On Bomb-Throwing
May 24th, 2008 | Published in Journalism | 22 Comments
Note to visitors coming via Jay Rosen’s Twitter feed: Nowhere here do I say that Curley and his team were “not effective” at WPNI. Not effective as they could have been is a better reflection of my thoughts.
So: Curley and Co. to Las Vegas, one of the non-secret secrets of the Web journalism world. Among the reactions?
- Patrick Thornton: “Now the real fun will begin at WPNI. He is taking his whole team with him.”
- Steve Outing: “Big ouch for WashPost, eh?”
Well, yes and no. I say this as a former WPNI employee who knows Curley and his team (we weren’t best buddies, but friendly enough). Let me also say that he and his team were always nice to me, and I admire them for doing what they do.
But to respond to Steve’s assessment, it would be a bigger ouch for WPNI if Curley’s team was more a part of the organization, but it was clear from early on that they were, if I can borrow the phrase, a pluggable app rather than deeply ingrained in the organization. Curley puts it this way: “I love The Washington Post and all that it stands for, but I probably wasn’t the best fit with the organization.”
I agree. Here’s my take: Curley probably figured out quickly that being a bomb-thrower (in the best sense of the phrase) was gonna be tougher at the Post than it was at, say, Naples or Lawrence. He couldn’t get rid of the IT staff (at WPNI, his unit was entirely separate in every way, which was the best he could do). He couldn’t make people at the paper do his bidding, although certainly they sought him out to build things, and his team did some great work. But there was a lot of pushback; some of it for the wrong reasons, some of it entirely justified.
And from the perspective of good portion of the staff of the Washington Post newspaper, this Curley guy talked a great game, but some were always a little skeptical. It’s a natural enough reaction, but at an organization that size, that’s a tough situation for anyone to overcome. So I think Curley and his team did what they could and didn’t get too attached. I can totally understand that choice, but the end result is that Curley’s departure won’t spell doom for WPNI, as his group was never really a part of the team. Will it reduce WPNI’s ability to produce some cool stuff? Absolutely. But it would hurt a lot more if circumstances were different.
Certainly there was resentment at his arrival and the attention paid to it, which Curley couldn’t have done much to mitigate. And it’s not in his nature to do so, from what I saw. He’s a very smart guy, and there’s no need to apologize for that. He had to realize that some folks wouldn’t be excited to see him, or would be jealous of his resources and ability to pick and choose projects, so his team mostly kept their heads down and did their work.
That’s the thing about bomb-throwing: it works best when you control the environment around you (think Lawrence and most likely the situation awaiting Team Curley in Vegas). Throw a bomb when you’re surrounded by people who aren’t already your allies and you risk alienating more people than you intended. I say this as someone who routinely chucked bombs during my career. It may have been slightly more effective at smaller organizations; it certainly didn’t work at the Post when I tried it, and I was wrong to do it as often as I did. I didn’t pick my spots well, and as a result I alienated people who could have been my allies.
I say this not just because Curley’s leaving, but because I see a lot of this behavior in the journalism blogging community. It’s not done with bad intentions, but it seems terribly counterproductive to me to condemn people who are facing an uncertain future and don’t know how to respond to it as people who “cannot be helped.” Shall we take them out back and shoot them, then? Once you start dividing your newsroom into people with a future and people without, imagine how much fun that’s going to be for everybody. Imagine the impact on your workplace culture.
Yeah, it sure feels good, in that revolutionary zeal sort of way, to toss some grenades over the wall. But who does it help? So much of journalism blogging is preaching to the choir that you get the sense that if rest of the industry just would get out of the way already, everything would be fine. Things are more complex than that, and it’s time we started being serious about that complexity.
May’s Carnival of Journalism question is this: “What should news organizations stop doing today, immediately, to make more time for innovation?” Which is a great academic question – because that’s pretty much what this exercise is: academic. Imagine, if you will, walking into a typical newsroom, picking out a person who has worked there for, say, 5-7 years and saying: “What you’re doing? Stop it. It’s worthless.”
What, that’s not what you meant by the question? I’m sure every newspaper veteran will see it that way, too. My response was to suggest that we work on improving existing processes rather than trying to tell people who already fear for their futures that we don’t need them to do the job they’re trained to do anymore. These aren’t abstractions that can be neatly tied up in an all-encompassing blog post; these are real people. Just because someone is not willing to get fired doesn’t mean they’re not of value. I’m sorry, but if you’re 25 and single, you have yet to understand why losing a job would be a very bad thing for you and the people who depend upon you. Let’s not approach our colleagues with a raised middle finger when there are more productive avenues.
