This article, Eureka! It Really Takes Years of Hard Work, from the New York Times is an apt reminder for the news media industry, and college media, as we try to grope our way into the future. It’s tempting to get focused on a solution that you think will help your online efforts (let’s give everyone a video camera! Let’s give everyone a blog!), when experience says that real innovation is built over time.
THAT more complicated story most often begins and ends with a determined, hard-working and open-minded person trying, and failing, to find a solution to a given problem.
This theory of innovation is problematic for the entire news media industry, because there’s a long history of poor investment in research & development. But it’s especially problematic for college media because of two critical issues: turnover and priorities.
Turnover: Every semester (or every school year), there’s a huge game of musical chairs. New editors are appointed. New reporters join the staff. And they all publish/broadcast in addition to their full-time job of being students. That’s not a smooth path for real innovation to take. If you get a forward-thinking editor-in-chief this year, you might get a print-centric fossil next year. Your web designer one year is great, the next, not so much.
This makes it incredibly difficult to maintain innovative efforts long enough for further innovation to occur.
Priorities: I mentioned above that students are putting out student media on top of their classwork. If professional journalists have a challenge integrating multimedia into their daily reporting, imagine the challenge for student journalists. I’m not saying it’s not necessary, I’m just pointing out the challenge. Most traditional news media have dedicated web people (if nothing else). Their whole raison de etre is to make the web site work better. They spend days at a time on that task. Contrast that with the average student media outlet, where the web site is the second beast that gets fed. I hope you see the problem here.
I was reminded of this today when I was in a meeting with our current web editor, a dedicated student journalist, who mentioned how the paper had originally approached the weblog format, and then abandoned that format, and had only recently picked it up again.
That’s a strike against innovation. If innovation is a sometimes slow climb up a long hill, we lose precious time and energy when we have to “re-push” the stone back up the hill. So does anyone have good suggestions for keeping momentum going in an environment of constant change? I’d love to hear some guidance.
on Feb 5th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
I don’t think that’s a strike against innovation. Students ought to be able to try, experiment and fail — a key to innovation itself.
The only way you’ll maintain an consistent direction is to have your dept. directors, advisers, coaches (even publications committees) be committed to innovation. The people who are there for the long term to guide the students need to be innovators themselves.
That way, a culture is encouraged where a certain level of invention is expected.