Don’t kill them too quickly

Rereading my post about Mark Potts’ NewspapeRx, I have one area of slight disagreement with the “innovate, but kill them quick” ethos he suggests in prescription no. 10:

The time is long past for incremental, evolutionary steps—newspapers need to think out of the box, try things that previously were unthinkable, and be prepared to quckly and ruthlessly abandon efforts (old and new) that aren’t working.

There’s a point at which innovation gets stifled if you kill things off too quickly. Think about the classic diffusion of innovation curve. It ordinarily takes time for an innovation to take hold within a population. Newspapers that decide to just throw out innovations with no follow-through, marketing efforts, or helpful documentation are guaranteeing the death of some (possibly) truly innovative ideas.

I read recently (via a Howard Owens comment) that Rob Curley estimated that it will take 18 months to judge whether a new service on a news web site is a success or failure:

It’s too early to tell if our podcasting is going to be a success. I kind of want to have about 18 months to see what happens both with audience and advertising before I call it a success or failure.

Curley wrote that in March … 2006. It’ll be another year before Naples should judge if the project is a success or not. Of course, Curley is now at Washingtonpost.com, so we’ll see how that works.

If that’s how long it’s really going to take (and I have no data to support or deny that assertion), then I can see problems for newspapers who kill off innovative content concepts too quickly.

And for college media, the lesson is just as applicable. If you are trying to do something with podcasting, don’t expect an overnight response. If you are attempting to build up user comments and online forums, don’t give up if the response is tepid for the first three months.

As someone who spends a lot of time following new media, six months can seem like six years, but there is a whole world of people who are still six months (five years?) behind the bleeding edge. Don’t abandon them before they have a chance to catch up and try out your innovative projects.

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