Transforming Newsrooms

Connecting Organizational Culture, Strategy, and Innovation

Jonathan Groves, Carrie Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317554660
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Transforming Newsrooms offers a practical guide to navigating structural and culture change for news organizations facing economic disruption in today's rapidly changing media landscape.

Even when the need for change is obvious, the best ideas and intentions are often not followed by successful execution. This book offers a road map for understanding the obstacles to change in news organizations and how to overcome them. Providing a detailed overview of the ways in which news processes and routines are being fundamentally altered to meet new demands for multimedia, interactivity, and immediacy, the book offers tips to help news organizations better serve communities by understanding what information people need and how they want to engage and collaborate. The book also features a variety of case studies and examples from news organizations of all kinds, including a 10-year in-depth investigation of the Christian Science Monitor, the first national news organization to stop its daily presses for a digital report.

Transforming Newsrooms is an invaluable resource for students and media professionals alike, demonstrating how to make research on organizational change actionable and help build a more equitable journalism model that will survive and thrive when we need it most.

The Christian Science Monitor: A Decade of Change

Part One – Making a Radical Shift for Survival

In October 2008, editor John Yemma walked into the Pulitzer-decorated newsroom of the Christian Science Monitor and announced that the daily newspaper would stop the presses.

Its work would carry on—on the web and in a weekly print magazine. But the “daily miracle” on dead trees would cease in 2009.

“Digital first!” has been the reluctant mantra of newspapers and other legacy media organizations for the past decade-plus as they grapple with the recognition that news consumption habits have changed in countless ways. But the Monitor was the first national newspaper that turned that rhetoric into inescapable reality by killing the print daily entirely.

The imperative for change was clear, even though the Monitor retained a strong reputation among academics and journalists for its prize-winning, often internationally focused journalism. It wasn’t just that the newspaper business as a whole was suffering mightily from increased competition and falling advertising rates. The Monitor was facing a major cut in an operating subsidy that had helped to support its journalism since its founding. Though the Monitor was not a religious publication, the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston owned the paper and largely funded its operations. In 2008, the church decided to slash its subsidy from $12 million per year to $4 million by 2013. Although the church didn’t cite declines in the number of the faithful as a reason for this cut, the number of branch churches and practitioners had been declining steadily since the 1960s.¹

Unless the news organization could find a way to build new revenue streams to make up for the church’s declining subsidy, it was staring down a future of debilitating cuts to its staff and other resources.

To make matters worse, the paper had fallen into a stagnant period of low readership; at the time Yemma took the helm, its subscriptions numbered just 52,000 (down from a high of 220,000 in 1970), and the website was getting 5 million page views per month.² Even without pressure from the church to raise revenue, its journalists were aware that a paper that isn’t being read has little influence.

Yemma brought a new vision: boost page views to more than 20 million per month within five years to increase advertising revenue and make the Monitor a vibrant part of the national news conversation.

Accomplishing that goal would require a major shift in practices and mindset. The Monitor’s journey since that time provides an ideal case for working through our model to understand how leaders and organizations must consider culture, strategy, and innovation simultaneously for meaningful change to happen.

For 10 years, the Monitor’s leadership and staff graciously allowed us to continue to return to the newsroom to observe their transformation. Through surveys, more than 100 confidential interviews, and many hours of observation, we have chronicled and analyzed the frustrations, the relief, the successes, and the failures.

Begin with the Past

Origin stories are critical to understanding organizational cultures. In 1908, church founder Mary Baker Eddy, tired of the sensationalistic yellow journalism of her day, sought to improve the media environment by founding a newspaper rooted in rigor. In the Monitor’s first edition, Eddy set forth the mission that still resonates with staffers today. “The object of the Monitor,” she declared, “is to injure no man, but to bless all mankind.”³

To this day, Monitor staff remain strongly aware of and committed to what they call “Monitor values” or “Monitor journalism.” In our interviews over the years, many have continually used those phrases as they referred to the importance they place on offering context and explanation: “We talk about being solution-based journalism. We don’t go into the fray; we try to push the discussion in a new way that is productive.”⁴

In strong cultures, tangible artifacts embed and reinforce stated beliefs. The Monitor stylebook affirms the organization’s mission:

To blaze its own path of clean, constructive journalism, broad in appeal, high in character, powerful in helpfulness, the Monitor tries hard to develop stories that are not routine, articles that are original, interesting, and important to human progress. … Our aim is to bring light rather than heat to a subject. The purpose is to heal. When exposing evil, we don’t call names or sling adjectives; we record acts and official charges. Warmth, compassion, even humor, can help the Monitor serve as ‘a most genial persuader.’⁵

An organization founded in accordance with something as deeply personal and tightly held as a religion is going to have especially powerful underlying assumptions that make up workplace culture and fuel resistance to change. Delving into its history helps uncover the cultural roots of resistance to change. An organization’s founder and early years can play a powerful role in establishing values, routines, and underlying assumptions about what kinds of actions and behaviors will be rewarded and punished. Past successes cause the behaviors that produce them to be seen as immutable, especially as people rise through the ranks based on their mastery of certain skills. Similarly, past traumas, both personal and within the organizational context, can cause avoidance or prompt defensive mechanisms.

