The talented people in these seemingly disparate industries are remarkably alike, but the cultures of the businesses are completely different. And here is why this matters:
The tradition-bound and risk-averse nature of the newspaper culture is the single greatest reason publishers are losing readers and revenues while competing digital products run circles around them.
With new technologies, media formats, and business models emerging at an ever-quickening pace, newspapers must learn to think and act like start-ups — or risk falling to the margins of the media world.
In other words, newspapers need some fresh DNA that will make them think and act more like techies and less like, well, newspaper people. The good news for newspapers is they have an abundance of the most important asset every business needs: great people.
Just like tech companies, newspapers are filled with exceptionally large numbers of highly intelligent, highly creative, and highly motivated individual contributors whose ideas, talents, and egos must be channeled efficiently into creating a product that not even the brightest among them could produce on his or her own.
Although the people working at newspapers and tech companies are more similar than you would think, their business cultures are polar opposites of each other.
Newspapers are all about faithfully and efficiently producing a well-defined product according to time-honored standards and procedures. In other words, the culture values tradition, consistency, and predictability, which, by definition, are inhospitable to change — particularly the sort of disruptive change that the Web, mobile, and social media require.
Newspaper folk essentially come to work every day to do their best to fully optimize a product that serves a clearly identified audience, that has a clearly defined revenue model, and that, until the last few years, has been a stunningly profitable business.
Tech companies — which are unencumbered by tradition, institutional inertia, and frequently even a clearly defined product for the first few years — are created expressly to do something that no one else has done before.
When techies come to work, everyone in the company — from engineers to marketers to salespeople — is eager to debate such fundamental questions as: What’s our product? Who will buy it? How will we sell it? How will we make money? The debate persists (almost to a maddening degree) until the product is launched — and generally continues afterward, especially if the marketplace fails to embrace the offering with sufficient zeal. Techies will tinker until they either get it right or run out of venture capital.
Although everyone marvels at how Microsoft, Google, and Facebook rocked the world, the preponderance of tech start-ups actually fail, because they prove to be far less clever than the founders and funders thought they would be. But failure is an option in Silicon Valley, because you learn as much from hitting the wall as from succeeding. Maybe even more.
It takes a certain mindset to take the entrepreneurial plunge. Techies embrace uncertainty and shrug off failure in a way that would unhinge most ordinary people. They are perfectly happy blowing up what they did the day before to try a better (or at least different) idea.
This sort of restless and relentless experimentation has produced all the technologies that have changed the way consumers get and give media — and the way advertisers increasingly are attempting to reach customers. A good deal of the success of digital media has come at the expense of newspapers, which simply have not acted rapidly or boldly enough to create products and services to meet the needs of modern readers and advertisers.
Publishers have not failed to embrace disruptive experimentation because they are not smart enough to do so. Their businesses historically were so successful that they didn’t need, or want, to change them. Consequently, risk-taking and experimentation are not prominent in the industry ethos.
Newspapers now must find new ways to cost-effectively create content; build new Web, mobile, and social audiences; and monetize their traffic as profitably as Facebook and Google do.
To do that, they will have to bring the creative chaos of Silicon Valley into every corner of their businesses. This means launching multiple, carefully planned initiatives across the full array of print and digital media. To be sure, this must be done with discipline and care.
Sometimes newspapers will get it right. Sometimes they will get it wrong. And, every now and then they will hit a home run. But they won’t win if they don’t play.
Alan D. Mutter teaches media economics and entrepreneurism at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California-Berkeley and blogs at Reflections of a Newsosaur (Newsosaur.Blogspot.com).