Writing Hurts

A couple of weeks ago, Annette Schulte posted something about a Cedar Rapids video blogger who uses his cellphone camera. The salient point was that media companies don’t need fancy equipment to get into the digital age. In fact, they don’t needs anything they don’t already have.

She’s dead on. You’ll never catch me argue for fewer toys for the newsroom, but we need to start doing the things we’d like to, however we can, and prove that it’s worthwhile before starting to throw money at it. The name of the game is audience building, and that means trying new things, particularly low-risk things, to try and capture new eyes. If it’s more successful, we can develop it.

Or maybe we don’t need to. At my last paper, we started shooting video and bought a Canon GL2 and started to shoot video. We had a nice set of wireless mics, a decent shotgun mic, a mini news-gathering setup. Very high-quality video.

No one used it unless I made them. It was too much.

Then we bought the Pure Digital Flip for $100. This little camera is stupidly simple to use. It has a big red button on the back, and that’s it. I call it reporter proof. It also produces better video and sound than a camera that cheap has a right to. Reporters loved to take it out, and our use of video went way up.

People in the media talk about “just good enough,” but it’s also really misunderstood. That doesn’t mean making crappy content. It means not getting hung up in perfecting things and actually getting content out the door. If that means a cellphone camera or the Flip Video, what’s wrong with that?

OK, I was being cranky in my last post. There are a lot of things that newspapers are doing to survive. I just worry that we haven’t absorbed the lessons of how to deal with disruptive change from other industries.

Take Polaroid and Kodak. Fifteen years ago, those were the names you thought of when you thought of photography. They both had histories of innovation and were well-positioned to corner the digital market. And Kodak did try early on, producing one of the first digital SLRs used by newspapers. But they were committed to film, and even when thinking about digital, they had a film mindset. Now they’re cutting back on film production and have a line of (mostly) excreable consumer cameras.

Polaroid thought that their photos were superior to digital ones. And they were, for a while. But sensors got better and better and cheaper and cheaper. And gradually, almost no one except artists and the elderly were using Polaroid cameras. The company didn’t plan for such a market shift. And I don’t know that anyone can.

Those kinds of changes are exactly what newspapers are facing today. And the innovation programs that are under way really are a good start. But newspaper companies need to stop thinking like newspaper companies. Easier said than done, for sure, but look where thinking the same way got Kodak and Polaroid.

I had an editor who once asked if we were going to do the same thing differently or something really different. We’ve tried doing the same thing differently. Now it’s time to try something different.