Washington Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton used a January 2012 column to ask whether his paper was innovating too fast. “Hardly a week goes by without the Web site or newspaper launching some feature, or a venture to attract more revenue, or a blog, or a social media innovation,” he wrote; some readers found the pace exhausting. The Post’s managing editor answered that he wished it were true that the paper had too much innovation.
The reply offered here was that pace was the wrong axis: what had changed was the product. A newspaper was built as a mass medium, bundling news, commentary and entertainment for a wide audience. Online, content and audience both come apart, so some features are built for everyone and others for a fragment — the @mentionmachine Pexton cited was always going to matter more to political obsessives than to a general reader, and that is fine.
What deserved criticism was unstrategic innovation: adopting a platform because it is the shiny thing of the moment, without working out why or how. The cautionary example was the British newspaper that introduced blogs by asking for a show of hands in the newsroom, then worked out a few months later that letting any journalist blog was not a good idea. Forrester’s POST framework was offered as the corrective, since it settles the audience and the objective before the technology.
The argument worth having was not about too much or too little innovation but about what separates good innovation from bad, with the journalism setting the terms.