How networking helped land most of my jobs

This continues my series on professional networking.

I credit my skills and hard work for most of the success I’ve achieved professionally. But my professional network has helped tremendously, too.

In this post, I’m going to run through the jobs I’ve landed and explain how my network helped me get most (but not all) of the jobs in my career:

Because my mother read the newspaper …

Chuck Offenburger, right, gave me my first job in journalism back in 1971.

I was on a canoe trip in the summer of 1971, between my junior and senior years of high school, when my mother read a notice in the Evening Sentinel that Sports Editor Chuck Offenburger was looking for a sports writer. I didn’t know Chuck, and had no network connection to him. But Mom called the notice to my attention. I applied and I got the job (and Chuck and I remain friends).

But the network connection that mattered here was my mother. I’m not a fan of nepotism or family interference, which didn’t happen here. Mom didn’t even know Chuck. But she tipped me off to the first job of my journalism career. And Mimi has alerted two of our sons to opportunities that led to jobs for them. Listen to your mom.

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Remembering a nine-hour commute in Washington traffic in the snow

As Washington braces for a winter storm (and the metro area’s inability to deal with winter storms), my mind wandered back five years.

On Wednesday, Jan. 26, 2011, almost exactly five years ago, Mimi and I drove nine hours to get home from the heart of Washington to our home in the Virginia suburbs. In good traffic, the drive usually took less than 45 minutes. In normal Washington traffic, an hour was not unusual, an hour and a half certainly possible.

But when it snows in Washington …

I am not the only one to remember that evening (or my whining about that evening):

Every time this happens to Washington I think of a dear former colleague @stevebuttry and his 11-hour ride home from work in 2011.

— Justin Karp (@jskarp) January 21, 2016

Nine hours, 11 hours. For recalling a nightmare from five years ago, two hours seemed a minor exaggeration.

David Heyman (who will appear more in this tale later) also recalled our shared 2011 Odyssey:

@jskarp @stevebuttry That night will never be forgotten. So glad to have been on Metro yesterday.

— David Heyman (@dcborn61) January 21, 2016

My daughter-in-law, Ashley Douglass, took three hours to get home in some light snow Wednesday evening, prompting her husband, Tom, to ask if I had the link from my account of the 2011 trek to share with her. He thought it was on this blog, but it was on TBD.com, the Washington local news site I helped launch less than six months before that snowy day.

The TBD archives were preserved a few years, but have vanished from the Internet. I couldn’t even find my story of the snowy commute on the Wayback Machine (which preserves snapshots from websites, but not full archives). But I did save the html files.

Some background on that day before I share my five-year-old tale: This was the year after Snowmageddon and Snowpocalypse paralyzed Washington for days. But not every winter storm forecast for DC materializes as predicted. At least a couple times earlier in January 2011, weather forecasters had warned of potentially snowpolalyptic storms that either missed Washington entirely or only provided a light dusting. So when we were warned of the Jan. 26 storm, most of Washington shrugged and headed to work as normal. But this time the forecast actually lowballed the storm. By mid-afternoon, huge, wet flakes were falling fast, sticking to the streets, and the federal government (and nearly everyone else) shut down early, sending virtually every vehicle in Washington into the streets at the same time.

I’ve spent most of my life in the Midwestern states of Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and North Dakota. I know winter storms, and laugh at Washington’s inability to handle light snow. But this was a genuine winter storm, falling fast and hard and wet on a metro area whose drivers and cities don’t know what do with a mild winter snow that wouldn’t cancel school in Iowa.

So here is my account of my commute from hell (on a day off even!) five years ago (with a few updates):

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Lessons from my time at the Cedar Rapids Gazette

I can’t believe it’s been five years since I left Iowa. In some ways, my adventure at the Cedar Rapids Gazette seems like it was only a year or two ago. In other ways, it seems a lifetime ago. But it ended five years ago today.

My departure from the Gazette was awkward. More on that later. But the circumstances inhibited me from reflecting at the time on lessons from a job that was simultaneously one of the most rewarding and frustrating experiences of my career. But maybe distance gives you better perspective on those lessons anyway. So here are those belated reflections.

