Two new-year posts in January 2008 set the terms for this one. Steve Outing, writing in Editor and Publisher, told editors to spend the year on culture rather than product: “Get everyone involved in the task of reinventing the newspaper. Give them time in their schedules to participate. Assign tasks — to everyone.” Bring in creativity and innovation experts if necessary, he added, and expose everyone in the company to them. Mindy McAdams took the theme further and less patiently: “Tear up your news hole. Destroy it. Tear up your CMS templates. Install something else and link to the new thing. Do it fast and furiously, as if your life depended on it. Because it does.”
The argument made here was that this only sounds radical in an industry known for its conservatism, and that the obstacle is history rather than technology. Newspaper and broadcast newsrooms alike were carrying the baggage of the distribution systems they had grown up in, at a point when journalism was shifting to a multimedia, multiplatform environment that required a different mindset.
The proposition at the end is the durable part: stop defining journalism by its means of distribution and start defining it by the journalism — how best to tell a story and reach an audience, with whichever tools suit it, across as many platforms as it takes.