While we’re at it, let’s not all pretend that we’re the cool kids rebelling against the man. Let’s not all assume that replacing 15-inch stories with blogs works in every circumstance. Let’s not all assume that the answers are so obvious that anyone who disagrees “just doesn’t get it.” There’s a gap, people, and talking about it only helps so much. I’d love to see more creation, more building of tools that will help us get to a better place. Advice is cheap, and worth the price in too many instances.
My intent here is not to shut people up; that’s not a good thing for anybody, either. It’s to encourage all of us to think a little longer before issuing sweeping pronouncements like “no more meeting stories” or “everyone must blog/twitter/facebook/pownce/whatever or else they’re useless.” Those are not fixes to real problems; they’re revolutionary slogans. And as revolutionaries the world over have found, revolution doesn’t always translate well once you’ve attained power. Then you have to make things work.
May 25th, 2008 at 12:19 am (#)
[...] aback this evening when I saw that Derek Willis quoted one of my Twitter posts from earlier today on his blog, The Scoop. (That’s an insightful item, by the way, about the behind-the-scenes situation at the [...]
May 25th, 2008 at 5:31 am (#)
As one who has lobbed the occasional ill-advised, ineffective or otherwise impolitic bomb around both the office and cyberspace, I understand the satisfaction we journalism bloggers sometimes seek by preaching to the choir. It nearly amounts to therapy when one feels as utterly powerless as so many of the younger and less experienced but passionate and well-intentioned among us often do in our own newsrooms.
That said, not even the sympathetic comments, bookmarks and trackbacks of our fellow journo-bloggers are anywhere near as effective a venting mechanism as working really, really insanely hard on an actual product or project that turns all that extensively expounded-upon vision into reality. Walking the walk is so much more satisfying that talking the talk, and it doesn’t leave all that much spare time for sermons.
May 25th, 2008 at 6:15 am (#)
[...] verschiedene Perspektiven. Während Steve Outing einen schmerzlichen Verlust sieht erklärt Derek Willis auf “The Scoop”, dass es aufgrund der geringen Integration der Einheit in die [...]
May 25th, 2008 at 6:31 am (#)
[...] On Bomb-Throwing – The Scoop “So much of journalism blogging is preaching to the choir that you get the sense that if rest of the industry just would get out of the way already, everything would be fine. Things are a more complex than that …” (tags: journalism newspaper blogs thescoop commented-on) [...]
May 25th, 2008 at 9:58 am (#)
Re: The CofJ question…
I don’t think it’s academic at all. I talk to four or five newsrooms a week, explain the goals of Web-first publishing, growing an online audience, and being the watercooler for your community, and about 75% of the time they ask me “How are we supposed to have the time to post stories in the middle of the day when we’re all on deadline trying to get 15 inches written about Topic X, Y, and Z?”
So to me, it’s an extremely practical question.
Should “meeting stories” be turned into a well-designed graphic scorecard for print to run anchor once a week? Probably.
Could an online calendar app that routes reader’s submissions straight to the Web and an XML feed that plays well with print layout systems save a great deal of some poor staffer’s time? Most probably.
I’m looking for more of those answers, although admittedly, what’s coming in are mostly view-from-30,000-feet strategic answers.
I think your angle — which I read as “Use a Web CMS as your print CMS to stop dual-entry” — is entirely practical when it comes to time and efficiency, but if a reporter is still going to spend three hours (or two, or one) writing up the play-by-play on a process story, that’s still a net loss.
May 25th, 2008 at 11:27 am (#)
So, is this a veiled apology to Caspio? I hope not.
But the bomb-throwing stuff aside, I do think there are some legitimate questions to be asked here with don’t fall into the grenade over the wall category. All we’ve been hearing about for the past blah blah years is how, through the magic of hyperlocal, the Web will save us all. Now, Curley and his minions are picking up and leaving
Whether or not Curley himself was a particularly effective leader, it’s hard to argue that he wasn’t given the resources to prove the Lawrence model could scale. I’m not sure he did that. To my mind, that probably explains at least some of the reason he’s making this (less-than-lateral) move to Las Vegas.
Lemme put it another way: If Curley’s experiment were making the Post gobs of money, I don’t think they’d simply let him go. But you know way better than I do what the culture is like there.