I want to keep the focus positive here: sharing lessons that I learned or relearned in challenging times. Because the lessons are not all positive, I want to make one thing clear: I have no regrets about the Cedar Rapids experience and I applaud my CEO there, Chuck Peters, for attempting innovation at a time when most of the newspaper business was shamefully timid.

I’ll share my lessons in these categories: career, newsroom leadership, disaster response, leading innovation, managing upheaval.

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I ‘lost’ a newsroom once, too

Jill Abramson, photo linked from New York Times

Because I was attending the International Journalism Festival when Dylan Byers published his click-bait piece “Jill Abramson loses the newsroom” on Politico, I initially intended to respond just with disapproving tweets.

Then Emily Bell slammed the piece for its sexist tone better than I could have. And I initially thought I’d respond just with approving tweets.

After all, I don’t know Jill Abramson. And she doesn’t need me to defend her (great response from her, cited in Huffington Post). I had no idea whether the story was true or not, though I had serious doubts because it relied heavily on unnamed and unaccountable sources. But as I considered it, I thought that a male voice, a former editor who might have supposedly “lost” a newsroom, might have some value and I started pondering a post.

Then I heard Aron Pilhofer tell an Abramson story at the festival and I decided I’d better blog about this.

Most of the editors I’ve worked for have been men. That’s probably true of most people in the news business because the vast majority of editors are men. While women have made strides, men still dominate in newsroom leadership.

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Editor of the Year? Who, me?

Looking back over the past year or so, in many ways it was the most frustrating, disappointing period of my career. I normally would avoid looking back on it at all. I am a positive person and have been looking forward to a new job that has taken me out of the newspaper business.

But I sort of had to look back, mostly in surprise, when I learned in January that Editor & Publisher magazine, which boasts that it is “America’s oldest journal covering the newspaper industry,” was naming me Editor of the Year. The magazine announcing the honor arrives in newspaper offices this week, the week after I left the industry.

A year before I received the news, I was preparing to do two of the most difficult things of my career:

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Pursuing a new opportunity in Washington

Each time I take a new job, I think it’s going to be my last move.

I thought that when I came to The Gazette and gazetteonline as editor, and I thought that about the previous job and the one before that. And … well, a lot of jobs in the newspaper business.

My next job won’t be in the newspaper business. The news business, yes, but not the newspaper business.

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How news organizations need to change to pursue a mobile-first strategy

To read all three of my “mobile-first strategy” posts as a pdf with a table of contents, scroll to the end of this post.

I used to watch the crowds in airport lounges when I traveled, studying how people read newspapers. Even with circulation declining, you could see people reading newspapers intently. Especially after 2001, people would have plenty of time to read while waiting for flights, and newsstands stocked a variety of papers to choose from.

Look around an airport lounge now. You’ll see more people looking into their phones than holding newspapers.

I get disgusted as people in news media companies fret over trying to squeeze some money out of Google or trying to charge for the privilege of reading our content. Whatever the merits of those arguments, they are essentially pleas to slow time down. But when I see people in the airport lounge, I know time is only accelerating with each tap of their thumbs.

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Midwest Newspaper Summit provides diverse views on challenges and future

The Midwest Newspaper Summit confirmed my view that the Complete Community Connection offers the best path to a prosperous future for news media companies.

I heard some good ideas discussed at the meeting, and the best possibilities for generating new revenues were ideas at the heart of the C3 approach.

The summit, sponsored by seven state press associations, drew more than 250 people to the Grand River Center in Dubuque. I can’t remember the last time I attended a newspaper industry meeting where they had to set up additional chairs, but they did. Jo Martin and Jennifer Asa of the Iowa Newspaper Foundation deserve great credit for planning, promoting and presenting the program. I posted more than 100 tweets from the summit on Thursday, so I won’t try to recap here. Instead, I will give my views on how the key points of each speaker will contribute to that search for a prosperous future:

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Bloggers share lots of advice

In my early days as a journalism trainer, I made my mark by compiling helpful handouts. I thought I had a lot of good ideas on the topics I trained on and I compiled tip sheets that people told me they found helpful.

