Thursday, May 6th Employee Review Meetings

Following our robust conversations on Tuesday, I am looking forward to another set of employee annual review meetings today, at 9 AM and 3 PM CDT.

You can follow the live blog on CoverItLive at the site below:

The slides are the same as Tuesdays, and can be found at:

Employee Review Meetings – Tuesday, May 4, 2010

We will be live blogging our employee review meetings at 10 AM and 2 PM on Tuesday, May 4.  This will be the first time that we have live blogged an annual review meeting, following our annual board and shareholder meetings, which were held last week.   You can follow live, and contribute comments and questions, at the CoverItLive site noted below.

The slides we will be reviewing include:

Year in Review and Work Plan

Last year at this time we were undertaking a major reorganization of the company — both to survive the most precipitous decline in revenue we had ever experienced and to position us for the speed and flexibility we need to thrive in the fast-changing local media world we are going to be experiencing for some time to come.  I am very thankful that our team was able to cut expenses commensurate with the revenue decline so that we could maintain a minimally positive operating cash flow in a very challenging year.  Many companies did that last year.  I am more thankful that our team was able, with all that operating pressure, to begin to imagine and implement a new way of doing business which continues to be what we believe is our best hope for thriving in the future.

We are doing this work as one company, with 11 operating departments, providing goods and services to the market or to each other.  Those 11 departments and their leaders are:

1. Marketing (includes all products) – Tim McDougall
2. Sales – Chris Edwards
3. Color Web Printers (commercial printing and distribution) – Jim Burke
4. Organizational Development ( including Human Resources and Facilities) – Cathy Terukina
5. Information Content Creation – Becky Lutgen Gardner
6. Commercial Content Creation (including Content Repository Project) – Audrey Wheeler
7. Community Manager and Publisher (including Editorial Page Staff) – Dave Storey
8. Broadcast Production – John Phelan
9. Digital Production – Randy Shields
10. Information Technology – Mike Coleman
11. Accounting  – Dave Everson

In the last year, we have created these departments;  shuffled our people, budgets and operating procedures to support this new structure; began to separate content creation from product creation; hired new key leaders from outside the company (Tim McDougall, Chris Edwards, Jim Burke, Randy Shields and many others); grew digital revenues and operating margin substantially with a focused effort by Shannon Booth’s team; selected our key vendors, based on the architecture of Abe Abreu, Sr. of e-Me Ventures, and successfully launched our atomized content repository; began a focused, metric based product development effort under Steve Lorenz’s leadership and began to develop a new branding structure for the whole company.

Currently, when we want to refer to the whole company, including all products, we use GFOC (Gazette Family of Companies), The Gazette Company or Gazette Communications.  All of these names connote the newspaper.  Both Becky Lutgen Gardner, with her information creators feeding all products, and Chris Edwards, with his sales force selling audiences through all products and services, need a better name and branding identity as we go forward.  We have begun this work, and are in the final stages of confirming our direction with internal and external focus groups.

The operating environment for media companies is changing very rapidly. The traditional ‘franchise” for media companies was based on scarcity.  Most communities, including our own, had one newspaper and a few television news broadcasts originating local news.  Advertisers trying to reach our market wanted to use our services to reach the most people in the shortest time.  The advertisers knew that much of their effort was wasted on people who were not interested, or did not want to be interrupted, but advertising was still effective enough to make it worth the expenditure.  Historically, advertising revenue tracked the economy.

We are now living through both “structural” and “cyclical” changes in this traditional model.  The cyclical we are very familiar with – the economy softens and companies don’t want to hire people, so employment advertising drops precipitously.  We have seen these cycles before.  We are beginning to see some signs that the worst of the cyclical downturn is behind us.  The structural is more difficult.   In the last few years, advertising in traditional media is becoming more decoupled from the changes in the economy.  While the audiences for our traditional products are still strong, the ability to monetize these audiences is under pressure.   Advertisers have more options, and are seeking ways to directly reach their customers in more efficient and effective ways, such as developing their own websites, and using social media.

