Nieman Foundation talk with Clayton Christensen & David Skok

As someone interested in not just great writing, but also the production of great writing, I found of note a recent videotaped discussion hosted by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. The Feb 27 session was on the topic of "Disruptive Innovation in Journalism" and featured Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen and 2012 Nieman Fellow David Skok along with Nieman Foundation Curator Ann Marie Lipinski.

Christensen is a renowned business author I was familiar with from his latest effort, How Will You Measure Your Life? co-written with James Allworth & Karen Dillon. I enjoyed the book quite a bit and was interested in watching this Nieman talk with Christensen as one of the featured guests. Lipinski notes early on in the session that it follows up on an Oct 2012 Nieman Report by Christensen, Skok and Allworth titled "Mastering the art of disruptive innovation in journalism" and in terms of the recent talk itself, there was some fascinating points made by Christensen and Skok. While certainly not all-inclusive of what the two discussed, below are some of the things I took from the session...


Sustaining & disruptive innovations

Christensen spoke of how sustaining innovations are about making good products better and disruptive innovations, on the other hand, transform something that used to be complicated and expensive and make it accessible to a whole new mass audience.

One example of this is in the general field of higher education, and specifically that provided through the Harvard Business School. Along with the competitiveness in getting accepted, resulting caliber of the graduates and high cost of attending, Christensen noted how many HBS graduates wind up in Financial or Professional Services firms. With few few operating companies (such as GE or GM) recruiting at Harvard, these firms instead often focus on creating exceptional in-house educational systems. The result of this becomes a disruptive force in education along the same lines as online learning available outside of a corporate ed department.

One key point made about disruptive innovation is it's something that has to be incubated outside of a current sustaining business. The reason for this is disruptive innovation needs to be worked on at the same time current business continued and if the disruptive business done by the same people or even in the same space as the sustained business, the disruptive business will lose its differentiation and become like what's already been there. Closely related to this idea of separating disruptive from sustaining business is someone can't bring about disruption by simply changing the tasks done within a sustaining business.


Jobs to be done

One concept discussed that sounds to be a hallmark of Christensen's lecturing was that of jobs to be done. Two things I noted out of the How Will Your Measure Your Life? book were personal focused ideas with "the two fundamental jobs that children need to do are to feel successful and to have friends- every day" and the encouragement that people should “think about what jobs your spouse is looking to you to do.”

The basic idea of consumer or jobs to be done as I understood it was an argument against demographics as the driver of choices made and for the idea that people spend money or support causes to get specific jobs done. Companies shouldn't worry so much about the customer or technology used, but rather on the job that needs to get done. Then along with this identification of the job to be done comes perpetual efforts to get the job done better, with focus on both enhanced value of the job to be done and at lower cost.

As an example of disruption based on jobs to be done, Christensen cited Apple under Steve Jobs (who was known for not focusing on demographics or research into existing markets) as a company that introduced the iPod as a better way to fulfill the job of making music available and accessible easily.


Newspapers and their future

What got newspapers as an industry to its current difficult business state was discussed with Skok noting how many of the things that used to make up pieces of a newspaper got picked off by companies that focused exclusively on those areas, with products for sale going to sites like Craigslist and help wanted to a Monster or one of the other job sites.

What remains for newspapers is the same basic question that all companies in all industries face, what jobs do newspapers serve? Skok and Christensen discussed how the job fulfilled may be that of providing truth, may serve the job of helping someone unwind, may be to help start the day for people or may be something different. Either way, newspapers just like any other industry need to hone in on what job they serve and focus on fulfilling that.



Four elements to a business model

Christensen talked about every venture has a business model with the elements being the following: (1) Value proposition – there’s a job to be done and we’re trying to get people to hire our product to fill that job. (2) Resources – have to have these to deliver a value proposition. (3) Processes – as the people in a company do things in support of filling a job, processes emerge. (4) Profit formula – how do you get money to cover resources?



