But even then, that process will take years to accomplish at the enterprise level what a small group, whose focus is entirely on reaching a clearly defined audience, can do in a matter of months.

Audience-first philosophy

What’s missing in many reorganizations across the industry are the wants and needs of the audience. We aren’t collecting content – both in news and advertising – with clearly defined audiences in mind.

Chuck Peters, the CEO of Gazette Communications, told me about 18 months ago something like this (I’m paraphrasing): “If you own a product and are not tied directly to revenue, how can you judge whether the product is successful?”

It made sense. I find myself asking another question too, and since I’ve stuck to a content theme I’ll continue with that: If you are responsible for putting content in front of digital audiences with a goal of increasing engagement and usage, but have no sustained and direct link between the content collectors and the audience you want to engage and reach, how can you be successful?

Especially in the digital realm, the lines between content, sales, marketing, audience and web development are so intertwined that separating those entities extremely hampers the success of digital operations.

It’s a little surprising to me that after all my study of Clayton Christensen and other thinkers on disruptive innovation  that I didn’t see more clearly sooner the imperative of a separate operation, but it is what we should have been doing. – Howard Owens

Katherine Warman Kern would probably disagree with my assessment based on the future of media will be marketing post.

Publishers/Programmers, Technology, Marketing should collaborate to identify how each platform will add incremental value to the consumer and the brand’s bottom line. To create incremental value, the media brand should leverage the unique advantages of each platform to express itself and evolve its relationships with the audience.  A fully integrated, multi-platform media brand will deliver a whole much bigger than its aggregated parts.

On digital platforms – or any other platform for that matter – having content collectors, sales staff and marketing folks focused on that specific digital audience offers the best chance for success. A small team and a self-sustainable revenue model, like the one Owens mentioned, can work.

The flip side is that on the enterprise level we will continue to market digital products in our legacy brands. We will continue to put newspaper ads online. We will continue to cover events that newspapers have always covered.

As director of new media in Ventura and VP of interactive in Bakersfield, I certainly had some grasp that online wasn’t print. I did push such innovations (at least for the time) as comments on stories, video, web-first publishing, locally focused home pages, user profiles/social networking. But looking back, I see now that I still had a lot of newspaper-think in my outlook. – Howard Owens

Newspaper readers and broadcast TV news viewers who use our online products will not solely help us grow audience. Adding incremental value to further the overall brand’s bottom line, in my opinion, will not help a product engage and reach audiences that have never consumed our products before.

It’s time to divide and conquer.

Do a couple of self-proclaimed tech guys/news junkies stand a chance competing in a crowded online news media field? While it doesn’t seem plausible, the digital age has made it possible. And sometimes, that’s enough. – Mark Briggs

Competing with the singleminded – Seth Godin: This conversation happens every single day at organizations large and small. You want to do the new thing, but of course you must do it in a measured, rational way. Which is great, unless your competition doesn’t agree.

Community can be so powerful – Chris Brogan: the people who live for community, the ones who know that the human-shaped web is much more powerful in the longer run than any technology out there today, those are the ones to watch.

The importance of failure – Marco Tabini: There is, however, an even more important lesson that I have learned about failure: that sometimes, failure is inevitable—or, as the colloquial expression goes, shit happens. Knowing that, sooner or later, things are going to fail is an important, almost cathartic realization that keeps the unwary apart from the wise. If you’re wondering what I’m blabbering about, check out this video of a keynote that Mythbusters’ Adam Savage gave at the Maker Faire.

Thanks for leading – Seth Godin: It’s uncomfortable to stand up in front of strangers. It’s uncomfortable to propose an idea that might fail. It’s uncomfortable to challenge the status quo. It’s uncomfortable to resist the urge to settle.

Books for entrepreneurs – Fred Wilson: Last week an entrepreneur named Stephen who reads this blog regularly asked me for recommendations that budding entrepreneurs should read.

I realize many talented folks are not looking to join what could be considered a traditional media company. But we are not a media company that is standing still. We believe we are headed in the right direction with a blueprint for a complete community connection and the leadership to make it happen.

Here is an opportunity to join a progressive six-member team in a fun, fast-paced environment at a media company doing cool stuff.

If you are interested, check out the job ad or contact me via email with questions.

The basic wisdom behind the piece in the New Yorker is that when underdogs break away from conventional wisdom, they win.

Gladwell uses a true story of a weak youth girl’s basketball team who utilizes a non-stop full-court press to have a better chance against stronger teams, and does it to great success. But yet the full-court press is not widely adopted in the basketball world. Why?

When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, ‘even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.’

This article was increasingly important to my mental status as the place where I work is undertaking another round of reorganization and uncertainty and what our CEO Chuck Peters labeled in an email recently as “reorganization fatigue.”