I don’t know whether it’s throwing a bomb or not, but maybe it’s time to ask ourselves whether hyperlocal is just… hype if it can’t be replicated, or can’t be replicated in a metro area over X size? We’ll see, I guess. He’ll have everything he could possibly want out there in terms of control, if not resources. Maybe the magic will work, but I’m not holding my breath.
May 25th, 2008 at 3:50 pm (#)
@Ryan:
You’re right; the question itself isn’t academic. Just some of the “usual suspect” answers that come from certain quarters of the journalism blogger community. You know the ones: their arguments consist of massive sweeping statements that are about as useful to each situation as swimming trunks on the moon. My point, badly made in that case, was that you and I both know that there are no cookie-cutter solutions, and that this stuff isn’t easy. Pretending that things would magically change if we all just drank the Kool-Aid is not a practical or useful response.
@Aron:
To Caspio? No. They’ve earned it. To any Caspio users that I maligned – absolutely. I’m not in their shoes, and I shouldn’t have been so judgmental. There’s plenty of room to criticize Caspio the product (and its salespeople) without going after users who may have little choice. On Curley, eh, I don’t know that we can say one way or the other. Personally, there’s no way I would have picked Loudoun County for that initial foray. Arlington, Alexandria, maybe, or even start at a city level. I think in a market like the Post’s instant money-making wasn’t going to happen anyway. The question is whether they’ll stick with it.
May 25th, 2008 at 4:16 pm (#)
Derek, Aron:
“Instant money-making” — This.
I think for hyperlocal to work, it has to roll out slow, build upon itself and become a habit and expectation for local users. Hiring a big team and spending what has to be into the millions on a giant splash of a project, turning the lights on and expecting it to be gigantically successful from birth is just begging for failure. Lawrence didn’t become The Legend of Lawrence overnight. It took time. It built upon itself. It’s still building upon itself.
May 25th, 2008 at 4:51 pm (#)
re: “no cookie-cutter solutions” — Right. In my case, I’m just trying to move staffers from thinking of their Web site as “that thing the guy in composing uploads every night” to something they participate in and have a sense of ownership of.
But then they look at me, sigh, and tell me they don’t have time to post their own stories, because there’s oh so much work to do — additional sigh — and they don’t have to staff they used to.
I like John Hassell’s answer to the question best so far, I think — practical examples of reporters who took the initiative to step away from their daily print workflow and fill gaps online instead.
May 25th, 2008 at 5:37 pm (#)
@Ryan:
I agree that Hassell’s answer is a good one. I think it’s as important to recognize *how* he approaches it – not by telling people that their days are numbered if they don’t stop being a dinosaur, but by making smart choices and talking out the best ways to achieve a goal.
May 25th, 2008 at 6:43 pm (#)
This post was obviously partly inspired by my blog. I think if you read my blog’s work in its entirety you will see a mix of marco and micro posts. I cannot help it if my marco posts are the ones that become popular.
I’m not here to defend myself or my blog today. Rather, I’d like to point out that the Post is going ahead with Fairfax Extra, which will be launching in a few months. So, the Post has deemed the Loundon Extra experiment worth doing at least one more time.
And it’s entirely possible that Rob (as he insinuated) is a better fit for a smaller, nimbler organization. He comes from Kansas, and he said when he accepted the Post job that he never envisioned working for a large newspaper. He simply may be a better fit for a publication like the Sun (and enjoy the environment more) than the Post. And if that’s the case, more power to him.
I stand by my statement that beat blogging is almost always superior to a 15-inch story. A 15-inch story is so arbitrary, while beat blogging is all about the content. I hope to be exploring this concept further over the next few months.
I have stated before that I subscribe to print publications. I want to see more print publications concentrate on analysis pieces (like The Economist), and how and why pieces instead of what pieces.
Here is the thing: We can not tell people (and lie) that their days are numbered if they don’t expand their skill set and mindset, or we can be honest with them. More than 2,000 print editorial jobs have been lost alone this year. It is what it is.
Newspapers are in for the fight of their lives.
May 25th, 2008 at 7:07 pm (#)
@Pat:
The fact that your more popular posts employ these sweeping generalizations helps make my point: saying these kinds of things may generate pageviews for you, but they don’t do much to help the industry. There is, I hope you understand, a difference.
