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Posts Tagged ‘management’

News flash: Readers don’t want to pad your profit margins

Posted in Online media, Print media, tagged , on November 2, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I am happy to have actual scientific evidence that I am right: Newspapers can’t go wrong by explaining to readers what they are paying for and why. Actually the proof is tangential to my argument, but it’s related so I’ll claim it as evidence anyway.

As the combination of the recession and the migration of advertising revenue drove newspapers to lay off staff and cut back content, journalists and readers alike often complained that the publications were being slimmed down and made less compelling just as the price per copy was being raised — all of which is true. The thing is, readers were not presented with any options. The decision was made and then presented to them in as happy terms as possible. I wondered whether it had to be that way and have argued that if you tell readers exactly what it costs to produce a single copy of the newspaper, including specifically the cost of printing and delivering it, readers would be much more likely to accept price increases. After all, the typical subscriber is barely covering the cost of paper, ink and gasoline as it is, leaving the cost of all the humans involved in creating the content out of the picture.

The evidence I’m claiming comes from a study of consumer reaction to the New York Times’ online paywall. The study authors fault the Times for failing to adequately justify charging for online content after it had been free for so many years, because the justification or lack of it made all the difference in the world in how people reacted:

“When participants were provided with a compelling justification for the paywall — that The New York Times was likely to go bankrupt without it — their support and willingness to pay increased,” Cook and Attari concluded.

Times readers who thought the paywall was merely an effort to improve the newspaper’s bottom line, on the other hand, visited the website less frequently and looked for loopholes to avoid the charges.

The reason I’m claiming this as evidence in support of my argument is that the basic situation is the same: People do not inherently understand our industry’s finances. If they truly value what your publication does, they will accept a higher price as the cost of keeping it. If they don’t value it, well, then you have a larger problem. But if you don’t even bother to explain to them the exact reasons you want to charge more, they just assume you want to pocket the higher revenue.

Readers I have talked to don’t even realize advertising has declined. They don’t realize that advertising essentially pays (or historically has) the full cost of news production. They think that all the cost-cutting of recent years, as well as the move to start charging online, has been about INCREASING profits. People understand the need to balance income and expenses. Explain it to them. It’s not a radical concept: Treat them like adults.

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The recession distracted us from the disruption

Posted in Mobile media, Online media, Print media, tagged , , , , , , , , , on October 22, 2012| 1 Comment »

Anyone remember when “disruptive innovation” was the focus of discussion about the future of the newspaper industry? It seems like ages ago, but it has been just six or seven years. A Nieman Journalism Lab interview with Clay Christensen of the Harvard Business School has brought the phrase back in recent days. For those who don’t remember Newspaper Next, Mathew Ingram at Gigaom.com aptly summarizes the idea:

“One of the classic lessons from Christensen’s seminal book ‘The Innovator’s Dilemma’ is that companies with a commanding lead in their field, whether it’s hard-drive makers or steel mills, are almost incapable of taking the steps that need to be taken to survive a technological and/or behavioral disruption — even when the danger of not doing so is blindingly obvious. In other words, even when a company can see quite clearly that a freight train is approaching or a cliff lies directly ahead, it is still almost impossible to step off the tracks or do anything other than stampede over the edge.”

For a few years, “innovation” got a big push, at least in newsrooms. Journalists, in fact, generally have done the most innovating in the business, making their news more mobile, more diverse in form.

But in the wake of the Great Recession and the ongoing slow recovery, many people in the business are focused on where they can find revenue, not on the main point Christensen had stressed, which Joshua Benton described for the Nieman Journalism Lab as:

“First, focus on the jobs that your customers are hiring you to do — and on new ones that you might be in a good position to do. Successful companies often value elements of their products that audiences don’t particularly care about; getting too much distance between those two perceptions leads to business failure.”

What is the job that people come to newspapers or any news source to get done? Ingram asks at Gigaom:

“Are readers suffering from a lack of paywalled content for which they can submit their credit cards? Probably not.”