Some media companies are trying to determine ways to recreate the scarcity economy that drove our success for the last few decades.  We don’t believe that will be a successful strategy.  We need to embrace the ubiquity of digital information, and create a platform for local information through which any individual in our service area can find the information they need, when they want it, on the device of their choosing.  While creating that platform, we need to support the legacy products on which we depend. We need to decide how many resources to allocate to support the legacy products vs. capabilities to address future needs. This is a significantly difficult undertaking, which requires new tasks, new work processes and a new organization.  We now have to make that implementation more personal, and powerful.  That requires a common vision of the future state, and many integrated projects.  I have used many different words, and images, to try to convey the fundamental change in our business. Please add your own version, or changes and additions to my descriptions.

At the core, we are moving away from a business revolving around scarce assets (a newspaper press and broadcast tower) to a business organizing a ubiquitous network of information coming from many sources.  By necessity, we have to operate both of these diverse business models at the same time (planned schizophrenia). For economy, and physical survivability, we need to make sure that the actions necessary to feed the network also feed our legacy products. And, we need to make sure that the production of our legacy products is done as economically as possible. For example, the sales force consolidation under Chris Edwards and the combination of all news gathering resources into Information Content under Becky Lutgen Gardner have to work as effectively as possible.

We cannot create all of the tools we are going to need for the new networked business.  However, we can create a common vision, and information architecture, and select the best tools and relationships to make the network powerful.  We can also discern, better than anyone in our area, the most critical issues for community development.  We can seed the most important conversations.  We have the commercial relationships to create the networked marketplace.

Since the tools and the consumer devices and behavior are changing so rapidly, we need to focus on speed and flexibility.  To do that, we need to be able to make things happen now by developing core issues in small groups of 3-5 people.  While many things are changing, we know that, no matter what happens, we need to:

1. Optimize print production – Color Web operations and structuring regional product flow – Jim Burke, Steve Lorenz, Dave Schroeder, Chris Edwards or designee
2. Optimize broadcast production in new facility – John Phelan, Kirk Schroeder, Project Manager
3. Create information content in elements (atoms) and track those elements through various levels of curation, up to local wikis – Becky Lutgen Gardner, Cathy Terukina and Chuck Peters
4. Develop an information content architecture, based on content repositories -  Audrey Wheeler, Randy Shields, Mike Coleman
5. Create an integrated product strategy and branding strategy based on basic consumer insights – Tim McDougall and his team
6. Create selling organization based on audience reach and effectiveness – Chris Edwards and his team
7. Create a focused and effective product planning and development process – Tim McDougall, Chris Edwards, Dave Schroeder
8. Nurture a creative and constructive culture – Cathy Terukina and her team
9. Develop nested performance metrics and financial metrics – Dave Schroeder, Daniel Spellerberg, Dave Everson
10. Determine new location, layout and financing of physical space – Cathy Terukina, Chuck Peters and Ken Slaughter
11. Nurture potential regional partnerships – Dave Storey, Chuck Peters, Ken Slaughter

All of these work plans need to be developed within a shared vision of the overall goal.  Like any business, we are trying to have fun, and make money.  Put another way, we are trying to serve our community in a manner that adds economic value. We are trying to do so by being the information source of choice for our community.  Wherever you are, on whatever device or product, you can explore the current information, history and multiple voices to satisfy your need for relevant information, in context.

In order to do this, we need to create a network of local information comprised of many individual voices, accessible from many points.  We are creating that network to allow the community to be engaged in critical community issues, and to ease commercial transactions.

I visualize this network, and the flow of information as follows, with the information content flow in yellow and the commercial content flow in green. Much of both streams of content will come from outside the company.  And as those streams flow, we need numerous feedback loops, which are depicted in gray:

Our mission is to be the information provider of choice through a dynamic mix of innovative products and services.

We will create and maintain mutually beneficial, long-term relationships with our customers, employees, and the communities we serve.

