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Battle for the newsroom: How convergence lives and dies

Posted in: by: John Duncan

Apr 30, 2009
11:34 AM

You know that old story where a guy stops his car on a London street and asks for directions from a stranger. “How do I get to Big Ben,” he says. The stranger pauses for a couple of seconds, purses his lips, takes a deep breath and tells the driver. “Well, mate,” he says. “If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.”

That is the problem of newsroom convergence.

In all honesty almost no newsroom would be well advised to be starting from where they are. But like the London driver, they don’t really have any choice.

So what pitfalls should a newsroom convergence operation seek to avoid?

First of all, don’t panic. The fact that you probably have little idea how to organize convergence should not worry you. No one does when they start out. You’ll know plenty by the time you finish.

The problem you have in leading this change is that you have a very specific set of challenges. Every newspaper is different. Different leadership, different culture, different history, different staff, different objectives, different audience, different environment, different technology. Sadly you cannot simply copy something you saw at a presentation by someone else. It looks great on Powerpoint. But it isn’t a roadmap. It’s like our apocryphal driver being told by someone that they found Big Ben by driving east. It worked for them. But if you’re starting at Aldgate rather than Heathrow it won’t work for you. (No more London geography I promise).

And let’s be honest, no one tells the truth in Powerpoints. They are designed largely to emphasize the most flattering 5% of what actually happened in a nice neat order that makes the whole thing seem orderly, well thought out and obvious. They are almost always missing all the most gruesome, most troublesome, most helpful details.

Sorry, you are going to have to find your own way there.

Sensible newspapers (and sensible lost drivers) admit early on that they are lost. They stop driving and start thinking. If you are about to stop and think about convergence I suggest you should start by asking questions under eight headings.

1. Why are we implementing a converged workflow? What is the purpose of the change?
2. Who are we? What kind of function do we serve as a media company?
3. Who are our audience now? How will it change over the next three years?
4. What are the capabilities of our staff?  Who will lead this change and who are the most enthusiastic followers? What are the strengths of our leadership?
5. What can we learn from the experiences of others? (but be careful of “heading east”)
6. What is our current technological infrastructure? How adaptable is it to future changes and platforms?
7. What are the major forms of communication in our organization? Where does formal and informal power lie? How do decisions get made and transmitted? How is success and failure transmitted to staff?
8. Where do we make our money now? What will have to happen for us to make more money in three years time?

If you were to think about only one thing on that list, think about Number 4. The success or failure of your project is massively impacted by the people who will implement it and the people upon whom it will be implemented.

The problem with any convergence process is that goes entirely against the most significant trend on your newsroom, which, in fact, is divergence.

Your biggest problem is probably that the skills of the people in your newsroom are diverging from the new requirements of the profession. The brilliant reporter would not even make it as a sub-editor, let alone a multimedia journalist. The podcast producer knows how to produce perfect audio but has no specialist knowledge of anything and no sense of how the news process hones and refines a print story. You can give a hack a cameraphone, but you can’t always make her think in pictures. A converged workflow won’t change this on its own, in fact circumstances will make it more and more likely to fail as time and technology moves on..

New platforms are not our biggest challenge; people are, And it is how you change the skills, relationships and power-structures among your teams that will determine the success of your convergence project.

If you don’t believe me, think about the convergence projects that fail. People’s comments about them fall broadly into two categories.

1. “The same people run the show but in a slightly different way.”

This happens when convergence is a fig-leaf to cover a land-grab by a print leadership who have finally seen the writing on the wall and know that if they don’t get control of their online and multimedia operations, they are going to lose power in the company to the people who do control and understand those things. They remain the most important people post-convergence, they still run the show on behalf of print and while they know a little more about other platforms than they used to, they truly care most about print and power. Non-print leaderships get frustrated and leave and print’s dominance continues to the detriment of the organization’s competitive position.

2. “Nothing really changed”

The last major round of newsroom convergence in the US didn’t really work. That was led by companies who owned TV stations and newspapers and wanted to see the two news operations working more closely (and cheaply) together. Because both have powerful leaderships of their own and at the time solid revenue streams it took tremendous force to get it off the ground but when it happened most journalists who were there will tell you that very little actually changed. It was a political stalemate and the old ways reasserted themselves pretty quickly.

This time around, we have to worry much more Type 1 failures more than than Type 2.  Print is not the powerhouse it was. The convergence project is not with powerful TV, but with the younger faces that run online operations in newspapers. The danger here is not stalemate but absorption, the powerful well-connected newspaper people drawing the online people closer to them, physically and procedurally in order to control them.

So how do you get round that? Well, you have to co-opt the best print leader you can find and you have to sell them hard on why real convergence is the best thing for the company and for their career. You might have to get your wallet out too.

For newsroom convergence to work it almost always relies on a print leader who really understands what needs to be done, is enthusiastic about it and who has the power in the company to mediate the continuing battles that will rage in a post-convergence newsroom between the various platforms, print, the strongest among them.

Once you have your leader, work downwards. But have realistic expectations. Don’t expect most of your print people to become instantly enlightened. They won’t. They have sections to edit and pages to produce and they get paid by you to produce the best pages possible. Their promotion doesn’t depend on the success of convergence, it depends on the quality of their section and of the newspaper. If an online project gets in the way of that then they will fight for their section first, not for the idea of the converged newsroom. But if you have a brilliant and powerful print leader mediating the battle, you’ll be okay.

So how do you keep a lid on internal fights?

My suggestion is to work hard on getting a water-tight PreNup. Use live scenarios to heat up the friction points in a converged newsroom and then follow them up with negotiations of principles to resolve them. You can’t stop people fighting for turf. But you can give them clear processes and guidelines on how to approach specific situations.  Work out the bargains in the cold light of a wet Tuesday morning in a brown-bag lunch or workshop rather than in the heat of battle on a Monday morning conference in the newsroom.

Then what?
Then keep working down the organization. Now is the time to really find the members of your team who have some passion for the new platforms and technologies, who use them already, who have ideas about how the company could exploit them. Identify them and train them to teach others. Empower them and reward them in a highly visible way. Don’t let section heads allocate their problem people to the training effort. Take their best and brightest people and ignore their screams.

Then identify for every single member of staff a skills plan that is within their reach. Don’t assume everyone must learn to do everything right away. Start with attainable goals that are specific to each person and build from there. Plan to develop the skills of your newsroom over the next two years not the next two weeks. Use classroom training as the beginning not the end of skills development and follow it up with measurement of progress linked to pay. The deal here is broadly that you promise not to overwhelm staff with training if they promise to stick with the program that you do put in front of them. It’s a good deal.

It seems like a lot
It is. The best plan of course is to call a consultant who has done this before to help you. But then I would say that wouldn’t I?