Changes that occur with disruption

Skok and Christensen noted that when a business becomes commoditized, new jobs to be done open up. It was said that as a general rule, when disruption occurs, the market booms and the interesting point made that if the top of the market drops off, the bottom will rise. Related to the field of journalism... if print dies, online writing fees should rise as there would be no more two-tier system with much higher compensation for print pieces.

Entrepreneurial Journalism Education / Difficulty in Sports Reporting Today

Expanding a bit on my post from yesterday about the Nieman Foundation (and Nieman Storyboard), I've come across some interesting Journalism education content lately including a webinar attended earlier this week.

As could be expected, the online session was the most engaging of the various sources of wisdom and class itself the Knight Center webinar to teach journalists how to start a successful entrepreneurial project taught by journalist and City University of New York J-School professor Jeremy Caplan.

I wouldn't say I was disappointed with my time spent, but it did leave me feeling it tough to get a tremendous amount from an online learning environment. There was the opportunity to post questions to a chat board that were then answered, but not much interactive learning (which isn't a terribly damning statement as you likely shouldn't expect much more from a two hour online session).

As to the content itself, material was posted to both Scribd and Google Docs and the high-level 7 Steps to a successful entrepreneurial Journalism startup are below...

1. Market research
2. Competitive analysis
3. Content & structure development
4. Building community
5. Cultivating sustainability
6. Leading on the path
7. Adjusting on the way

Important points to be sure, but my thoughts on the content were that it was pretty basic business school type stuff (but, again... maybe that's not being critical as it could be new learning for some in the session) and that the actual application of the steps seemed to be described as most frequently towards building hyper-local community news websites.

All in all, Journalism and the business around writing (which obviously could cast a pretty wide net) is definitely of interest and attending the session was a good step in learning more.

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On this subject of new opportunities in Journalism, the aforementioned Nieman Foundation had on it's Nieman Lab site recently a Justin Ellis piece How Time Inc. is preparing for a future in digital news with a j-school of its own. Interesting concept with the old media giant offering in-house education (heavily leaning towards digital new media topics) to employees.

Finally (and also related to the idea of changes in Journalism), excellent piece titled Death of the interview posted to ESPN earlier this week. Written by Tim Keown, it delves into how sports reporting (both by the press and athletes) has changed in today's environment of short attention, tight news cycles and need for the sensational. Very solid piece that's both entertaining and thought-provoking.

Penn State Crimes, Moral Failures & Journalism

While the typical path of this blog has been to link to and write about specific pieces or books that struck me as interesting, this post is about the Penn State scandal and it's mesmerizing (in mostly bad, but also some good) elements.

Details of the actual indictment and alleged crimes within are horrifying, but what's really captured attention has been the characters apart from the accused molester Jerry Sandusky, especially living legend and now ex Penn State coach Joe Paterno. In his case, you have someone who has done much good, but in this case (by all appearances) failed at the most important moment.

It's a fascinating subject, this concept of duality within an individual... his good deeds remain so, but one specific thing handled in entirely the wrong way impacted so much for the victims. Paterno is of course the most recognizable name involved that could have raised these allegations to police years ago, but there's also now ex Penn State President Graham Spanier and his head in the sand approach both years ago when Sandusky's crimes were raised and since the indictment came down over the weekend. If one can detach from the horrible nature of the crimes, it's a study in how people in power (now including the Penn State Board of Trustees that fired both Spanier and Paterno) react to events, create environments and set policy.

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So... the story itself has been riveting, but what's also held my attention over the past week has been the words from sports journalists reporting on the story. Some writers I respect a great deal have had fascinating observations to make and they've first appeared as real-time twitter musings and then as published columns.