The current focus on paywalls and how to grow the online subscription business helps the business survive, and it might even be considered an innovation if the purpose is to change the industry from one relying on cheaply acquiring an audience in order to sell lots of advertising to one that relies on creating a product that people are willing to pay to acquire — but it doesn’t serve customers. Continuing to provide the public with the same information we’ve always provided them isn’t an innovation. There has to be more.

Look at the way people use technology – and how rapidly that technology is moving. Ask yourself whether the way you do business makes sense in that world. What is the job people come to you to get done?

Christensen sounds a warning that innovation focused on customers can’t be put off for long:

“Even as the disruption is getting more and more steam in the marketplace, the core business persists, and is really quite profitable for a very long time. Then, when the disruption gets good enough to address the needs of your customers, very quickly, all of a sudden, you go off the cliff.”

10/26 UPDATE — More on the ways people use technology:

“This year, the amount of time consumers spent using mobile devices—excluding talk time—will grow 51.9% to an average 82 minutes per day, up from just 34 minutes in 2010, eMarketer estimates.

“… Time spent with print media will drop to an average 38 minutes per day this year, eMarketer estimates, down from an average 44 minutes per day in 2011. Newspapers will see a drop to an average 22 minutes per day this year, while time spent with print magazines will fall to 16 minutes per day.”

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Shortcomings of paywalls

Posted in Online media, tagged , , , , on August 23, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Mathew Ingram at GigaOm reminds everyone that even with a paywall in place online, a newspaper has quite a gap to fill if advertising continues to decline (as it likely will), and that relying on payments from readers does not equal freedom from pressure to generate traffic. Sample:

“But the biggest flaw in … (that) reasoning, I think, is the idea that having subscribers means newspapers won’t have to be driven by pageview-based tactics any more, and can just focus on high-quality journalism. This assumes that the readers who subscribe will be radically different creatures than the ones who read the content for free: in other words, they will only be interested in serious journalism and not celebrity news briefs or slideshows, whereas the free reader is driven only by their interest in those sleazy eyeball-grabbing tactics.

“I don’t think that’s the case at all. I think most readers who pay will still want just as many of those things, and will only continue subscribing as long as they get them — and without them, the paper’s subscription base may be loyal, but it will also be relatively tiny. This is the flip-side of the transformation that some newspapers like the NYT have already undergone, where the revenue provided by readers now exceeds the revenue provided by advertising. While that may seem like it would provide great freedom to pursue quality, it also means the the paper is even more beholden to a small group of readers …”

That being said, I think the industry still needs to move aggressively to build non-advertising revenue. Journalists just shouldn’t look forward to the day when finally they are free of business-driven demands on their time and websites.

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When I realized the world was moving on without me

Posted in Mobile media, Online media, Print media, tagged , , , , , , on August 20, 2012| Leave a Comment »


Mark Potts’ description on his Recovering Journalist blog of the first glimpses he and Washington Post executives had 20 years ago of the coming media technology revolution reminds me of my own moment of realization on that topic.

It’s worth the time to read Mark’s post, but his tale revolves around this:

“Twenty years ago, Robert G. Kaiser, newly appointed managing editor of The Washington Post, took a trip to California to learn more about the then-developing world of Silicon Valley. While there, he was invited by John Sculley, then Apple’s CEO, to a conference in Japan about the future of digital media. Several dozen movers and shakers from the worlds of publishing and technology gathered in the resort town of Hakone, outside Tokyo, to discuss what it might mean to use computers to collect and distribute news and information, something described by the newfangled word ‘multimedia.’”

It was just 1992, but what was described in that meeting in Japan is pretty much the online media environment we have now. As Mark describes it, Kaiser and others recognized the need to prepare for the technological tidal wave, but for all the effort put into it, things just petered out:

“The history of the past 20 years of newspapers and digital media is, unfortunately, a legacy of timidity, missed opportunities and a general lack of imagination and guts to leap into the future.”

