toFostering Innovation

Within an Existing Organization

THE SECRETS

Dan Pacheco, The Bakersfield Californian

A Primer for Newsroom Leaders

Bakersfield’s Successes• First U.S. newspaper to deploy “citizen

journalism” with The Northwest Voice (2004)

• Among first to experiment with free Classifieds and social networking (Bakotopia.com, 2005)

• Award-winning print redesign (2006)

• Local niche network approach. Eleven online brands, 6 with print editions, since 2004.

- New products generate unique share of 7% local audience, 22% advertisers in city of 300,000.

- 30,000 user profiles, 29,000 friend connections, 1,000 blogs.

And most recently ...

• Knight News Challenge recipient.

- Printcasting: a digital-print hybrid strategy. Grows local audience and revenue by giving niche print publishing tools to consumers, and self-serve print advertising tools to local businesses.

- $837,000, two-year project started in June (and my full-time job).

- Timeline: Alphas & betas this Fall, full launch in March 2009, extend to five partners in other cities in late 2009, fully open source in 2010.

- Learn more at http://www.printcasting.com

But that’s the past• Much as we hate to admit it, newspapers have a

culture that is really focused on the past and what happened yesterday.

• Our continued existence is all about focusing on tomorrow.

• Unfortunately, our office culture often struggles with staying current with today, let alone defining the future.

• How do we get there?

First, the Truth

• There are no formulas, no silver bullets, and really no secrets. This is an organic process.

• You either embrace change and risk, or you resist change and embrace status quo. News industry’s future depends on change.

• Strive for the former!

- General lack of action has inspired some influential people to encourage journalists to jump ship en masse. Example: http://tinyurl.com/636wg3

- The less you do, the more we’re going to hear this -- and the better the advice will sound to your staff.

Innovation Starts With You

• Leadership must expect and support creativity.

• Difficult, because this means less focus on supporting existing business.

- But existing businesses are faltering. Keep a core team focused on shoring them up. Use revenues as your own Venture Capital firm for innovations that will be tomorrow’s core businesses.

• Leadership must BELIEVE in the future, and put its money where its mouth is.

• Listen to and encourage people who pitch ideas. Be a spring board, not a buzz saw.

Two ways to innovate

1.Innovate from within

2.Innovate from without

(Hint: 2 helps drive 1).

Innovate From Within (hard)• Difficult for people who are incented to support

current business models to prioritize the future.

• Some ideas from star innovators in Bakersfield (Mary Lou Fulton, Jen Baldwin, Matt Munoz):

- Listen to crazy, creative ideas & communicate with staff so that even top-down mandates look like grass-roots initiatives (JB)

- Empower cheerleaders in the newsroom to inspire change in the newsroom. Without buy-in, you get backlash (JB)

- Make innovation everybody’s job, but also somebody’s job. Make it clear that new ideas are welcome, but also assign someone to gather and evaluate ideas from inside & outside (MLF)

- Use competitors, and use competition to your advantage. e.g. MySpace and Facebook pages for your new products (MM)

Internal examples• Newsroom video revolution.

- Totally organic. One year after one video editing desk as assigned, 70% of newsroom contributed to videos (see Bakersfield.com home page).

• “Bakosphere”: Newsroom decided to use blogs as their live content management system.

- Live news updates and conversation with community throughout the day. See http://tinyurl.com/55zbzp

• Californian Extra: a daily PDF digest of news for busy people.

- It didn’t survive (good approach, wrong audience), but the idea continues in a different way with Printcasting.

Innovate From Without• Not all ideas will gain traction in core

organization. Sometimes you need to shelter innovators from core product concerns.

- Send them into the desert, or separate them from core organization.

- In Bakersfield: New Products Group, Mercado Nuevo, Printcasting.

• Don’t expect instant miracles. “Make money on day one” can sfifle the big future opportunities.

- But do expect long-term vision for revenue generation.

• After success, send those people back into the core product.

- Encourage tendency of core product teams to compete with new products.

External examples• Nine totally new brands created in a network

of 11, in addition to Bakersfield.com and Tehachapinews.com

• Bakotopia.com

• The Bakomatic social media platform

• Inside Guide business directory

• Personal Inbox and news feed

• Interest Groups

• Printcasting

Create Innovation Vehicles• Create transparent process that makes it easy

for anyone to pitch an idea that grows audience & revenue in new ways.

• Encourage anyone at any level to pitch ideas.

- Say, “If your idea is chosen, you can have a role in its implementation.”

- Surprise! Most people have an innate entreprenurial spirit, but they lack a safe framework to let it be seen.

• Validate best ideas with research. Then, get busy!

Make Room for Play• Creative people learn by playing with new

things, and it gives them energy that results in more new stuff for you.

- e.g. Bakersfield’s Second Life experiment. Some laughed, but it resulted in a renewed appreciation for a Personal Inbox & micro-payments that later surfaced in our social media platform, Bakomatic. (And to our surprise, it was profitable!)

• The difference between play and competitive research is very thin these days.

- Allow staff to casually play with Facebook apps, Twitter, Seesmic videos, iPhone apps, etc. If jobs get done, what are you worried about?

• Google reserves 10% of everyone’s time to work on projects of personal interest.

Make Room for Accidents• July 7 WSJ report on Innovation -- read it! (http://tinyurl.com/59stjo)

• Some of the most world-changing innovations in history are the result of accidents (e.g. discovery of Smallpox vaccine)

• Let creative people jump between projects (otherwise, we get bored!)

• Don’t call unexpected results “failures”.

• Encourage pack-rat-like collecting. Stumble through your collection periodically.