A couple of thoughts: I agree that what many folks call innovation is anything but innovative, but I don’t think you can start to build a culture of innovation using the very practices that have led to a stultified industry – meetings, basically. Personnel evaluations? Most of the people I know doing innovative stuff – people like Matt Waite – have very few people in the business who can properly evaluate them.

In my experience, the way to institutionalize this is to allow it to grow in a small setting first and then expand upon that experience. That’s what I meant by no committees. Instead, newsrooms should identify the person or people most likely to have good ideas that involve a different take on the usual practices and give them the space to create.

If it works, then you can work on institutionalizing innovation. But reserving portions of meetings for “innovation” time will result in little good.

For much of the industry, it seems that “innovation” often means “doing something that others started doing in the past one to five years.”

I bet most of us have heard “We don’t do that” or “Nobody does that” or “We’ve always done it this way,” etc.

If newsroom leaders truly want innovation, they wouldn’t just say so once or a few times. They would work to build it into the culture.

A few ways to start doing that would be to make it part of meetings, story coaching, personnel evaluations and the budgets (in both senses of the word).