My moment of realization comes on a much smaller, more limited scale. In 1997, I told my reporters that we all needed to think of the newspaper’s website as a place to report breaking news because it put us on an even playing field with TV, but I remained skeptical of how much new effort needed to be directed online. But in June 2005, I attended a session at API in Reston, Va., with the unwieldy name “Cross-Platform Media Teams: Strategic Thinking for a Multi-Platform World,” and that changed everything for me. In particular, a presentation by Jeff Coles of USC’s Center for the Digital Future drove home the idea that the Internet was driving far-reaching changes in people’s behavior in the same way that the advent of television did. The trends indicated that even then, before the first iPhone launched the explosive growth in smartphones.

Which leads us in more recent years to the kind of scenes such as former Wall Street Journal reporter Paul Glader recently described from a trip on Amtrak:

“All of my neighbors were pecking away at Amazon Kindles or Apple iPads. In this container on rails, the microcosm of well-connected travelers showed what kind of ‘Star Trek’ world in which we are, or soon will be, living. … They flitted back and forth, like distracted youngsters, between email, news sites, books and video games like Angry Birds.”

Newsrooms already have been decimated by massive declines in advertising revenue. Often, the cuts in staffing make editors even more resistant to changing beats or organizational structures – we’ve lost so much, how can we do anything new when we can’t even do what we once thought was the bare minimum? But retrenchment is no way to keep up with a world that’s racing ahead of you.

(Thanks to Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman for pointing to both of these articles.)

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Survey on mobile news devices raises questions

Posted in Mobile media, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 10, 2012| Leave a Comment »

USA Today app
The 2012 RJI Mobile Media News Consumption Survey brings some interesting mileposts on the evolution of mobile news use, but to me it seems to raise some questions too.

In a post at poynter.org, Jeff Sonderman writes that certain results of the survey “makes tablet readers seem the best hope for print publishers that want to make a digital transition based on paid content.” Along with a finding that tablets are strongly favored for news consumption by people over 35, Jeff highlights three findings of the survey:

“More than half [52 percent] of the mobile news consumers who said they used their large media tablet most frequently for news also subscribed to a printed newspaper and/or newsmagazine. …
“Those who said they use their large media tablet most frequently for consuming news also are much more likely to subscribe to digital news products than those who said they use their smartphone most frequently for news. …
“About 60 percent of owners who favored large media tablets consider their experience consuming news on their tablets better than reading a printed newspaper.”

Among the questions I have is whether print news organizations should be focusing on where their current audience is or where the potential audience is – and that’s a question that goes back decades.

Among people who already subscribe to newspapers or news magazines, and who are over 35, tablets are a strong favorite – but if you focus on going after that group, what about the people under 35, who much more strongly favor using their smartphones rather than a tablet (57 percent vs. 28 percent)?

Smartphones also are nearly ubiquitous – owned by 92 percent of mobile news consumers, compared to the 40 percent who own tablets.

Maybe if your mobile site is good, it doesn’t matter, but I haven’t heard that the industry is approaching the point where most mobile sites are considered to deliver a good experience. Until then, the few news sites that are good would seem to have an advantage in building a reading habit among a larger segment of the potential audience, leaving the industry still relying on a shrinking portion of the population.

A focus on the tablet also could simply reinforce the old print newsroom habit of tailoring the work toward a particular time of day – except with tablets it is evening instead of morning. Smartphone users are roughly equally likely to check for news at various times of day, while half of tablet users wait until evening.

Ultimately, this may come down to whether you think news will (or should) wind up primarily supported by subscriptions and some type of paywall or will (or should) remain largely free and supported by advertising. If the former, the ready niche – of older, presumably better-off readers accustomed to your style of product – is tablets.

But even if that’s the better path in the short-term because it based on paid content now, not the promise of something uncertain later, it’s less of a digital transition unless your theory is that it is the best way to convince stubbornly print-oriented editors and publishers to begin tailoring their work toward a tablet-based digital audience, and that from there it then would be easier to get to an all-digital orientation from there than from where they are now.

