Newspaper Next 2.0

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Permalink Reply by Maurreen Skowran on January 28, 2008 at 5:35am

Steve, I'll be interested in learning about advances in revenue generation.

Does the digital business side have any common gathering place online?

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Permalink Reply by Steve Buttry on January 28, 2008 at 6:50am

Maurreen,

Not that I know of, but we will have some online discussion groups when we launch our upgraded web site Feb. 19, and I know we'll be gathering the business side folks there at newspapernext.org.

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Permalink Reply by Steve Yelvington on February 3, 2008 at 11:05am

I taught a series of very intense N2-based workshops over the last year. The participants were primarily Morris DigitalWorks technical folks (programmers, database and system administrators, etc.) but we also included business consultants, designers, site builders, a number of people from the newspaper division's corporate staff and some of the newspapers.

The specific problem we were trying to solve was the overengineering mindset (some of our geeks formerly worked at a nuclear weapons facility). That might sound pretty far afield from teaching N2 principles in a newsroom setting, but the core problems are quite similar: defensive culture, inflexibility, fear of failure, and most importantly an inability to focus on the end user's poorly met needs. You do not hear the words "good enough" or "low end" in a nuke plant.

I think we made significant progress toward shifting the culture to a more innovative stance. The Innosight recommendation that the principles and the language be widely taught is absolutely the right path, in my view. We emerged from the process with an abiity to question ourselves when we slip into the old habit of bloating projects so they become big "fail backward" failures instead of little "fail forward" opportunities.

We also emerged with a portfolio of ideas generated in the workshops that might lead to new products and services. The sour economy makes this is a very difficult time to be thinking about some of them, but I'm confident we're going to find some real payoffs.

And we're doing a lot of little things right. At the moment we have one of our corporate sales guys working a new revenue program that we pulled together in about a week, including all the support technology, by repeating the "good enough" mantra and relying on existing open-source tools. The results so far are just phenomenal, and we're making modifications on the fly so it all works better.

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