All Posts Tagged With: "api summit"

I’ve been writing columns and articles and doing research about the Internet and news media for a long time. A few columns over the years have been particularly well received; some landed with a dull thud; some attracted their share of criticism. Like many of my fellow industry pundits who opine about digital media trends, I’ve been called everything from an insightful expert to an idiot by journalism’s practitioners and leaders.

Is this your CEO?

I don’t always find it easy to judge my own work, but I thought my last column for Editor & Publisher Online, “My ‘Crisis’ Advice to Newspaper Company CEOs: 11 Points to Ponder,” was decent. That self-analysis has been backed up by a steady stream of personal e-mails as well as blog posts commenting on the column. Lots of folks are telling me that the crisis plan for newspapers that I presented was a pretty good one, and covers much of what troubled publishers need to do in order to survive this double-whammy of economic meltdown and secular media transition. I’ve had numerous news professionals, executives, and academics tell me that they’ve forwarded the column to their newsroom management teams and journalism students.

Of course, the 11 central ideas I presented aren’t all mine; many have been espoused by other smart and visionary media experts over the years. Names like Jeff Jarvis, Mark Potts, Rob Curley, Vin Crosbie, Amy Gahran, Mindy McAdams, Jay Rosen, and many more have given newspaper executives lots of great guidance. Much of our advice comes down to one central theme: Digital is without one iota of doubt the future, so even though print revenues still far outweigh digital, the print side of newspapers must be removed from the central organizational position. Build and innovate for the future, don’t prop up the past. Only when you execute that step can other necessary steps be taken.

So if I’ve succeeded in nicely organizing some of the best advice for newspapers to get through this crisis period, I wonder why I’m hearing so little from newspaper companies’ CEOs? Now that things in the newspaper industry have gotten so awful (e.g., the latest), why aren’t CEOs joining the great and insightful conversations and discussions that are swirling on the social networks where media folks hang out? (My guess: Most of them don’t participate in social networks, and thus can’t really understand the modern digital media environment.)

Of the 50 newspaper executives who attended API’s “Crisis Summit” recently, the only one I’ve found openly discussing the elephant in the newsroom is Chuck Peters of Gazette Communications.

So WTF? Why aren’t newspaper CEOs talking and writing more? Are they in their corporate bunkers trying to figure out what’s next? Planning their retirements?

Newspaper CEOs: How about mixing it up online with the rest of the pundits, professors, journalists, consultants, experts, and interested parties who are sharing their passion and ideas for saving the newspaper industry?

Especially following the non-communication that came out of the API CEOs Crisis Summit, it feels to me as though the thoughtful solutions and innovative ideas that are emerging as the industry crisis gets close to critical aren’t getting us anywhere. Are newspaper CEOs even listening? Do only they have the ideas to save the industry? (Yeah, right.)

If you CEOs need help or advice or ideas, reach out to the names above, or me (I do some consulting); reach into the collective intelligence that interacts on social networks.

(Hey, if I’m wrong about this and there are some online conversations going on where those newspaper CEOs actually are engaging with those who want to save their businesses, let me know.)

Since the 50 newspaper company CEOs who attended the “Crisis Summit” hosted by the American Press Institute recently did not appear to have come out of that one-day session with The Answer to the industry’s woes, I took it upon myself to offer them some advice in my latest Editor & Publisher Online column: “My ‘Crisis’ Advice to Newspaper Company CEOs: 11 Points to Ponder.”

Yeah, it might have been more useful for them to ponder my suggestions before the summit. Oh well, there’s still time to save the newspaper industry. Right?

The latest from the API Crisis Summit of 50 newspaper company CEOs: not much.

As Fitz and Jen at Editor & Publisher report: a conference call about the summit’s outcome was scheduled for today, but was canceled at the last minute. Jen quoted an e-mail from Mark Mulholland, associate director at API:

“Because no reportable consensus was reached at last week’s ‘API Summit on Saving An Industry In Crisis,’ today’s press conference call originally scheduled for 11 a.m. EST has been canceled. The summit conference was a constructive dialog among senior industry leaders, serving as a catalyst for continuing conversation and efforts at reversing declining revenue and profit trends. As progress toward those goals is made, additional information will be provided. We apologize for the short notice of the press conference cancellation.”