7/11/12 UPDATE: I think my own view comes closer to what the deputy publisher of TPM expressed in May to Nieman Journalism Lab:

“We’re giving a lot of thought to three different kinds of consumption: Active consumption being at the desktop, on-the-go consumption being on your mobile phone, and passive consumption being in your bed, on your tablet, something like that.”

7/13/12 UPDATE: I’d like to see more studies of the effects of paywalls on demographics, but one from Our Hometown about what happened to the online audience of the Times Record in Brunswick, Maine (that link goes to a PDF), should give everyone pause: When the paper’s website was free, the average age of users was 43, but after a paywall went up the number of young site visitors dropped off a cliff and the average age rose to 59.

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Future newsrooms will need fewer people but better pay

Posted in Online media, Print media, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on May 31, 2012| Leave a Comment »


I will take issue with the poynter.org headline The one chart that should scare the hell out of print media, for two reasons. First, it’s actually two charts, the second of which is above, from a presentation by KPCB’s Mary Meeker. The two illustrate what appears not to be a blip but a trend in the money end of the news business. The one above extrapolates the advertising revenue.

You may question whether it is reasonable to extrapolate a trend from the greatest economic collapse since the Depression. I would argue yes both because it started before the economic collapse and because of the second chart, comparing where advertising revenue is spent and where consumers spend their time:

Note on the far left: People spend 7 percent of their time with print media, but print gets 25 percent of the advertising revenue. Note on the far right: People spend a combined 36 percent of their time with Internet and mobile media, but those get just 23 percent of the ad revenue. Even if print will be perceived as a better buy (not a bet I would make), at some point those numbers seem likely to come closer to equalizing.

First conclusion: The ad revenue decline of recent years seems likely to continue.

This leads to a point made by Ken Doctor at the Nieman Journalism Lab: Money coming to news organizations from readers (paid circulation/online access) is growing as a percentage of revenue. Partly this is because of declining ad revenue — if you’re total revenue is $100, then $20 is a small percentage, but if your revenue drops to $50 then $20 is pretty big – but it’s also from the growth of various kinds of paywalls. I remain convinced that an all-or-nothing paywall closes a newspaper off from the possibility of luring new customers, but the trend toward metered paywalls seems able to draw in both avid readers and those who wouldn’t pay even for the bigger headlines of the day.

What the combination seems to lead us toward, as Doctor indicates, is a model where many news organizations will be asking for subscriptions more on the basis that NPR stations ask for memberships — not because they have something every day that you want know, but because you want free access because they regularly do. Advertising, in this scenario, becomes an increasingly less important revenue source; readers drive the revenue.

One fear I have read often in the past is that a news model driven by what is popular would gravitate toward the lurid and celebrity gossip, but I don’t think the above situation would do that. The kind of readers drawn by that kind of news would not be the ones who pay for regular access. Those readers would want at least the occasional substantial bit of civic journalism or in-depth news. You might make a living (a la TMZ) if you are at the top level of celebrity gossip, but at the local level that won’t cut it.

But what also seems likely is that the new level of revenue may not support seven-days-a-week newspapers in many markets, as Clay Shirky argued will eventually be the case even with the Washington Post. If that becomes the common model, then would mere daily scarcity of news drive enough people to buy online subscriptions to get news from “newspapers”? After all, in many markets there are TV and radio stations, which already send out news for free, and in many cases there may be small sites such as Homicide Watch (cited by Shirky) that focus on certain high-interest news areas more thoroughly. What then would spur people to pay for access to the mainstream non-TV news site?

Aggregation is part of the equation — if a news organization shows that no matter the source, it will round up all the news in the community, it could gain a loyal local following. But that seems not enough, to me. If less frequency is key, I wonder whether a higher quality of writing in the reduced number of publication days will be a major factor. If that’s the case, then the frequent publishers’ first instinct of holding down news salaries when budgets constrict could be counterproductive.

