Photo linked from Wikimedia
I’ve written about Project Unbolt for the new Culture Change blog of the International Newsmedia Marketing Association.
Some of the content will be familiar to readers of this blog, because it’s essentially an overview of Project Unbolt, which I announced here in January.
I took a new approach in this post, though, noting how deeply our corporate culture is rooted in being a newspaper factory:
I always loved working in a newspaper factory.
I worked in the newsroom, far away from the fast-moving machinery — unless you counted my typewriter keys as deadline approached. But I was well aware my building was a factory and my company a manufacturer.
You smelled ink when you walked into the building. You heard and felt the rumble when the press started. In the hallways and lunchrooms, the inky smears on clothing and skin identified the factory workers who turned my words and my colleagues’ work into the daily miracle.
Once, as editor of the Minot Daily News in 1992, I got to yell, “Stop the presses!” (You had to yell, by the way, or you wouldn’t be heard.)
Much as I loved the factories I’ve worked in, I also embrace my current professional challenge: “Unbolting” my company’s newsroom from the factory’s deadlines, culture, and processes. …
I hope you’ll read the whole post and become a regular reader of the Culture Change blog, where I’ll contribute every couple of months.
In the context of that blog, I needed to move on to the topic rather than elaborating on an old memory from the factory, but I’ll tell here briefly about the time I got to yell “Stop the presses!” (I’m operating from memory here, but I think I remember the details well.) (more…)
The Buttry Diary 