Tag Archives: lessons learned

What do Lake Wobegon and journalism’s ‘golden days’ have in common?

Posted on by
Reply

A colleague forwarded a quote this morning from Garrison Keillor, of “Prairie Home Companion” fame:

“This is the beauty of the new media: it isn’t so transitory as newspapers and TV. Good stuff sticks around and people email it to friends and it slowly floods the country. What the new media age also means is that there won’t be newspapers to send reporters to cover the next war, but there will be 6 million teenage girls blogging about their plans for the weekend.”

He’s right about information sharing and the long tail, but he’s wrongheaded about the “good old days” of newspapers.

I guess Keillor is selectively forgetting that newspapers haven’t exactly been doing much sending reporters to cover anything overseas lately.

In fact, Lake Wobegon and ideas of newspaper journalism golden days have a lot in common: fantasy.

Life (and the news) “back in the day” was just as tough and fraught with issues as today. We just choose to forget the yellow journalism that spawned the Spanish-American War,  the drive for celebrity and institutional malaise that gave Jayson Blair room to run and the controversial style (at the time) in coverage and design of the USA Today.

It’s all too easy to take the low road and declare all bloggers as miscreants in pajamas (except for those pesky journalists with access to an open source CMS), twitter simply a tool for narcissists (sometimes, but what about the other 60 percent?) and that newspapers have already tried online and failed (think again).

Actually, thanks to new media, I think journalism’s best days are yet to come.

Taking lessons from Internet ubiquity and radio

Posted on by
Reply

Chris O’Brien has a great report on the steps NPR has taken to be leaders — not just in radio, but journalism itself — and how that has translated into a culture of innovation in the organization.

Among some fascinating stats (26.4 million weekly listeners, 38 foreign bureaus, $1.5 million in digital storytelling training) O’Brien hits on what I think is the real key behind NPR’s success:

NPR officials also credit the personal nature of their work, the fact that people connect with the voices of its reporters and personalities. That’s another lesson for newspapers: People like voice, and attitude. I think that’s been flushed out of a lot of newspaper writing which has become increasingly bland.

Indeed.

I commute an hour to work every day and while the afternoon drive is dedicated to decompression, which occasionally entails rocking out, my morning drive is all NPR. I’ll even break the music cycle if I happen to be on the road when Marketplace is on and I’m not generally into business news. It’s just that good.

So NPR’s success is due in part to telling stories in an engaging way to a captive (but not compelled) audience. Blogs and other distribution methods offer even more opportunity for personalizing news content and multimedia is a no-brainer.

So how do we convince the powers that be that investing time, effort and money into really doing online news delivery is a good investment?

May be we should start with Mark Briggs’ artful summation of On the Media’s report on the Pew Center’s latest survey of the future of the Internet:

  • The Internet will become completely ubiquitous. Half the survey respondents think that’s a good thing, half think it’s a bad thing.
  • No matter which side of the fence you’re on, Gladstone and Rainie end up agreeing that human nature is what will be revealed. We can’t blame technology.
  • Digital connectivity among people is an additive function. It does not replace offline networking. In other words, people are not more lonely or spend less time socially in the real world because of the digital connectivity.
  • We’ll become ridiculously mobile.

This isn’t Earth-shattering news, but it’s instructive to get it out in black and white (so to speak). It also provides a baseline for moving forward: Internet ubiquity is coming and bitching about how things have changed is a moot point.

Why make plans for anything else?

Lessons from Leatherman

Featured

Posted on by
Reply

I had a chance to hear Tim Leatherman, inventor of the multi-tool today (yes there is a guy named Leatherman). He was featured at Speakerlunch a monthly pep-talk for entrepreneurs put on by a local guy in Corvallis.

I came away with a couple of entrepreneurial lessons to consider that I wanted to share:

  • Leatherman had his moment of insight on a European vacation. His Scout knife wasn’t hacking it for repairs on his $300 Fiat 600, so he jotted down a quick note, “Put a pair of pliers on a pocketknife.” Lesson: Carry a notepad everywhere to capture ideas. Even on vacation.
  • Once he’d created a working prototype (after three years of cardboard, wood and metal models) he took the thing to knife and tool makers. Knife makers wasn’t interested because the thing wasn’t a knife. Tool makers called it a gadget. No thanks. Lesson: Sometimes the industry best positioned to capitalize on a good idea can’t tell one when they see it.
  • That prototype looks a lot different from the first PST (Personal Survival Tool). It’s got two pair of pliers mounted to the top and a bunch of other stuff. He also was asking $40 wholesale, which meant retailers would have to sell it for $80. Buyers for mail order house Early Winters took him under their wing and suggested paring down the expensive multiple pliers and scissors. Final price: $24 wholesale. Leatherman was selling a million in 10 years. Lesson: Sometimes paring your idea down to the basics is what people want. Bells and whistles just get in the way and boost the price to unmanageable levels.
  • Once Leatherman got his business rolling, he farmed out some of the knife blade tempering to Portland neighbor knifemaker Gerber (who was the first to turn him down years before). Gerber execs realized exactly how many blades they were subcontracting and learned just how big of a business the multi-tool market had become. They engineered their own tool and became Leatherman’s first prime competitor. Lesson: Be careful who you partner with. Even if you’re the only game in town, it’s a temporary condition.

By the way, Leatherman carries two of his tools at all times: the Charge and the Squirt on his keychain. Are you surprised that the inventor of the American version of the Swiss Army knife wouldn’t be prepared?

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]