The keystone of my evidence, besides any manager’s common sense, is from a story by NPR’s “Morning Edition” in early May about new research measuring human performance in groups, which found that a minority of any group typically will account for a majority of the group’s performance. In other words, a few stars get more done at better quality than a larger group of more typical people. That runs counter to my experience of what managers at all levels do in the face of budget pressures, which is to replace departing staffers with someone who costs a lot less and is deemed “good enough.” “Good enough” hires, if you extend the logic of this study, actually cost more in the long run because they are not just a little but a great deal less capable.

There’s a tantalizing hint of this thinking in the memo from Jim Amoss to the Times-Picayune newsroom about changes in New Orleans from the paper’s reduction in days of print:

“Concerning pay in the new companies, I want to dispel some rumors: There could be some salary adjustments, depending on changes in job descriptions. But most people will make what they make today, if not more.”

I will repeat the relevant part: “most people will make what they make today, if not more.” In a world where the competition for eyeballs is not just local, the need for writers who can catch a reader’s attention is heightened, and it would make sense that if you find you have someone who can both produce the daily bits of news needed to keep a news site relevant while also producing stories worthwhile to the remaining partial-week readership, you would pay that person better than someone who could do only one of the two functions.

For that reason, I would reach back all the way to the early 2000s for a piece of advice I heard an executive repeatedly give (mostly in vain) to publishers: You get what you pay for. If you cut the size of your staff but increase the pay of the remaining people, so that your payroll overall is the same, you might be able to attract and retain the people you need. It is guaranteed that if you cut the staff size and hold the line on the pay – or, worse, cut it – you will never have the people you need, and who would want to pay to read your sorry rag at that point?

6/12/12 UPDATE: I’m gaining some hope about the above from an INMA article about the Star-Tribune boosting reader revenue closer to 50 percent:

“We’re asking users to pay more of the freight. But for that strategy to work, we knew we needed to focus on high-quality customers who see value in our products and have low churn. And to get those high-quality customers, we’ve focused on three areas: our core print audience, pricing/retention, and accessibility.”

If you’re going to focus on high-quality customers, you have to have high-quality staff to provide the value needed to hold onto those customers:

“The content we provide isn’t available anywhere else. This is local reporting — business, local sports, city council meetings. You are doing that, and you are relevant. Differentiate yourself from your competitors. Once you do that, you’re going to get people and you’re going to get them to pay.”

But it’s beyond content to a smart strategy on pricing and marketing. Those are not my areas of expertise, but the article’s points sound good to this journalist.

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I got there first

Posted in Print media, tagged , , , , , , on May 29, 2012| Leave a Comment »

If I had been blogging angry, my post last week about Warren Buffett’s letter to his company’s new editors and publishers might have sounded like Clay Shirky’s take on it:

“Buffett is famously the greatest investor alive, and almost as famous for plain-spoken observations about the market, so you’d assume his first public memo about Media General would offer insight into the current state of the newspaper business. The actual text, however, merely makes it clear that Buffett doesn’t understand that business.”

A lot of the rest is similar to what I said, though. I take no credit for influencing Shirky, I just wrote faster. But he has a line I wish I had thought of:

“Small-town residents of the sort Media General serves tend to adopt technology late, but the future eventually arrives, even in Opelika, Alabama.”

The CEO of Media General, in an interview with a Richmond-area business website, says something pointing in that very direction:

Publishing revenues are down about 50 percent over the past five years, Morton said, but much of the costs— printing presses, delivery drivers, etc. — have held steady.

“There was nowhere to hide from these revenue declines,” Morton said.

“Over the past five years, our first thought was that this was heavily due to the recession and, like many other recessions in the past, that this was a cycle. You tighten your belt, freeze hiring and even drop the number of people.

“So we went through a couple years thinking that was the way to handle it. But it kept going.”

It wasn’t until the second quarter of 2011, Morton says, “that we realized the world had changed.”