Another significant past influence on the Monitor was its previous troubled attempts to adapt to technology.⁶ In the mid-1980s, the Monitor bet big on broadcast. It started producing radio and television news programs, bought Channel 68 in Boston, began transmitting shortwave radio broadcasts, and started its own 24-hour cable station.⁷

The cable station, known as Monitor Channel, folded in April of 1992 after less than one year on the air. The channel provoked turmoil in the organization, including the resignation of a number of leaders, especially after the church disclosed it had borrowed $41.5 million from pension funds to cover costs as it was launching these expensive new initiatives.⁸ More than $200 million was invested in the channel, and though it was close to its target of reaching 5 million households by May 1992, it would have needed 25 million to be profitable.⁹

Although all of this occurred nearly 20 years before the Monitor made its big digital shift, past failures can still frame how influential, long-term members of organizations view change. Several longtime staffers we interviewed brought up these failed forays into broadcasting when we asked how the organization was dealing with change; one called it “the time when the organic material hit the ventilating device” and said it had been an even more difficult time for the organization than the current digital shift.

“You know, there’s that memory out there—that if something doesn’t work, they’ll shut it down,” one editor told us in 2009. “Would they actually let the Monitor shut down? I don’t know.”¹⁰

The Change Begins

Yemma began the early months of his tenure as editor faced with rallying the staff behind the radical change to come. The Monitor’s top new goals as a web-primary publication were: (1) immediacy, or publishing news online as quickly as possible and jumping on any trends; and (2) increasing page views. As Yemma put it,

Mary Baker Eddy launched us in 1908. Each year of the 100 years and four months since then our predecessors have charted their course by the values she instilled. It’s up to us now.¹¹

Unlike predecessors who supported the traditional “wall” separating the editorial and business sides of the organization, Yemma saw the publishing division as an ally and teamed with then-publisher Jonathan Wells to develop a possible path toward sustainability. Working with consultants, the Monitor crafted a unique value proposition to bring Eddy’s vision into a twenty-first-century focus: “Explaining world news to thoughtful people who care about solutions.”

Restructuring was necessary, and the newsroom reconfigured workflows to accommodate the website and new weekly magazine. The changes also meant trimming unneeded positions, and to ease the pain, management first offered buyouts to volunteers. As Yemma explained in a February 2, 2009, Q&A memo to the staff:

Q: If after Feb. 16 you need to reduce the staff further with layoffs, how will you decide which staffers get laid off?

A: We are first looking at the jobs and tasks necessary to carry out our core publishing mission. That mission, of course, is changing as we move to a web-first strategy with a weekly print edition. We know that we have to do without certain positions and will have to narrow our editorial focus. In general, if the work associated with a particular position is no longer needed, that would be a position we would not continue to staff.

Q: How will I know if I have one of the jobs essential to the new strategy?

A: I realize that the picture is not yet entirely clear. I’m afraid that is unavoidable at this point. Editors are currently working to develop new staff configurations and workflows. We are bringing on board new technology (the new web content-management system) and reconfiguring K-4 [the Monitor’s publishing system at the time], both of which have production and staffing implications.¹²

The newsroom ultimately cut its staff by 22% at the time of the transition, from 96 to 75 people, mostly through buyouts and attrition.¹³ The new weekly magazine had six employees dedicated to editing and production, and staff writers on the national and international desks—the two largest parts of the operation—would rotate in for various assignments to help fill the weekly.

Most of the journalistic effort, however, would be concentrated on the website. The new focus meant new routines.¹⁴ For most organizations, getting out of well-worn daily grooves is one of the hardest parts of change, as people gravitate back to their comfortable rhythms. But because the Monitor had completely eliminated the daily print edition, it didn’t have to fight the temptation to keep the focus on the legacy product. As a result:

• Schedules changed. Editors needed to cover the site from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. each weekday and on weekends. Under the old system, writers would file by 11:30 a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Uncovering Your Values One
• Deciphering Your Culture Two
• The Christian Science Monitor: A Decade of Change. Part One – Making a Radical Shift for Survival
• Developing Your Strategy Three
• Developing an Entrepreneurial Mindset Four
• The Christian Science Monitor: A Decade of Change. Part Two – Page Views Are Not Enough
• Engagement ℃ Applying the Model Five
• Leading through Change and Resistance Six
• The Christian Science Monitor: A Decade of Change. Part Three ߝ Retrenchment
• Conclusion – Developing Your Road Map
• Index