You know the problem. You’ve got a tangled newsroom issue that needs your attention – but you’ve got news to pursue (and a staff to manage) in the meantime.
How can you tackle such challenges as reaching young readers or building a training program or putting your online edition to better use when you’re in a constant scramble to do your best for the daily report?
A group of 23 editors – managing editors, deputy managing editors, and assistant managing editors – came to Poynter recently with just that dilemma. These editors are constantly on point for the daily, yet they all also bear considerable responsibilities for leading and managing newsroom change.
So, what were the editors doing here that they couldn’t do back home?
They were focusing and testing their thinking:
FOCUSING on their newsroom challenge by identifying and digging into a challenge or an aspiration in their newsroom. They couldn’t put off dealing with challenge. They had a deadline. They had to write about it – an exercise that helped them sift and sort what was most important, including what stood in the way and what contributed to a good outcome.
TESTING their thinking by turning to seminar colleagues, whose role was to challenge the editor’s thinking. What hadn’t been thought of? What voices hadn’t been incorporated? How would actions being considered lead to a better situation? As a result, some editors shifted their thinking, some refined their approach, others gained confidence that they were on a pretty good track.
What did the editors get from the process? Here were some of their thoughts by the end of the seminar:
- Realization that sometimes that first analysis needed more thought – a few more steps back from the trees to see more of the forest.
- Fellow editors, with their fresh eyes and different experiences were valuable in raising good questions and brainstorming.
- Future visions are built one step at a time, starting today.
- They (the editors) often are part of the issue — how they lead, baggage they carry, blind spots they haven’t recognized.
- Editors are facing many of the same challenges.
- The change theme is universal. Common issues include personnel, roles and responsibilities, structure, team-building, journalism. Most are provoked by the change around us — reader expectations, non-reader trends, new company or newsroom expectations, technology.
The process adopted by these editors to work through their issues could be helpful in any newsroom.
If you have a challenge or a vision for your newsroom’s future and want to put it to the test, here are some questions to help guide you:
- What is at issue in the situation and why is it important to address?
- Does your boss agree with the importance you place on this issue?
- What do you know? What do you need to know?
- Whose voices are valuable in the analysis?
- What journalistic and/or business values are at issue?
- What helpful support already exists?
- What barriers do you anticipate?
- What leadership will the newsroom need in addressing the situation?
While watching the editors work through their issues at the seminar, I thought of the reflex I grew accustomed to following in such circumstances. Confronted with a complex issue, I’d put people in a room and brainstorm and flip-chart ideas until the walls were covered. Most of those ideas never saw daylight. And for good reason — the brainstorming started before an idea was brought into sharp focus and tested.
The 23 editors modeled a better path to solutions, an approach that begins with focusuing and testing. In the process, they demonstrated that making deadline and making time for thinking can co-exist in the newsroom.