UPDATE: And from John Robinson, a briefer but better explanation than I gave of what these newspapers, unshackled from MG’s debt, ought to be doing:

“The real question is, what is the newspaper spending its profits on? And the follow ups: Is it investing in the future? Is it investing in its staff? Is it reducing the profit-taking so that more can be funneled back into the operation? Is it reducing its investment in the newsprint product so that it can increase an investment into digital news creation and distribution?”

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Hands-on management isn’t the real problem for news

Posted in Online media, Print media, tagged , , , , , , , , on May 25, 2012| 1 Comment »

Warren Buffett
I would wager you would have a difficult time finding an employee of any Media General newsroom that is soon to become part of Berkshire Hathaway’s BH Media Group who wasn’t thrilled by Warren Buffett’s letter to his company’s publishers and editors. It declares what he calls a “hands-off principle” in the management of the newspapers. As far as it is defined, it sounds as good as any management declaration that living journalists who don’t own their own papers would be able to remember.

On content:

“I believe newspapers that intensively cover their communities will have a good future. It’s your job to make your paper indispensable to anyone who cares about what is going on in your city or town.
“That will mean both maintaining your news hole — a newspaper that reduces its coverage of the news important to its community is certain to reduce its readership as well — and thoroughly covering all aspects of area life, particularly local sports. No one has ever stopped reading when half-way through a story that was about them or their neighbors.
“You should treat public policy issues just as you have in the past. I have some strong political views, but Berkshire owns the paper — I don’t. And Berkshire will always be non-political.
“… Our job is to reign supreme in matters of local importance.”

On the possibility of duplicating the debt levels that could not be maintained as revenue shrank:

“We shun levels of debt that could ever impose problems. Therefore, you will determine your paper’s destiny; outsiders will never dictate it.”

Read that again: “You will determine your paper’s destiny; outsiders will never dictate it.” That is where the rubber meets the road in this story, because it’s not entirely true, and the real question is to what extent editors and publishers understand that.

What is it that is driving the industry’s decline? The debt was a factor, so its removal is a great help and provides breathing room, but it’s not the driver. The level of debt that Media General had incurred might have been manageable at the levels of revenue that were coming in 10 or 15 years ago, and if those had kept up then everything would have been peachy. What changed? Buffett’s letter somewhat addresses this:

“We must rethink the industry’s initial response to the Internet. The original instinct of newspapers then was to offer free in digital form what they were charging for in print. This is an unsustainable model and certain of our papers are already making progress in moving to something that makes more sense. We want your best thinking as we work out the blend of digital and print that will attract both the audience and the revenue we need.”

Clearly the experiments with online paywalls now under way at a number of these newspapers will continue, but that doesn’t address the real driver. If you find the formula for paywalls of any kind that get you back to the paid-content equivalent of whatever your paid circulation was 15 years ago, you are not fixing the problem because paid circulation has never, at least since the 19th century, come close to paying the cost of producing the news. If you drop $1 in a newspaper box, the actual per-unit cost of creating that newspaper probably was $3 or $4. Traditionally, the bulk of that cost is covered by advertising because advertisers have thought it was well worth it to reach the mass audience. Newspapers produce news, but their business has always (at least since the 19th century) been selling eyeballs to advertisers, not selling newspapers.

Paywalls may help, to the extent that they provide at least some revenue and the lack of free local news online can stem the loss of print circulation, which in turn helps justify the rates charged to advertisers. But advertising has been declining for years for reasons that have nothing to do with drops in print circulation.

The real driver behind the industry’s trouble is that the Internet is not just an alternate delivery medium. As Jeffrey Cole of the University of Southern California’s Center for the Digital Future has put it, the advent of high-speed Internet is driving changes in society and personal behavior just as the advent of television did. That, not the decision by newspapers “to offer free in digital form what they were charging for in print,” is the force behind the growth of 24/7 news on mobile devices and tablets. If you somehow could put every newspaper in the world behind a hard paywall, that wouldn’t address all the TV networks, local TV stations, radio networks (NPR, to name one), web-only news sites, local place blogs, topic-oriented websites, and on and on and on. People expect to find everything they want to know online not because newspapers are there but because, as I said in a post last month, everything else is there. And because everything and everyone else is there, that is where many advertisers increasingly want to be – and they are not just trading print news sites for online news sites, they are exploring the Internet’s plethora of options for reaching an audience.

