about the image above

March 28, 2024

Of Mormons, Moguls and Murdoch: Focus on the Innovation, not the Innovators

So, what do we make of it when true-believer Mormons lead a revolution based on the digital innovations of the day? How do we cheer or boo advertising-driven ventures that harness the best ideas and actually implement them with scale?

This is a time of revolutionary change, and we’ve got to separate — for a moment at least — the players from the plays. In writing about the major restructuring of the Deseret News/KSL operations in Salt Lake City this week, I suggested that Clark Gilbert and his inspired band were getting on with the business of remaking journalism. When I write about how smartly Demand Media has harnessed analytics to create a business, my enthusiasm shows. Why?

I believe the news world, oh-so-unevenly, is finally coming to grips with the digital era, and getting beyond the grief stage in saying a long good-bye to printed newspaper and broadcast-at-6 daily news shows. News people — editors, reporters and publishers — who pride themselves on being logical, follow-the-facts types should have followed the logic of digital change more quickly, more widely and more thoroughly. They didn’t though, and we have all suffered for it, in a decade when the public needs as much in-depth and knowledgable news coverage as it can get.

So I focus on the innovation; that’s where the new news business will be built, one way or the other. Whether it comes from a religious foundation, a quest to build toward an IPO or, in the case, of Rupert Murdoch, the last (?) chance to put his stamp on the industry he loves.

What we all learn — and apply — from the innovation of others, however much we like them or the goals, that’s the key.

In Utah, it gives me shivers to hear six big drivers of the journalism — the family, financial responsibility, excellence in education, care for the needy, values in the media, faith in the community — and not hear the basic, enduring driver of journalism: to inform and educate communities and audiences without fear or favor or proselytization.  With Demand, and now Yahoo’s Associated Content, I sense the lost opportunity when those companies tell me that just want to pick off high-ad-value content (technology, health, finance, etc.) and that the news guys can just figure out how to make the rest pay. I think News Corp’s donation of $1 million to the Republican Governors Association, just ahead of a decade-setting election, compromises the integrity of the Wall Street Journal, a great news company.

We can’t though dismiss what the Mormon Church, Rupert Murdoch and ad moguls are up to. We have to learn from it and help it power a journalism that matters. That’s why I made the connection, for instance, between the Salt Lake experiment and TBD, between what Demand is up to and what the Financial Times is doing with analytics to create a new business. It’s the innovation that’s worth us all learning from, no matter what we think of the innovators.

Article Tags

Categories

Related Posts