In 2008, we embarked on a process to reshape the company to pursue this vision over the next ten years:

Strengthening Communities by Engaging and Informing Participants Through Interactive Processes

While we have made much progress in the last year, we are still in the process of moving from a culture suitable for maintaining a franchise to a culture capable of supporting multiple new innovative products and services on a common community platform.  We have changed the organization from supporting jobs and work processes that focus on the newspaper and television broadcast, to ones that are digital first, and can support multiple products, but we have work to do to change the culture, tasks and outcomes that will allow us to serve our communities best.  We need to make fundamental changes to our technology infrastructure to make this happen, starting with the content repository. This slide shows that we are clearly in the beginning stages of a long work in progress.  Like building a house, you have to start at the foundation.

These are big changes, but we have dedicated employees who are capable and committed to making them happen.

What do you think?

NAAMXC10

After three days with industry leaders, and sharp outside perspectives, I am more encouraged about our direction, and our ability to make progress quickly.

I started writing this blog two years ago after my first presentation at an NAA MediaXChange.

At that time, I was very concerned about our industry’s approach to the fundamental changes in the creation and distribution of local information.

Rishad Tobaccowala kicked the meetings of with a quietly delivered exhortation to fully embrace the new mindset and business models, while continuing to deliver on the old — kind of a planned schizophrenia.  A couple of quotes from his great presentation:

I believe the very idea of what is “news” needs to be rethought. Last night when following his talk on twitter I thought it was news. No journalists. No editors. No “content” company. It was news to me because it was what I believed was news in my context (today’s speech) and it was delivered to me just when I needed it and the form I wanted.

This is still an industry that is huge with over 40 billion of revenue. But it is one that is half the size of what it was three years ago. Yes, this year it will decline 4% versus last years 27%!But being less pathetic than last year is not exactly something to feel good about.

We are living in a time of STD and there is no contraceptive but only a vaccine. A time of Seminal, Transformative and Disruptive change. We must infect our own organizations and minds with seminal, transformative and disruptive thinking to thrive.

…forces us to rethink our own business and in doing so we have some collateral thoughts for yours.

Facilitation: First I would ask in an age where people are marketing to themselves and learning by themselves or other people they connect with how do we facilitate this behavior?

Voices and Users: Second, in a world where not just users of a product and service but also voices (advocates and detractors) are instrumental to decisions how do we combine, curate and make convenient all this information?

Re-aggregation: Third, as marketers, advertisers, retailers struggle with fragmentation how do we re-aggregate groups large enough to affordably market to or scaled enough to impact business? Google is an amazing re-aggregation engine in that via search and to a lesser extent Adsense it combines people who share intent one at a time into large groups.

I believe with the right mindset and right technology and right people your business can do very well in the future because of something that we see and what Eric Schmidt said.

Mobility.

All things analog are becoming digital (such as television)
All things digital are becoming mobile (i-phone, i-pad…)
Most things mobile are becoming deeply linked to analog (local and retail space).

I would redefine the future of your business not as “news” or “newspaper” or “content” but rather as a leader and key partner in facilitating and re-aggregating community information, history and voices for civic, retail and commercial purposes

Local is where it is at. Community will matter. Your legacy industry has some very strong assets such as sales folks, writers, and relationships with retailers as well as other voices in the community. You also have a trusted brand name that allows you to either be a leader or significant partner in what will be a huge future business.

People need a well-curated, combined and convenient resource as they meander their communities. Retailers need help in promoting and spreading the word about themselves. Marketers need to find folks in large numbers as “intent” based marketing is supplemented by “location” based marketing.

He then closes with 10 steps for improvement, so his entire notes are well worth the read.

Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep focus, built on Rishad’s opening keynote, by noting that our role is as conversation starter, and that we should be using the local networks of information, mostly social networks, to:

1. Get real time intelligence – discover what your communities care about now
2. Promote real time conversations – make it easy to share and comment on information
3. Focus on Location using mobile applications – this is going to explode as Facebook adds location based services
4. Redefine “ad” to “add value” – people pay much more attention to information referred by their friends

Ian’s blog is worth a view, and he has made his presentation available on Slideshare.

