Two Cheers for Recent Looks at Newsrooms, Three for Looking Even Harder
Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.
Foundations and some other funders like to talk about themselves as being in the “risk capital” business, and, like many who take risks, their investments often prove disappointing. No shame there. But funders almost never do what real venturers must: look closely at why they came up short when they have, trying to learn and to fare better next time. And when funders do undertake what they like to characterize as “evaluation,” they very rarely conduct such appraisals independently or go public with the results, thus preventing others from sharing in the learning.
So I was especially pleased earlier this month, to learn of a set of studies released by the Center for News, Technology & Innovation (CNTI) that included one of the most successful nonprofit newsrooms, the Salt Lake Tribune, and perhaps our field’s biggest recent disaster, Houston Landing, which failed after less than 24 months and the loss of $20 million. (Disclosure: I am on the advisory committee of CNTI, but had not seen and did not know of these studies before they were published.)
CNTI has kindly provided me for this column with highlight versions of both the Houston and Salt Lake papers to post publicly; the full versions, somewhat more detailed, remain behind a paywall. Both of the papers are part of a larger body of work CNTI calls its Business Success Initiative, which includes studies from other fields as well, ranging from Peloton to Netflix.
I want to spend this week drawing some lessons from the CNTI reports, both for the insights they do provide and the ways in which we need to probe even more widely and deeply. So while I will be critical of this new work to some degree, I want to stress upfront that we need more such inquiries, not fewer.
What went wrong in Houston
While there has been some public dissection of what happened at Houston Landing, most notably this long piece from NiemanLab, the CNTI report nicely distills its critique, as I read it, to four key points:
- the extensive “community listening” process ahead of launch, spearheaded by the American Journalism Project (AJP), the smallest contributor among four primary launch funders, “never named the specific activities or audience needs that incumbents were not fulfilling;”
- the editorial approach was incoherent, with “competing priorities: accountability reporting, community coverage, publishing cadence” and the use of various publishing formats insufficiently resolved;
- the failure, as detailed in the NiemanLab piece, to “convert reader volume into revenue;” and
- more generally, that “capitalization is not a substitute for product market fit.”
So far, so good. I find those points generally well taken, although Michael Ouimette, chief investment officer of AJP, told me that the community listening research “identified clear, differentiated gaps that a new startup could seek to address to adequately serve the large, complex and dynamic Houston area.”
But when we turn to the happier story from Salt Lake, we encounter the limits of this sort of strategic analysis. If to a hammer, as they say, everything looks like a nail, to a purely strategic analysis, everything can look like strategy.
CNTI concludes that the Salt Lake Tribune cleverly resolved tensions between business and news objectives by naming an editor, Lauren Gustus, as CEO. It then observes that this allowed the Tribune to align its nonprofit business model by successfully removing the paywall.
A contrast, but for larger reasons
I do think Gustus has been indispensable to what’s been accomplished in Salt Lake, but I also think editors with this sort of executive talent are passingly rare. Other standout examples have included Evan Smith’s years at the Texas Tribune, Emily Ramshaw at The 19th, Neil Chase at CalMatters and Chris Baxter at Spotlight PA. But this handful, and a few others, have been the exception, not the rule.
As I frequently advise boards looking for new leaders, if you insist on finding such a person, rather than having both an editor and a business leader report to a board, you are making your task much more difficult, and heightening the risk that your choice may ultimately prove disappointing.
Similarly, while dropping the paywall has produced some encouraging if still preliminary indications for the nonprofit in Salt Lake, doing so at the Chicago Sun-Times was, at least initially, less well executed, and a very different approach has had to be taken with the new Chicago.com, on which the jury remains out. In contrast, the Baltimore Banner has retained its paywall and seems to be prospering, even if still heavily dependent on a lead funder.
People first
The invisible throughline in all of these cases, I believe, is what’s missing from both much of the after-action analysis to date on Houston Landing and from too many accounts of the sector’s bright spots. That is a focus on the quality of management, of the very human executive talent that tends to distinguish more successful operations from those which fail to thrive.
It should not be beyond our capacity to look hard at management quality, and we need to muster the candor and the courage to acknowledge both when managers excel and when they come up short. I am aware that adding this to what is required in a serious evaluation makes it even more fraught, precisely because it is personal. But as anyone who has studied business press coverage or scholarly analysis knows, management talent and execution is an essential aspect of business success. We avoid discussing it at our peril.
Second Rough Draft will be off next week. See you soon.
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