You wrote what you wrote, and you stand by it. Good on ya. Except that you don’t offer any evidence for it. Yes, blogging can help beat reporting, but so can learning GIS tools. I haven’t seen from you (or anyone) documented evidence that replacing stories on the beat with a blog “almost always” leads to better reporting, more readers and greater financial success. So I’m sorry, but your say-so on this just isn’t good enough, and no self-respecting person should just take your word for it (or mine, for that matter).
I’ve also never seen in any of your posts an indication of how you would deal with your colleagues who in your mind are beyond help. Do you fire them? How do you explain that to the rest of the newsroom without causing panic, considering the people left behind are seeing some trusted colleagues and friends being shown the door? What’s the litmus test? Is it different for a page designer than a reporter?
And are those layoffs you’re talking about entirely the result of people not accepting the proper mindset? Saying “it is what it is” seems nice, but in this case, it is many things, not one thing.
As I said at the top, macro helps you. Micro, while probably less helpful to your own Internet empire, might help accomplish what you say you want to. As would a willingness to consider alternate viewpoints, or to avoid sounding authoritative on situations (ie, WPNI) that you clearly don’t have inside information on.
Fight of their lives? Maybe so. I’m less clear on how you came to be a general, and why I should follow you.
May 25th, 2008 at 10:40 pm (#)
Derek,
You were absolutely closer to the situation than I ever was, but I think you are TOO kind to Curley in your post.
The attitude at WPNI now is get Curley out of the building at any costs. Don’t throw any bombs until he is gone.
So after he picks up and leaves officially for Vegas, I think a lot of folks will be glad to fill in the gaps of the Curley at post.com story.
RW
May 26th, 2008 at 8:31 am (#)
“…saying these kinds of things may generate pageviews for you, but they don’t do much to help the industry. There is, I hope you understand, a difference.”
Fire in the hole!
Honestly, Derek, I don’t know why you’re wasting your breath on this. Pat seems like a nice enough guy, but he’s one of those bloggers who seems so completely comfortable with his own ignorance sometimes it’s almost breathtaking. This was the last straw for me. I dropped him from my reading list right then and there. Maybe you should do the same.
May 26th, 2008 at 1:35 pm (#)
@Russ:
Actually, I think you and others would be more knowledgeable about the situation than I would. Other than brief conversation about Django issues, I didn’t work with Curley’s team in any real capacity. So if I’ve been too kind – and I honestly didn’t think his tenure at WPNI would be as long as it was – then I’ll be glad to have others fill in the gaps. A bad fit may be a kind way of putting it, but that pretty much acknowledges that there were problems all around.
@Aron:
Yeah, I hear you. But since this post went up, I’ve heard from several folks, including one who basically stopping blogging because of people with attitude’s like Pat’s. I guess I feel that if no one else is going to say something, I might as well. But I won’t be reading anymore. I don’t have to.
May 27th, 2008 at 3:27 pm (#)
As another reporter/blogger accused (by association) of asking Academic questions lemme say – Hardly.
I offered a handful of practical solutions of ways to create more time for better and deeper reporting, almost all of which included getting help from active citizens.
I never suggested no more meeting stories – I said pick your spots and otherwise let trusted citizen accomplices put in the long hours listening to officials talk about nothing. I said use crowdsourcing to report on a.m. traffic trouble rather than force a reporter to waste time every day doing it.
I’m not saying tell the reporter we don’t need him; I’m saying tell the reporter you’re free to do work of greater value to most readers, the kind of stuff people can’t do for themselves, if only because they don’t have the time.
Every hour I’m sitting in a meeting is one less I’m doing CAR work.
So Derek, please read my post and see If I’m tossing grenades or trying to find ways to give us all more time to get some work done.
May 27th, 2008 at 4:11 pm (#)
@Matt:
Thanks for writing, and allow me to clarify: it’s some of the responses to the question that have been academic, not asking the question itself.
So I’m guessing you don’t agree with Ryan’s characterization of portions of your post (meeting stories being “next up against the wall”, etc.) as well as your own line of “i just don’t think we need to do it”?
The trouble I have with your first and third items is that in the first case you don’t say whether those incidents would still be tracked somehow, and if so, how. On meetings, I can only say that it’s my experience that showing up for those meetings, while not always enjoyable, yields far more insight than trying to track developments remotely or through someone else’s experience. When I was covering Congress, I learned the most about the institution itself and its members during marathon nighttime sessions. That helped me spot stories I otherwise would have missed. Same thing occurred on the local level, where councils frequently tried to bury important agenda items.