We are facing the same economic pressures and societal changes as every other media company. We also are in a community that suffered a historic natural disaster almost a year ago which has added to the tough economic situation.

As a company we’ve gotten smaller and recently reprioritized. We’ve focused on the concept of separating content from product, changed roles and responsibilities and have more people wearing more hats than ever before.

I’m not trying to say our current plight rises to the level of David vs. Goliath, but if that gets you motivated, go for it. Rather, it’s a plea to understand it’s going to take unconventional ways, uncomfortable moments and an increased willingness to try new things.

What was perhaps most fascinating in the article was the research conducted by political scientist Ivan Arreguin-Toft. Arreguin-Toft looked at every war in the past two hundred years and found that when the weaker combatants changed the rules, their win percentage went from 28.5% to 63.6%. That’s an astounding figure. (From Dennis Yang who writes how this also applied to the business world).

On that note, I agree with Gladwell when he writes about effort and ability. It resonated with me as we face an uphill battle to transform a media company into a community connection and how daunting of a task that must seem like given all the negativity about the media industry.

David can beat Goliath by substituting effort for ability—and substituting effort for ability turns out to be a winning formula for underdogs in all walks of life, including little blond-haired girls on the basketball court.

We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It’s the other way around. Effort can trump ability . . . because relentless effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coordination.

I like that we are not sitting back and waiting for something to happen. We are likely to reorganize again and rethink think how we are doing things. And, to me, that’s better than the alternative. Doing nothing and trying only conventional ideas is not acceptable.

The price that the outsider pays for being so heedless of custom is, of course, the disapproval of the insider.

But let’s remember who made that rule: Goliath. And let’s remember why Goliath made that rule: when the world has to play on Goliath’s terms, Goliath wins.

Related articles

• Malcolm Gladwell Wants To Know Why Your Team Doesn’t Press More [Basketball] (deadspin.com)
• Underdogs Win By Changing The Rules (techdirt.com)
• Gladwell on David vs. Goliath (kennykellogg.com)
• Recipe for an Underdog (myespn.go.com)
• Innovation Pressure (meganmcardle.theatlantic.com)
• Gladwell on How David Beats Goliath (paul.kedrosky.com)
• What is this News Tribe thing? (newstribe.us)

Rob Curley, most recently with the Las Vegas Sun, contacted me in what I’m taking is an initiative to join the News Innovation movement. He is also seeking an opinion and advice from me on a project his team plans to launch soon. All good stuff.

Now, I took Curley to task about a year ago in a post called Kicking Rob Curley While He’s Down for not including more of the news innovators in his projects and experiments. Most have them have been pretty cool, but my opinion was and is that we can all learn and benefit from collaboration since we’re all on the same side.

Now he’s reaching out to the news innovators, and I’m happy to be a part to the process. This is a good thing. I’ll share how it goes.

Here the email:

Jason,

Thank you for accepting my Facebook and LinkedIn invites!

I am taking your advice. All of our big projects here at the Las Vegas Sun are being “ran by” different folks across the nation to get their input.

We are working on something at the Las Vegas Sun that we would love to share with you to get your most-honest opinions, thoughts, advice, or basically whatever you’re willing to share.

Do you have the time or willingness for it?

We would be honored if you would help us with this.

Thanks for considering!

rob

For me, the point of the news innovation movement has not been about talking and creating new ideas. It’s been about action and collaboration. I think most people got that at the BarCamp.

With that said, here were my big takeaways, and I’ll go into more detail on some of them below:

• Collaboration – although messy and hard to replicate – is vital to success.  Collaboration solves the filter failure issue. (Originally I couldn’t find the right link to the ‘filter failure’ post until Scott Karp posted this).
• Organizations need to commit to innovation, despite the cost, and the sharing of those innovations leads to smarter ideas in the future
• We have to better create more relevant user experiences across print, digital, mobile and the next platform to come
• Sales staffs at media companies still have no idea how to sell or be creative when it comes to digital advertising, business models or call-to-action types of monetization efforts.
• Three dudes – Sean Blanda, Brian James Kirk and Christopher Wink – who run Technically Philly offer a great lesson on a digital startup.
• Not many of the news innovators work for media companies. A lot of the talent is working for companies trying to help the media industry evolve.

One concept that I have not yet fully explored, but agree with came from Ted Mann via Twitter: @turkeymonkey: #BCNIPhilly takeaway No. 1: If you’re creating a blog or website, forget about building your business model on advertising”

The comprehensive roundup of the reaction from #bcniphilly gives a better overview of the day than I can, but I want to go into more specifics about topics that resonated with me.

Collaboration

Media organizations must learn and be better at collecting and curating content based on topic in a collaborative, networked way. Those companies are only one voice and there are hundreds of others out there locally who like to produce, consume and share. We need to find those people, engage them, work with them, publish them and celebrate their successes within this newly formed network.

