This will be my column in Monday’s Gazette:
I came to Cedar Rapids to do two things: Lead the news staff of The Gazette and GazetteOnline and change the way media companies operate.
I’m shifting my attention now full-time to the second pursuit: transformation.
I will not explain the changes in our news organization here. The staff is still working to understand what’s going on. I will leave it to leaders of that part of the organization to explain what they are doing. I will explain my new role.
When I started here a year ago, newspapers were in a panic. Print advertising sales had fallen an unprecedented 14.4 percent below year-ago levels in the first quarter of 2008, the third time in the previous four quarters that the drop was in double digits. Our industry now looks back on those days with nostalgia. The rest of 2008 saw quarterly declines of 16.1, 19.3 and 20.6 percent. And the first quarter of this year was a stunning 29.7 percent.
Blogger and media consultant Alan Mutter’s headline in his Newsosaur blog recounting these numbers was an understatement: “Worst quarter for newspapers.”
Gazette Communications is in better shape than most of the industry, but we see similar trends and we know we must act. In the newspaper industry and in this company, we need thorough and fundamental transformation and we need it swiftly.
It seems unimaginable that an industry as established and entrenched as newspapers could just collapse like we are. But the list of newspaper closings, bankruptcies and cutbacks has been numbing. We are following a pattern of failure to respond to disruptive innovation that Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen has documented in dozens of industries, from department stores to railroads to steel companies. Again and again, Christensen has seen that the very things that make a business successful in its old way of operating make it vulnerable to disruptive innovation.
In April, as we were wondering what the second quarter held in store, I published my blueprint for a new business model for media companies, the Complete Community Connection.
I am now the C3 Coach for Gazette Communications, working to turn C3 from a puzzling abbreviation into a successful innovative company.
Without dwelling on details, my most important tasks in the new role are to launch new community engagement efforts, coach our staff and leadership in the tools and techniques of innovation and develop projects that will reshape our relationship with the community and ensure a prosperous future for our company.
If you’re interested in being a regular contributor to community conversation – whether through a blog you already write, through a blog we’d host, by contributing to our company’s products or in innovative ways that you’d like to discuss, please get in touch.
I will be working in the community as well to encourage use of the new tools we will be using to engage the community. If you’re interested in learning more about Twitter or other social media, please check out the continuing education courses I will be teaching this fall at Kirkwood Community College.
Since I am no longer directing the news staff, Publisher Dave Storey and I have agreed that I won’t be writing this weekly column after today. I will continue to blog frequently about our company’s innovation efforts, about journalism ethics, social media, innovation in the media, about our community engagement efforts, about events and issues in the community and about what’s on my mind. I hope you follow the blog.
My first year at Gazette Communications was incredibly eventful in some destructive, negative ways for our company and our community. I believe and hope the year ahead will be a year of rebirth and transformation for this company and this community.
Steve,
There have got to be days you feel like Oppenheimer watching the first mushroom cloud…We’re lucky to have you out there on the high wire, doing all the necessary experimenting (including floundering) and cheerleading and just plain soldiering through.
Best of luck, man. Every day, Gazette (and you) get to look the naysayers in their comfy eyes and say “It ain’t braggin’ if ya done it. If you have a better idea, let’s see you commit to it.”
Go get ’em. The Gazette’s leadership is inspiring as hell.
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Thanks, Dean. Still lots to do here.
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Steve,
I’m a guy that lives a good life, farming all the the stories as a result.
Everyday brings a new one, some never get written because there is no where to go but to pasture.
Life is good, we have some real moments in our speck of this time on the planet that need to be shared.
Yet we wonder, “Where’s it at?”
I also like what Dean Miller has said…..just wish there was more involvement
We’ll all keep pluggin’ away.
John Korkie
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HA, HA ,HA ,HA ,HA That’s funny Steve! The incredibly shrinking man among the incredibly shrinking Gazette, among the incredibly shrinking newspaper business. Yep, that Gazette leadership is awesome man! Man, Steve, I at least thought you would make it a year. What will we do without your weekly laments about the newspaper business? I sure will miss your Constitutional knowledge! Go get em buddy! You can do it!!
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