How the rising generation of newsroom leaders tackles media industry challenges
Newmark J School’s Executive Program is turning good people into even greater leaders. They prioritize culture change, equity, sustainability, and product thinking.
This fall, The Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism will launch its third Executive Program in News Innovation and Leadership.
Over the last two years, newsroom executives from 14 countries have gathered in New York City and online to discuss the modern challenges facing news outlets and how media leaders can learn to manage more effectively at the intersections of business, product, tech and editorial. Applications for the third cohort of the Executive Program, which begins in September, are due on June 30.
Anita Zielina, the Director of the Executive Program, discusses the trends she sees in newsroom leadership, the power of the Executive Program alumni network, and the secrets to the program’s success.
What trends have you seen in the cohort’s final Capstone Projects over the past years?
What we tell folks to do with their Capstone Project is to pick a big and tricky challenge — a strategic challenge that not only impacts their own organization, but ideally also impacts the media industry in a broader way. And it’s interesting to see that some topics or trends have emerged in these past years, that we see coming back and back, over and over again.
One of them, obviously, is the whole area of product. So we see quite a few participants work on strategic challenges that, broadly speaking, have to do with how product thinking and product strategy are so crucial to transform and innovate the newsroom. People work on challenges that are related to questions like: How does my organization need to be structured in order to become more product-centric? How do I, as a leader, become more product-centric? For many, it also means making a career shift into product.
The second interesting trend that I’m seeing is that quite a few folks choose to focus on culture topics. Topics that have to do with work ethics, work culture, how managers and organizations treat their employees, how they work on — or not work on — retaining them, how they treat them if they have to say goodbye to them and separate from them. I think that reflects kind of a broader theme in the industry of culture and ethics and work/life finally becoming more of a topic, broadly speaking.
And then the third topic that we consistently see is innovation, in the sense of how to make organizations able to innovate better and more sustainably. Innovation has this tendency to be a buzzword, but what actually makes me happy when I look at many of the more innovation-focused challenges people worked on is that it’s far from that lofty buzzword. Instead, innovation strategy focuses on answering questions like: How do we have to reshape our organizations? How does the org chart have to change? What workflows or tools or processes are we going to use specifically to innovate? What frameworks do we use to drive sustainability? What kind of incubator or accelerator could we build to foster innovation in our ecosystem?
It’s a global group of people that come to the program. Are there differences in the things that are happening in the U.S. versus what’s happening elsewhere?
The interesting thing about running a truly global program is to see that the broad challenges are really very similar. I think if you ask many of the participants about what they learned, many of them walk away with that feeling of, Oh my gosh, we’re all in this together.
I think specifically in the U.S, there is sometimes this U.S.-centrism where we think that everything that’s happening here is super unique. So one of the rewarding things is that participants see that actually, no, there are various parts of the world that somehow tackle similar challenges.
What are some lessons that you’ve taken from the first two cohorts of the Executive Program?
One of the working assumptions of the program when we built it was that the cohort itself is going to be so powerful. So we need to ensure that they get to work with each other, be in small groups, do workshops together, really have the opportunity to help each other throughout the year with their respective leadership challenges. And it is not surprising, but it is great for us to see, that this really works.
There have been very deep relationships and friendships formed that I think are the core of this group now, of folks that you’re always going to have in your corner, which is something that I think many of the people coming to the program expressed that they fundamentally lacked before. They felt like it’s getting lonelier, as you rise up through the career ranks — a feeling that I think resonates with many of us. And having that group of people that’s always there for you in a very trusted setting, that are at a similar stage in their career, has been at the core of building the program.
One of the other big working assumptions when we built this program was that we said journalism leaders, even if they come from the editorial side, or work on the editorial side, need to understand the fundamentals of finance, of business, of where the money comes from, of building products, of managing technology, to be effective in their leadership roles. The world has changed in a way that, even if you have an editorial leadership role, you’re going to have developers on your team, you’re going to have designers, you’re going to sit in boardrooms with your chief product officer, your chief digital officer, your chief financial officer, and you want to be able to speak their language. So creating that literacy is one of the core components of the program and has proven to be very effective for the leaders who take part in it.
What are your plans for the alumni network?
Now that we are moving into a world where we have two cohorts of alumni and are now filling the third cohort, we are starting to bring those people together. So for the first time in September, when we kick off the next cohort, we’re actually inviting the first two cohorts back and we are doing joint sessions so that everyone gets to meet each other. Like in 2021 we are also doing an “unconference” where they are going to spend the day working on solutions sessions and strategic industry challenges together.
And from this year on, we’re also doing a bi-monthly alumni workshop or sharing webinar, because ultimately we want this to be not just a life experience while you’re in the program. We want this group of people to be a hub for modern, empathetic, product and business-savvy, forward-thinking leadership in the industry. And we believe that they can have more impact in their roles if we keep that alumni network alive and foster it.
What kind of changes have you seen in the lives of the participants as they go through the program and afterwards?
One of the key success metrics, if you’re running an executive program, is, Does it empower people to take on larger executive roles with more impact? And both in the first year and the second year, we are seeing that this is happening, and it makes us very proud. So, in the last cohort alone, four out of 20 participants during or immediately after the program, took their first C-level role. So that is really due to their own greatness, but the program played a little role in that, and we are very proud of that.
Our main mission, if you take a step back and look at the bigger picture, is that five years from now, we want to see a different kind of C-level, and a different top management level in newsrooms. We want it to be more diverse, more female, more international, more product and innovation-minded, more interdisciplinary. And that is ultimately the goal of the whole program — to empower the people who are now in the second or maybe third leadership tie to be prepared to take on these C-level roles, to take on these SVP roles, to take on editor-in-chief roles, so that we are basically changing how leadership looks in the industry. So it’s great to see, obviously, that this is working.
Now for some of our folks — the ones who don’t work in large organizations, the ones who come in with their own organizations that they’ve built themselves, or are building themselves — obviously, impact and scale look very different. For them, it’s maybe not about taking on that larger corporate role. For them, it’s sometimes about successfully scaling their own organization, fundraising for the next growth phase of their organization or maturing the idea and the small venture they have into something that’s like a full and proper newsroom. And while that is sometimes harder to measure, in pure metrics, we do see that several of the participants who come from smaller or more startup organizations experience this impact after they graduated from the program. And obviously, that’s something that makes us very proud, specifically when we look at local media or community media, and see the impact that those participants are having after they graduate.
What are you the most proud of about the Executive Program?
I’m incredibly proud that we’ve managed to build cohorts of people who are smart, who are really pushing the industry forward, but who are also really absolutely fantastic, empathetic and supportive human beings. One thing that I’m personally super proud of is that the program is a very asshole-free zone. It’s really a no-jerks-allowed zone.
I’ve been through executive MBA and other executive programs myself. There is a tendency that these programs sometimes accelerate the voices of the ones who are already shouting the loudest, that they sometimes don’t really incentivize supportive, collaborative and empathetic behavior. So I’m very proud that the groups that we are elevating are not like this.
There is the spirit of collaboration, the spirit of, We’re in it together and we’re gonna get through it better together rather than alone. This is spirit is then paired with the managerial and business acumen, the product knowledge, the strategic goals, the excellent stakeholder management — the hard, business side of things.And I think that’s the secret to the impact of the program. We don’t train people who are good at business and management, but kind of suck as human beings. We empower people who already are awesome human beings to be even more effective in their leadership and their management.