Buffett knows all this, I think. As he told the Richmond Times-Dispatch in an interview Thursday, “(Print) circulation for the industry will decline,” and experimentation is necessary:

“Some newspapers are experimenting with various pay-for-content models in their digital editions. Buffett didn’t specify what sort of model should be adopted, saying that is something the company’s newspapers will have to work out themselves.
“‘I think there is a better formula’ than the current revenue model, Buffett said in the interview. ‘I don’t think staying free over the next 10 years is the sound choice.’”

So we have to circle back to the “hands-off principle.” Here’s what the directive to publishers and editors boils down to in plain English: You make the decisions, as long as you maintain both your news hole (that’s one of the few things specifically spelled out in the letter) and profitability (not spelled out, but Buffett’s not running a charity, so it’s assumed).

The situation, then, is not much changed from what it was before, for these papers and any others: If advertising continues to migrate not just to other platforms but to non-news venues, what’s left is higher prices for readers, in print and online. Can a paywall for a small or medium-size news organization bring enough revenue to cover all production costs that are not covered by the remaining advertising? I hope so. I think so. If it can’t, hands-off or hands-on won’t matter.

Which brings us to this portion of Buffett’s letter:

“American papers have only failed when one or more of the following factors was present: (1) The town or city had two or more competing dailies; (2) the paper lost its position as the primary source of information important to its readers or (3) the town or city did not have a pervasive self-identity. We don’t face those problems.”

No, we don’t. But that doesn’t mean we won’t discover a No. 4 reason: The publisher and editor failed to recognize what the problem really was.

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Fallor ergo sum – What should be the manager’s creed

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, tagged , on February 19, 2012| Leave a Comment »


You’ll spend 18 minutes very well if you watch the talk by Kathryn Schulz, author of “Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error,” on the topic of what we learn by being wrong. In particular, it’s useful as a manager to remind yourself that different people see things differently, and your perspective might not be the best for understanding what’s going on. Or that events have changed beyond your plans, so you need to adjust. As a reporter or editor, you have to keep this in mind all the time so you don’t automatically ascribe motivations to people. As Schultz says, “It does feel like something to be wrong; it feels like being right.”

Her talk reminded me of the time I have most audibly been on the receiving end of someone assuming he was right and I was wrong. It was at the 2004 Republican National Convention, the night that Vice President Dick Cheney spoke, but the keynote speaker that night was a Democrat, Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, whose speech rained fire and brimstone on the Democrats. I was there to serve as the editor for the Media General Washington Bureau staff covering the convention, and at some point as the fury of the speech became clear, the bureau chief, Marsha Mercer, looked and me, and I looked at her, and she said something like, “This is the lead, isn’t it?” There was no other way to see it, I thought. What Cheney eventually said that night was utterly expected. So Mercer wrote the story, I read it over, and I filed it. We packed up and headed out of the media area attached to Madison Square Garden, and my cellphone rang. A night editor at one of our papers was calling to ask, more or less, if we were out of our minds. “It’s the vice president’s night,” he said, and we simply should not have relegated the VP to the bottom half of the story. I wondered about it overnight and the next morning, when it was clear that almost everyone had done what that editor said we should have — led the story with Cheney’s speech. But for the next solid week, the only thing about the convention that got much discussion was Miller’s speech. I think you could make the case either way that night, but at that moment people making the different decisions felt just as sure that they made the right call and that the others were clearly wrong.

My point isn’t that Marsha and I were proved right, but that as an editor you have to remember that people have different perspectives, and even if your reporter has written a story completely opposite of how you think he or she should have, you have to understand why before you launch into a critique of what’s wrong with it.

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