I tried to build on Rishad’s and Ian’s comments, by presenting what we are doing to change our company to play in this world, in a panel with Greg Veis of the New Repubic and Lincoln Millstein of Hearst. Greg got us off to a good start by showing what his company his doing to show related content and share content.  Lincoln then quietly showed a concept video of where Hearst is going with their content strategy.  The Hearst video so engaged the audience that I had to almost forceably bring them back to pay some attention to my presentation!  Words cannot do justice to the Hearst video, but I can say that Hearst is clearly trying to “start conversations” in their communities and make it easy for everyone to engage. I am hoping that both of them share their presentations.

I then presented the following slides, which summarize much of what I have written here about our direction and our key tasks, with a focus on the content repository, as the session was on managing content:

On the plane to the next meeting, I drew out the flow of information as I envision it for us to achieve our C3 mission to be the Complete Community Connection:

Branding a System of Information

Our company is blessed with very strong brands, including The Gazette and KCRG.  As I mentioned here recently,

We have created deep emotional ties to our products, both within our company and within our communities.  We need to begin to create emotional ties to an integrated local information ecosystem, and the multiple ways we can access that system.  That requires a definition of a brand promise and a new way to talk about the system, without regard to our existing products, which all have strong brands.

At the most basic level, this information system will be designed to provide an individualized two-way flow of information.  While we want to still be the trusted source of accurate information, we need to have a brand to describe the relationship desired with the entire system, not just the products.  And our employees creating the information, or helping local businesses connect with local communities, need a name and brand promise that is beyond the products.

While we are not settled on the exact name yet, we think we know the essential characteristics of the brand promise.

I could go on describing for some time, but for many,  a visualization helps to best see the relationship of the supporting brand concepts.  (Press the “full” button below the image to see the image large enough to read the text.)

Exploration to Execution

When I started this blog, in April, 2008, all I knew was that we needed to explore new ways to fulfill our mission of being the “information provider of choice”.  After 21 months of exploration and experimentation we have a plan that needs to be executed.

There are many nuances to this plan, but the core of it revolves around a few concepts:

1. We need to use all the tools at our disposal today, and the many that will be coming, to enable anyone in the various communities we serve to engage in the issues important to them and to ease their commercial transactions.
2. Our products of today – newspaper, magazines, television, websites, shoppers – need to be recreated to fill a defined role in an integrated local information ecosystem.  These packaged products will all have roles, but will not be able to meet all the information needs of the people we serve.
3. To best define our products, we need to adopt the best practices of brand management as used in many consumer products companies today.
4. To satisfy the information needs of our users, we need to create information in the first instance in such a way that it can be easily flow into products, or be accessible to anyone with the properly tuned digital device.  The sources of that information should be transparent, and related information, and the context of that information should be easily obtained.
5. To ease commercial transactions, sellers need to be able to reach audiences, down to an audience of one.

In order to pursue these concepts, we have had to make some big changes, primarily in reorganizing our legacy print and broadcast companies, although commercial printing, packaging and distribution have seen significant changes as we took on the work of printing two newspapers, and distributing one of those and another newspaper.

Last year at this time we were organized by product, with each product having its own integrated company – print, broadcast and commercial printing.  Print and broadcast each developed digital products related to their core product.  We were creating content in the first instance for the applicable packaged product – newspaper article or broadcast video.  We did not have a digital strategy focused on the user experience. So, changes were necessary.

The biggest changes were separating content creation from product creation, setting up a separate digital products group, and creating one sales force designed to connect audiences with advertisers.  We have only been experimenting with those changes for the last 8 months, and know we need to make further changes.  Change management is critical.  The first step in that process is understanding why changes are necessary.