There's been so many good pieces written already, but what many sports journalists and fans of sports journalism are waiting to eventually read is the announced earlier this year book from Joe Posnanski on Paterno and this season (which of course nobody could have envisioned turning out like it has). Posnanski thus far has written two different blog posts on the scandal, first Darkness and then Curiously Short Posts and I doubt he knows what his eventual book on Paterno will contain, but I have to imagine it's going to be an enthralling read. Just a guess of course, but it may well be heavy on the aforementioned duality of how a good person (which Paterno certainly seems to be) can do a bad thing (specifically, the limits to his actions taken when allegations were brought to him).

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Back to the subject of reporting and sports journalism... reading the columns and musings from good writers as this story has unfolded has gotten me thinking more about journalism and writing. To this end there's been three different pieces I've come across lately about the profession that all stand out as interesting.

First was an address given by Nate Silver to the Columbia School of Journalism. Silver founded the political blog FiveThirtyEight and in his speech imparts both his background and valuable career lessons for someone about the enter the field of journalism.

Second was a series of tweets from Tommy Tomlinson about an Ira Glass speaking event. I've also been at a live event by the This American Life creator and concur that Glass is a definite master storyteller.

Third was a tumblr site We Are Journalists I just came across today. Very interesting vignettes from people in the profession working to chase down and report well on stories... including things like the horrible crimes and subsequent inaction (and now action) out of Penn State.

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Updated on 11/14 with additional pieces that struck me on the child sex abuse scandal (not a "scandal, not a "sex scandal")...

- Good Riddance, Joe Paterno by Buzz Bissinger for The Daily Beast
- Omelas State University by author John Scalzi on his website
- The End of Paterno by Joe Posnanski on his Sports Illustrated blog

A horrific and amazing ongoing story.

Words, Writing & Wildmill Tilting...

I've written about it a few times here, but lots of great stuff on of the Chris Jones blog Son of a Bold Venture.

Content ranges from the tactical with writers answering questions on their craft to profound with missives on aspiring writers (or really aspiring anyones) tilting at windmills as they try to realize career goals.

The last two posts at Son of a Bold Venture trafficked more towards windmill tilting with "Lydia Could" about pursuing a Journalism degree in spite of the profession's career arc (much less arcy these days) and then "The Chattanooga Fix" about the small chance of success in writing a book measured against required time and effort.

Rather than leaning towards the doom and gloom, though, me thinks these posts both inspire based on what I take as the directive that... you try, you may or may not succeed, but you try. If you know what you want, great... you try to do that. If you don't know, but have an idea... you try around your idea and see where that takes you. If you have no idea, you scattershot about at different things... and hopefully find something of import to you. Either way... yep, you try.

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If these two most recent Son of a Bold Venture posts were about... duh, trying, there were a few prior to that on a different topic I feel strongly about, words. "A Parting Glass" featured a Charles P. Pierce written eulogy on fellow writer Clif Garboden. It was simply very cool reading about how someone loved what they did, and that thing being the writing of words on a page.

One other Jones missive from the past month that struck me around this topic, but it really wasn't his writing in the post that hit me, but who he wrote about... and then a reader posted blog comment.

"Opening Acts" begins with a reprinting of a J.R. Moehringer magazine piece, which I found of note as Moehringer's memoir The Tender Bar seems a close relative (if not ancestor) of what Son of a Bold Venture is all about. Both on writers, writing, words... all things I feel of import.

In relation to this specific post, though, what I keep thinking about is actually a comment from another reader of it.

Valerie said...
I have let the busy-ness of life crowd out the time and love I once had for reading. As a bureaucrat my own writing is dry and dull (but sometimes artful in its own way). Your posts are drawing me back. I must go out and buy something other than a newspaper to read right away. I need to find time again to slowly savor and enjoy someone else' art of telling a story.

I love it. While I enjoy the blog from Jones in part because it's about writers and writing as an act, it was great to see someone make mention of writing and words as a something to consume.

Whether I'm writing them or simply reading them from someone else... I love words organized on page in a meaningful way (note the heading of this blog) and it's cool to read other people say much the same thing.