Innovation is not a Printing Ink
Why newsrooms are reluctant to innovate
When my colleague Astrid got the request for a workshop from a traditional media house with the usual buzzwords “online” and “storytelling” and “multimedia”, we sat down together. We invented a workshop that had never existed before: two days of quick access to the journalism of things. Our workshop was wonderful, I thought, it contained all the basics to make an editorial team want to explore the digital worlds. The answer came unusually quickly: it was “too ‘fancy’ for us or for our form of journalism”.
Too fancy. Hm.
Innovation is daily routine in journalism. Journalism reinvents itself with every issue. In the daily newspaper newsroom, every day a new one is created that has a completely different content. The rhythm is even faster online. From an evolutionary point of view, such a high rhythm is open to new things, as mutations in the genetic make-up can occur every day and be passed on. A new column, a different look for a page. And yet journalistic media are very constant. Perhaps it’s because of the insecurity you face as a result of daily self-reproduction. So it is not surprising that many innovations in journalism are small steps. Kim Svendsen, head of the Stibo Accelerator in Denmark, estimates in his model of the “Three Colours of Innovation” that 95 percent of innovations take place in the near field of traditional organic development. But he advises not to lose sight of the what-if questions. Svendsen says: “We want to be the red sock in the white lingerie. It doesn’t all have to be dark red. That wouldn’t sell. But a red colour can’t hurt. White socks sell worse and worse.”
They are simple attempts to improve something that already exists. If, for example, data is prepared for reporting in an unusual way. Instead of the line-up table, there is a graph that analyzes the routes. These are the innovations of the green area.
Why not… try something new?
Then there are the runaways when a journalist says: “Why not …?”. This can culminate in an action for information, a data collection project or a project like “Deutschland spricht” (“Germany talks”), in which readers are matched with opposing views. This area is shown in yellow in the model. And then there is the red area of radical innovation. I am certainly not leaning far out of the window when I say that readers and viewers are sceptical about this kind of innovation. They want to recognize their media.
But the red area of the “what if would be” question also requires editors and authors to take a look at their own medium, which makes them forget for a moment the routines that make serial media production possible in the first place.
Matthias Murmann, founder of the German production company btf, which is usually on the way a lot beyond the yellow zone with its productions, says: “The sentence we hear again and again when we are dealing with the free market and someone is working with us for the first time is: “We have never done this before”. For us, this sentence is always a sign that we are on the right track. Whoever does everything the same cannot create anything new”.
Many of the ideas and examples in this blog are located between the yellow and red areas. They leave the comfort zone and aim right into the wilderness. We don’t ask ourselves how a newspaper can be better consumed on the toilet or in front of the open fridge. We ask ourselves what journalism should look like when the bathroom mirror or refrigerator door transports it. This way of looking at things alone makes it possible to eliminate conventional assumptions and clearly see the core of the journalistic offer: What are we doing?
We journalists are writing long articles about the disruptive power of the Internet of Things. We reporters visit start-ups and interview CEOs. We tell our readers that THIS will be the next big thing. FOR SURE.
And, of course, journalists interested in shaping the near-future landscape in meaningful ways should focus not just on the talking but on the doing, inventing, evaluating, and re-doing.” — Marcus Bösch, Vragments
But we do not transfer the knowledge from our articles directly to our own work. It could be too fancy. The journalism researcher Wiebke Loosen says: “Many pioneer journalists turn to their own small projects because they find the structures in large editorial offices laborious, processes slow”. Economically speaking, there has long been much to suggest that the supposed “comfort zone of innovation” of the three-color model will become the cemetery of classical media. That the future belongs to the “Why not?” media and the “What if?
Give your Green Idea a Yellow Spin
Let’s change that! When you come up with your next idea, just think of the model of the three colours. And give your green idea the spin of a yellow or even red bubble. I am convinced that in the space of “Why not …” and “What if …” the passion for journalism awakens anew. My declared goal is therefore to remain “too fancy” for the editors in the comfort zone. Because that’s the death zone of the old media.
We venture further out on our expedition, to places where no hiking trails are signposted and the paths are no longer paved. Driven by the question: “What if … there is better journalism there? “Can a spring mouse be happy in a turtle cage?” asks German intellectual Wolf Lotter in his book “Innovation”. Jumping mice are the lateral thinkers in an editorial office, but they only serve to maintain the system, he says, and lists all the guys who are often mistakenly regarded as innovators. I don’t want to be on that list. And there is a good way not to land on it: reinvent journalism.