Let’s start with the separation of content creation and product creation.  We cannot pursue our 5 core concepts unless information is created in the first instance without regard to product or display. When I asked Becky Lutgen Gardner and Steve Lorenz to tackle that less than a year ago, many people in our company could not imagine such a split.  How would the work get done, on deadline?  Steve and Becky did a great job making that initial split, but our experience has shown that we did not get it completely right.  The daily tensions between the two groups are not creative tensions, leading to a better system, but are the result of flawed expectations and processes.  The products have not redefined their role in the local information system and content creation has not defined the core local information they will curate.  So, I have asked Steve and Becky and their staffs to go back to the drawing board and create a better system.

Products cannot create their focus without understanding the user experience and the user’s core information needs.  Our industry, and our company, do not have a history of strong brand management focused on the end user.  So, we are looking nationally for a new leader of brand management.  If we can find someone who will accelerate our development, that person will be responsible for all product management and marketing, and Steve Lorenz will focus on print product management.

Our print, digital and broadcast products each need technical production of their products.  Print and broadcast each have a dedicated production staff.  Digital production is currently housed within our Information Technology department.  We are searching for a new leader of digital production, to partner with Shannon Booth, our leader of digital products.

For the last 127 years, our information has been designed for our products, and our products have defined our relationship with our communities.  We have created deep emotional ties to our products, both within our company and within our communities.  We need to begin to create emotional ties to an integrated local information ecosystem, and the multiple ways we can access that system.  That requires a definition of a brand promise and a new way to talk about the system, without regard to our existing products, which all have strong brands.

I will write more on the branding process later, as well as our content creation efforts and audience focused efforts.

What do you think so far?  What does not make sense?

Level Set

It has been over a month since the employee meetings, and we are learning much every day.  As Mike Coleman, our Director of Technology likes to say: BLUF – Bottom Line Up Front – I am more convinced every day that we are on the right path, but we certainly don’t have the operational details of the transition all worked out, and we need lots of help to build the new local information system of the future.

That future is built on a network of information that is mobile (fluid and flexible), social, and location based.  From that network we can create better packaged products (web, print and broadcast) and with mobile and desktop applications we can let users define the information they would like to have.

However, the ability to fund that future depends on our existing packaged products.  The production cycles of those products are so demanding that we have created a flywheel that is difficult to turn, let alone imagine blowing up and recreating.  Dan Conover recently chided the media industry, and the funders and explorers of new approaches, for an “Imagination Gap“.  He expresses his frustration in many ways, but BLUF, I think he is trying to get more people to focus on his “Informatics Scenario“.  Dan has responded to Jeff Jarvis at length, with a summary for those without the patience for length, and has included links to a review of his thought and a listing of why the industry is so challenged.

Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen have been expounding on the ideas supporting the Informatics Scenario for some time, and Jeff even posted on data driven information after responding to the Information Gap critique with a call for another vision.  Jay Rosen’s talk at the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism succinctly reviews the tensions between our flywheel past and our atomized future.

Steve Buttry, our C3 Innovation Coach, must have had lots of time in Moscow, as he took Jeff Jarvis’s challenge to expound on a different vision for the future, mobile centric.

My initial reaction was:

Steve -

How much time in the airport did you have? This is so long it needs a table of contents and an index!

As you have stated before, you tend to focus on the what, and I focus on the how. Any company attempting to make this transition needs to focus on both, congruently.

With this “storm of the last 30 years” currently upon us, I might have more time today for a more comprehensive response.

For now, here are my first thoughts:

1. I think you and Jeff Jarvis are answering different questions. You seem to be focused on a user-centric sustainable system for the next 20 years, and as Jeff reminds us, he was focused on what happens tomorrow if a major daily stops production – how is the community informed?

2. To get anywhere close to the functionality you describe, we need to create content in the first instance in a very different way – atomized and heavily tagged. There are so many technical, cultural, emotional, work process and business issues in just this aspect that it is beyond the scope of any one company. A coalition of the willing needs to form to pursue the various aspects and share best practices.

3. For the user, we need multiple user-defined applications, mobile and desktop (think Twitter apps) that allow the user to obtain the content they want in the new mobile, social, location based information world.