That approach (and sharing those handouts liberally online at No Train, No Gain) built my reputation in the journalism training field more than anything I did. So when I decided to do a blogging workshop this week, my first inclination was to develop a handout with all my tips and advice on blogging. I could have done that and almost did, but two things held me back:

• I’m not that experienced at blogging and still learning a lot myself. I feared that my own advice might be too shallow and obvious (though I’m amazed at how often people express gratitude for advice that I consider obvious, so I will include some of mine).

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Thoughts on the future and the past of newspapers

Just a quick post to share three links on the future and past of newspapers:

• Chuck Peters, CEO of our company, blogs (with lots of links adding great context) about the past year or so at Gazette Communications and how we are trying to shape our future. He puts my Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection in context with current reorganization of our company.
• I wrote a blog post or two’s worth of comments (and others joined the discussion, too) on Jerry Bowles’ blog post The Internet is Killing America’s Free Press and Why It Matters (I disagreed with him).
• Howard Owens puts the decline of newspapers into thoughtful historical context, noting that it has paralleled the decline of civic engagement.

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Clinging to the past won’t save newspapers

Newspapers need to move into the future and stop clinging to the past.

Two bloggers I respect greatly, Tim McGuire and Alan Mutter, blogged favorably this week about efforts to force Google to pay for linking to content from newspaper web sites. Because I respect both of these men and consider McGuire a friend, I read each blog again and considered what they had to say. Reluctantly, I say they both are mistaken.

I don’t claim that I or my company have the solutions for how to move forward into a prosperous future. But I am sure that the future lies in moving forward, not back. I’m glad our company is seeking solutions by looking forward. I think the business success equation that Chuck Peters has identified, Success = Attention x Trust x Convenience, is on the right track. And charging for content will harm each of the factors leading to success.

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Link lovefest for Gazette transformation continues

Updated with BeatBlogging Q&A:

The transformation we are undertaking at Gazette Communications continues to draw attention:

• Alana Taylor of BeatBlogging.org interviewed Chuck Peters and me and posted Thursday. Quotes several other blogs, including Tim McGuire’s description of me as the “real damn deal.” Can’t read that one enough. Also drops an Obi Wan Kenobi reference that must mean Chuck. Alana followed up with a Q&A with me.
• OJR asked me to write and just posted a piece on what we’re doing: “News businesses must think about content, not just products, to ensure survival.”
• Greg Linch and Daniel Bachhuber of CoPress just posted the podcast of an interview with me.
• Elaine Clisham of the American Press Institute promoted our transformation in a tweet  in the #editorchat discussion on Twitter last night. (Full disclosure: Elaine and I worked on several projects together during my three years at API and continue work together occasionally. In fact, I will be speaking at API’s The New Newsroom seminar in Eau Claire, Wis., tomorrow.)
• I had a confidential conversation yesterday with a publisher and a consultant interested in what we’re doing.

Those are new developments. These are other links I posted recently:

• Martin Langeveld on the Nieman Journalism Lab calls us a “news startup to add to your watch list.”
• Caroline Huber of editorsweblog writes about our changes (heavily citing Langeveld).
• Chuck Peters’ presentation at the MediaXChange was well received.
• Michele McLellan‘s News Leadership 3.0 blog praised our plans.
• Tim McGuire‘s McGuire on Media blog had kind words for me personally and made a flattering comparison to Outliers.
• Chris O’Brien called Cedar Rapids one of the “most important places to watch on the U.S. media landscape” in the NextNewsroom blog.
• Ann Michael described separation of content from product as a “powerful concept” in her Scholarly Kitchen blog.
• This recent attention is in addition to deserved praise Jason Kristufek has received for his leadership of the BarCamp Innovation gatherings around the country and for the continued interest in the News Mixer project a Medill School of Journalism graduate class at Northwestern University developed for Gazette Communications.
• I might have forgotten some other links. The calls, tweets and links have been coming pretty fast and furious.

As I wrote in an earlier post, all of this means nothing but ego stroking and eventual embarrassment if we don’t deliver in the executing of our plans. Lots of people in the newspaper industry have been wrong about a lot of things before. You could compile many more links than this of people eloquently making the case that news web sites need to charge for their content. And the fact that you could find a lot of them wouldn’t change the fact that they’re all wrong.

But I am encouraged that a lot of people I respect think we’re on the right track. And I’ll keep sharing those links if they keep writing.

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