Scott Karp of Publish2 talked about collaboration in general at #bcniphilly (which you can also view), and also what his company is doing to try and make it easier for media companies.

We believe citizen journalism is part of a larger process where professional journalists still play the vital role they always have. The key is to enable dynamic and ongoing collaboration between citizens and professional journalists, where citizens can become a true practical extension of the newsroom.

In all this, it was clear that we need to recognize the wetness of collaboration. It’s messy and there is no perfect formula to make it work. But when it does, it’s magic.

Someone working alone with really cheap tools has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens to create a resource you couldn’t have imagined existing five years ago. – Clay Shirky at Web 2.0 Expo

Innovation

Steven King, the editor of innovation for washingtonpost.com, spoke about the web ninja’s team and about some of the past and future projects they are working on. View his presentation and watch a video interview with him.

The team is made of up only three people. Their job is to, as his presentation says, rapidly develop innovative ways to present news and information. They also work with a three-person ad innovation team.

“If we are not looking toward the future, than we have no future,” King said. “It is very important to have these types of discussions and be flexible to be able to work with whatever comes next.”

In some ways that’s what I meant when I wrote about “What are the jobs to be done” saying if it is to solely make money now, than we will fail. Yes, we need revenue to continue to operate but we need that three –person team, or whatever it is, of smart, talented people looking toward the future. If we do that, I think instead of being way behind, we’ll be more agile and better equipped to address issues when they arise.

The startup mentality

As I noted above #bcniphilly organizers Sean Blanda, Christopher Wink and Brian James Kirk started a web site, Technically Philly, that for me offered some good lessons for the startup mentality we need right about now.

Whitney Rhodes sums it up pretty well on how to get started by finding 1) a need 2) a community based on that need and 3) a way to reach out and fulfill said need for said community.

Technically Philly suggests you tackle a community you already consider yourself a part of. Technically’s founders, three recent college graduates and tech gurus, did just that. They saw a tech coverage hole in Philadelphia and created TechnicallyPhilly.com to fill it.

The reason why I mention this mentality is because it plays into the moving away from the institutional brand to the person brand. Our society and industry seems to be shifting to that mentality and having the skills and mindset of a startup is going to play a big role in that.

I also asked others to assume that the blueprint was the way to go and offer thoughts and ideas about how to implement it.

I went through the document myself and made notes about where I thought ideas needed to be modified in search of my own ideas on how to do it.

But I was asking the wrong question.

The how doesn’t really matter. That will come. What matters right now is this: What part are you going to do? What part are you going to take ownership of? What part are you going to task on?

Ideas are cheap. Execution and follow through are worth so much more. Obviously, we have to be smart in what we do, but failure is part of the process.

So what part am I going to take? I am currently working to re-envision a local news and information web site. You can keep track of the progress at NewsTribe.us.

I will make a commitment to what Buttry describes as community content opportunities and take ownership of the local knowledge and personal content and connection portions so they have a home on GazetteOnline.com.

Local knowledge – An important aspect of the Complete Community Connection will be to develop the place where people of our communities and perhaps across Iowa turn for answers to their questions about this state and its communities: databases, community resources, services, history, unique aspects of local life (attractions, institutions and events) and a user-generated encyclopedia of local knowledge.

Personal content and connection – A longtime contradiction of life in the news business has been that we ignore or downplay the biggest news in the lives of the people we serve. If someone in your family graduates, gets married, has a baby, dies or has a major illness or surgery, that’s the biggest news of the year in your family and often in a broader circle of friends and co-workers.

I’ll keep you in the loop on the progress. Again, what part are you going to do?

I will embed the PDF below, but if 30 some pages are too much Mark Potts offers a good, condensed analysis called Inventing the Future in Iowa.

So let’s assume this blueprint is the way to go. How would you implement it? What would you build? What are the ideas do you have for applications, widgets and whatnot? What should the priorities be? Where would you start? I’m looking for specific ideas that you think can be implemented anywhere.

What would an organization with this mentality look like? If this is a startup, what would it be in the first three months? Six months?

I’ve just now read it and am beginning to digest it. (Even though we work at the same company, Gazette Communications, Buttry rolled it out to me like he did to everyone else via his blog. I’m not bitter, but it would have been great material to talk about at #bcniphilly.)

I will be working through it as I travel back to Eastern Iowa in the next day or so and I will post my own answers to the questions above by the end of Thursday (If I’m asking you to do it, I have to follow through as well).

So have at it. Ryan Sholin asked me at the end of the day on Saturday what’s next for the BarCamp NewsInnovation crew. Could playing a role in forming some specific examples on how to implement this plan be a first step? I’m not sure, but it can’t hurt.

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