4. For the business, we need a system whereby the creators of the information content, the creators of the commercial content, the application developers and promoters and the system administrators can all get paid their fair proportion of the revenue, automatically, driven off the tags. The revenue comes from very targeted promotional messages and transactions, easy for the users to experience and act on.

5. If #2 is not beyond the scope of one company, 3 and 4 clearly are.

I believe Dan Conover’s frustration with our industry’s “lack of imagination” stems from the fact that not enough people are even talking about the same “what”, so we cannot get to sharing the “how”.

Judy Sims makes it personal, in her comparison to the grieving process http://simsblog.typepad.com/simsblog/2009/11/pity-the-poor-publisher.html

Once we get past the grieving, we need to start fresh
http://bit.ly/6QYaO4

What do you think?

C3 Employee Live Blogs

We will be discussing the state of the company and the implications of the changing community information environment outlined in my recent post C3 with interested employees over the next two days. In the spirit of transparency and maximum participation, please join us for a live blog of at least two of the upcoming employee meetings.  For those employees not able to attend in person, all the slides, including financial data, are available on the private company intranet.  For those without access to the private intranet,  the slides, numbered as they will be during the presentation, can be found here:

The first event will be Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 3 PM CDT and it will be live, and recorded, here:

The second will be Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 9 AM CDT, and it will be live, and then recorded, here:

C3?

We have our quarterly board and employee meetings this week.  We are an ESOP company, owned by our original founding families (over 126 years in business), and the Employee Stock Ownership Trust.  So everyone is interested.

The last time I made a formal report, we were having difficulty forecasting our sales, and we did not know if we would be able to cut sufficient expenses to offset our accelerating revenue declines.  We were in danger of not meeting our bank covenants.

Today, I am very appreciative that we have stabilized, thanks to the wonderful support of our customers and the hard work and dedication of our over 500 employees.  We are profitable, have positive cash flow, have met the bank covenants and have been able to maintain our cash position after paying millions of dollars to ESOP participants who have left the company.

So, we are stable, but not out of the woods.  How deep are those woods? How dark?  David Olive challenges us to be “essential” and reviews how we got here — by being bland and boring, then buying other media at unsustainable prices.  Now, he says:

We have to surprise and entertain.  We have to be willing to offend, in causes we know to be right.  It’s really quite simple.  We need to be essential.

But it is clear that David likes newspapers.  He is not focused on the fundamental changes in economics and social behavior that others see, and occupy much of my time.  Neil Perkin does a wonderful job in his most recent slides of capturing these new dynamics, and graciously gave me permission to use a few from his June 2008 slides at the Newspaper Association of America convention this March.  For a more comprehensive view of these fundamental changes, and potential future states, download and read the new study The Big Thaw from The Media Consortium (with a helpful list of efforts to explore in Appendix E).  Doug Fisher includes many of these new points of view in his review of the literature, including our friend Dan Conover. As regular readers know, I have been exploring new organizing thoughts, culture, technology and organization for some time.  Some people say I make this too complicated.  So let’s try simple.  Most of these slides have been used before, including a few of Neil Perkin’s from the March NAA presentation, but what do they mean, in practical terms?

Shannon Booth, our Director of Digital Products, would like to offer easily accessible, relevant information to any one person in our community, on whatever device they possess, where they are, simply.  In order to do that, we need to change how we create the information in the first instance, make sure it is properly tagged (linked to descriptions of the information that travel with the information) and can be published anywhere.  That means that the content creators in information content and commercial content much change the way they work, and the systems with which they work.  It means that IT has to develop and support robust systems of content creation and management.  It means that our product managers must develop presentation systems that allow both “packaged products” such as newspapers, broadcasts and websites as well as flexible and free flowing user requested information.  It means our sales department must be able to consult with our advertisers to advise them on how best to reach their desired audience, not just sell them products.  Our financial metrics, and billing procedures, need to support this free flowing information. Lots of change.  But clearly doable, if we want to.  If anyone does not want to, then my advice would be to find something you do want to do.