Yes, it’s true, none of us outside that API conference room should have expected miracles to come out of a 7-hour meeting of the CEO minds aided by a couple of corporate turnaround gurus. On the other hand, what has come out following the session is disappointing, to say the least. It doesn’t exactly promote faith in the ability of top newspaper executives to lead the industry out of the mess it’s in.

I’d still like to hear from some of the API summit participants. Hey, CEOs, how about blogging of your experience that day and your perceptions? Blogging not your thing? I’d love to chat with you about the summit; here’s my office phone number: 303-543-7810. I’d be happy to take a break from my other work and blog about our conversation. Or e-mail me: steve@outing.us

OK, we have a little clarification about last Thursday’s behind-closed-doors American Press Institute Crisis Summit of 50 newspaper company CEOs. You’ll recall the brouhaha over an API staff summary of the 7-hour event, which concluded with, “Participants agreed to reconvene in six months, and to explore additional collaboration.” That got a bunch of people upset (including me): What?! You’ve been told your industry is in serious crisis and many of your companies are on the brink of bankruptcy, and you want to wait 6 months?

But here comes explanation from Donna Barrett of API (which she posted in the lengthy comment thread of my previous blog item):

“I am one of the CEO participants and an executive officer of API. The API report got it wrong. No newspaper executive in the room suggested that we wait six months to meet again. When someone said we should have a timely follow-up, the facilitator said, ‘Like in six months?’ and was quickly told by the participants that it needed to be much sooner than that. There are other problems with the report. It is a poor reflection of the event, which I believe was over-hyped from the beginning. The forum was a constructive dialog between newspaper executives, period. This is all anyone should have realistically expected to accomplish in seven hours.”

Thanks for the clarification and insight, Donna. (This does demonstrate the dangers of closed-door meetings, where people start to form opinions based on limited information of what went on.)

After 50 newspaper company CEOs met behind closed doors at the American Press Institute on Thursday for their “Crisis Summit,” I was tempted to comment, but wanted to wait to see what would come out of the meeting. Would some participants write what transpired that day? The API staff did publish this summary, but it’s pretty thin on detail. There was this at the end, under the heading “Next”:

“Participants agreed to reconvene in six months, and to explore additional collaboration. Some spoke of joint investment in research and development of both technologies and products, others of more formal means of sharing information.”

Well, I wasn’t the only person taken aback by that statement. On his News After Newspapers blog, Martin Langeveld, who recently retired after a long career in newspaper publishing, wrote what I too was thinking in “Busted Flat In Reston“:

“Six months? What are they thinking? They’ve laid off more than 10,000 people in the last six months — what will be left six months from now? They need to launch a Manhattan project to blow up their industry and start over. Now, not six months from now.”

Langeveld is right. The industry’s leaders keep putting off drastic change and hoping that incremental change will do the job. It won’t reset the trajectory to upward and it hasn’t so far.

The API staff reports that turnaround specialist James Shein, who addressed the 50 CEOs and who had researched the basic financials of the public companies represented at the summit, “concluded that as a whole the industry is at or approaching full-blown crisis stage, though individual companies are in various phases on the continuum. And he is pessimistic about their ability to halt their fall without outside help.”

I’m still eager to hear from some of the API summit’s participants (full list was published by E&P); perhaps there’s more to come out of Thursday’s meeting that’s not so discouraging. But from what we know so far, this still looks like an industry in denial about how much it must change, with many leaders whose heads are still high on Shein’s crisis curve (below) while their enterprises are much further down.

So, 50 newspaper CEOs, is there more to the story of what went on behind those closed doors? Because from outside, it’s not looking promising that you’re going to lead a reversal to the slide down that nasty-looking graph. If all that was accomplished at the Crisis Summit was to get everyone to accept that the problem really is big and agree to tackle the how in 6 months, that’s clearly not enough.