Newsroom admits: we have a lot of boring stories
October 19, 2008 by grzegorz.piechota
“I was in South Florida doing the redesign, and somebody raised their hand and said, ‘You know, I read our paper every day, and a lot of the stories are kind of boring. I hope I don’t offend anybody.’ “
Lee Abrams, US Tribune Co.’s chief innovation officer, continues:
“Then the publisher got up and said, ‘Really? Who agrees with that?’ And the entire room, 150 people, all said, ‘Yeah, we have a lot of boring stories.’ And even the guy who wrote the story that person was referring to said, ‘Yeah, I wrote that story and I thought it was boring.’ It just gets people talking about things that are verboten, and that’s important — to get the dialog going.”
Mr. Abrams told this story to Portfolio’s Jeff Bercovici at at the Dow Jones/Nielsen Media & Money conference held in New York on October 14-15, 2008.
Mr. Abrams took part in discussion titled “Agents of Change: Can They Turn Old Media into Profitable Media?”.
Some highlights:
“We need to go through the exercise of completely rethinking everything the newspaper does, not only as far as staffing and all that, but the actual content itself.
So we went through that exercise, and really just tried to blow up all the clichés, all the assumptions, all the sacred things about newspapers and just reinvent them for 2008, respecting the history of it but just sort of a brutal look at what a newspaper in our different markets should feel like and look like and smell like….
Bottom line, though, with traditional newspapers, is just aggressive, without prejudice rethinking of everything, very painful, creating a lot of problems but part of changing the culture is being competitive today in an area that hasn’t changed, really, in years and years…
There was a big myth that you could not have these [newsroom] cuts that were going through and still produce a quality newspaper, and that’s just nonsense… We’ve been through some pretty substantial cuts, and there were people who thought, ‘No, it’s going to be horrible, you just can’t do it, it’s going to be dumbed down.’ And no, it just had to be rethought. It’s just as intelligent and engaging as ever, just with fewer people.”
Wikipedia calls Mr. Abrams “the most influential radio guru of his generation”. He pioneered a form of audience measurement and psychographics and helped invent the album-oriented rock radio format. He joined Tribune Co. in March 2008 after it was bought by a real estate entrepreneur Sam Zell. Both have been facing strong criticism for their disrespect to journalists, strong words and cost cuts.
Tagged: business model, Case studies, innovation, newspaper
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