It’s hard for me to take seriously the “pick your spots” line when you write things like “Almost every public meeting is a show trial.” Local officials would love reporters to think that they only “talk about nothing” at meetings.
All that said, this isn’t bomb-throwing stuff. But it’s a far cry from a proven case that what you’re giving up is expendable, imho.
May 27th, 2008 at 6:06 pm (#)
Derek,
Not expendable – Able to be done in a different way and one that requires a lot less sitting at a meeting for seven hours.
reporters who do their homework (reading agendas and minutes; talking a lot to officials, clerks, people affected by decisions, etc) are never surprised by what happens at a Muni or school board meeting. To apply the old Lenny Bruce line, in the halls of justice, the justice is in the halls.
I’ve never covered Congress, but I agree my proposal wouldn’t work there; nor would i recommend it for the San Jose City Council, etc.
I’m talking about smaller places where reporters simply can’t spend so much time watching something that’s in almost every case nothing but an official stamp on a decision already made. If I can’t make a friend with one lousy board member who will flag me about some kind of poison pill hidden in an agenda item, I’m not much of a reporter.
Nor Do I advocate never showing UP – As I said in my post. There are lots of other good reasons to show up and I show up a lot, often on my own time because I understand that’s part of being the kind of reporter I want to be. It’s not a 9-5 job.
For cops and fire stuff, I think there’s a debate to be had about how to track them and whether to track them, but running around all day chasing non-stories (as most of them are) is not a good way to be of value to readers.
And yes, Ryan went too far with kill the meeting stories. I’m talking about killing the time wasting (though I like his colorful meeting vote grid idea).
I mean, how else can I fit in all the state of the industry blog conversation I have scheduled for today?
m
May 27th, 2008 at 9:21 pm (#)
[...] Brett Roegiers the other day, and he mentioned a blog post by Derek Willis on what he calls “Bomb Throwing” in the newsroom. In a general way, he talks about the new wave of online journalists [...]
May 28th, 2008 at 2:11 am (#)
Wow, what a great conversation. A friend pointed me over in this direction and I’m glad I came.
I built and ran a daily operation at a magazine a few years back — and I definitely did the bomb-throwing (sometimes ill-advised), so I can related. However, there was a method to the madness. I don’t know the Post situation — but web operations are often underfunded, under-understood and expected to change RIGHT NOW because it’s the Web.
I’ve had the unfortunate experience of being a part of the decision to fire people who had been with a publication for 20+ years because their skills didn’t translate to what we needed.
Do I think that was great? Nope. But the fact remains we built a better journalism product by doing that.
What surprises me here — and like Ryan I have spent the better part of two years working with news organizations, keynoting journalism events and all the normal hubbub — is that even progressive-thinking journalists don’t get what the Web does best.
Even here (and yes, this is a sweeping generalization, but not meant as a condemnation), the discussion about the Web is still print centric. The Web shouldn’t reproduce what’s done in print — it should do something entirely different (not outside of the ethics and such of reporting).
That doesn’t mean SlideShow and video and blogging. It means completely revamping sites so they do what no other medium can (and yes, this is vague because I’ve laid out what each section of a paper should look like at my blog, if you’re really interested).
The end goal should be, IMHO: create teams of people who are specialized, reporters, programmers, designers, photographers, ect — and unleash them together.
You can’t out-Google Google. You can’t teach a copy editor to out program a coder. So don’t try.
My two cents.
Love the topic and discussion! Very smart.
May 28th, 2008 at 11:01 pm (#)
[...] On Bomb-Throwing. Derek Willis has a very good post about the role and effectiveness of disruptors in the newsroom, basing his points on the recent move of Rob Curley and much of his online team from the Washington Post to Las Vegas Sun. [...]
July 21st, 2008 at 12:03 pm (#)
Hi Derek. Just found your blog and came upon this post, a couple months late. I completely agree with your stance, especially in light of the recent dust-up over the Tampa intern’s blog. General sweeping statements won’t help save the industry. Practical suggestions will. And yes, there’s too much of the “us against them”, “heroes and villains” mentality. I can’t help but think that some in these camps are not so much interested in instilling a mentality of change as they are in replacing the existing status quo with their own status quo. Are we moving toward to a point where we continuously question dogma, or are we just moving closer to praying to another god?