National Public Radio is well down this path.  Their Create Once, Publish Anywhere system is a joy to use.  Try their iphone/itouch application.

Think of Shannon Booth, and her attempts to connect to the communities we serve, at the top of this pyramid, artfully created by Mike Coleman .  We all need to support her.

As our friend, and consultant, Abe Abreu, Sr. notes, this will not be easy, and we need people who want to play.

Well, I trust your three Directors – Content, Commercial, IT – on my team understand the purpose [of Content Engineering], and that the Content Director has the authority to execute on the organizational mission. I believe we have a solid plan to help build a bridge across the content creation and packaging chasms that now exist and everyone is struggling with.
I also feel that we have a solid platform on the way on which we will build new tag-at-first-instance workflows in the DAM [Digital Asset Management system]. And it doesn’t hurt that Dan [Conover] is a rock star.
But frankly, and as you’ve often blogged, the biggest challenge, as it turns out, is going to be the [people within the] organization itself. Is the desire and the willingness to change there yet? Will TV and Broadcast play nice? Will print and online willingly merge around a new digital-repository-first methodology? Those are issues that the leadership at large must address.

For now, we are creating a 10-person prototype/team to deploy the tool, test my content-waterfall theories and new work flows, use those to prime the DAM with content, seat 2-3 content originators, flow content out to an alpha site, and fix the inevitable bugs.

In the meantime, company leadership needs to be equipping the rest of the organization with, metaphorically speaking, rough-terrain gear and leading them to the other side of the chasm across the narrow donkey bridge we will build. If that doesn’t happen, no tool or methodology in the world is going to save the business!!

We’re building the tools, we are working together to build the process to connect the people with the tools, but somebody has got to lead the people across the bridge – and that’s a function of talent, competence, passion and commitment. Clearly, the hardest work of all!!

People-Process-Tools! It takes a village

[Edited by Chuck Peters 10/25/09 at 8 PM CDT to correct typos noted by Abe in his comment]

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Reflections after #MTS at Google

I have been back from the Media and Technology Summit (#mts on Twitter) for 10 days.  The reentry back into work and an early Winter in Iowa has been harder than usual.  Some of that is due to the pace of play in October, coupled with some strong personal challenges for very close friends.  But much of that is due to the deep tensions coming out of three days in Mountain View which were very well organized by Alan Mutter (@newsosaur)

John Temple (@jtemplermn) started us out with sobering reflections on the last decades of the Rocky Mountain News.  We shifted immediately into the latest semantic tools.  Several of the slide shows can be found at this “event” on Slideshare.

The immediate, and lasting, impression is that there are three levels of complex revolutions taking place.  The first revolution is in user interfaces, and users’ changing behaviors with those interfaces.  Even those presenters whose jobs focus on the use of those new interfaces were struggling to keep up, and had more questions than answers.

The second revolution is the numerous nuanced business models that can be successful in the networked economy.  Owners need to think about more than a simple “freemium” model.  Marshall Van Alstyne wowed and perplexed us with the concepts of proprietary complementarity.

The third revolution is the fundamental changes in underlying technology.  Atomic, tagged, semantic, free flowing.

Each of these areas is changing so fast that we can barely comprehend the changes, yet alone have robust and detailed discussions about them.

Yet, our basic human needs don’t change, our communities need tools for coherence and development and even Yahoo’s research shows that we really want relevance and simplicity.

Tara Hunt (@missrogue) tried to get us to focus on those essentials, to mixed results.  Starting with the quote

“Stop being important and start being interesting.” – Michael Hirschorn, The Atlantic Monthly

if you can succeed in making your readers feel smarter, more in control, sexier, excited and more interesting themselves, you will win

Search is dead, web pages are dead, but print has a long future.

public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and a contributor to democracy. The duty of the journalist is to further those ends by seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues. We strive to serve the public with thoroughness and honesty.

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