It was an odd show. Definitely worth it.

I’ve been developing websites for newspaper companies for nearly ten years now and I think when Dave mentions “speaking the same language” he is touching on a very big point.

I mentioned to Jay at the recent NewBiz conference that I’ve hit “reboot” several times over the years and failed. The reason was that I was trying to reboot the organization, not necessarily the news.

Despite many individuals making progress toward grasping the revolutionary changes that are happening, many organizations still retain a culture that, while admirable in some sense, mixes about as well as oil and water with what we think needs to happen to reshape the news business.

Few in my company would not agree that Twitter is important. But few would understand me when I try to explain that it is exploding the distribution layer, once controlled by press ownership, into a million atoms.

The value for a news organization now is reassembling those atoms in a coherent way, or better yet, finding where in the stream to inject their atoms. The position of a news organization, a reporter, or any human in the value chain of information distribution, has changed from a vertical position to a horizontal one.

It’s a DNA level change and my sense tells me when someone has not made the change, whether or not they are excited about Twitter.

I can’t explain it. It’s like the people just sensing something was wrong with others in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

And I still sense it widely in traditional news organization employees. Much progress to be made there.

The greater danger we are seeing is that once one is enlightened, they decide they must leave the traditional organization, because innovation is happening too slow. We saw a few examples of that this week.

That said, I’ve also seen a few examples where some innovative folks are getting hired by traditional organizations, like the applications group at Chicago Trib.

Time will tell if this is the beginning of a DNA transformation that will ultimately save these orgs, or just a few lucky bright spots that fail to ignite the flame.

“Jeff said he really didn’t like cell phones.”

Apologies for calling you “Jeff” in my first post. I can’t imagine why. (No snark intended- I really can’t imagine why)

JustFYI

Sorry if i misunderstood, but you called it an interview:

“This RBTN is more or less an interview with Jennifer Preston, the (relatively) new social media editor of the New York Times.”

Best,
Just FYI

To Jacob — we’ve talked about this many times on previous shows. I’m sure we’ll talk about it in subsequent shows.

Criticism of your inexplicably bizarre interviewing technique does not equal discrediting you. It does say something about your sincerity to seek open discussion and debate.

I said it better here…

“Toward the end I came right out and asked the question I’ve been wanting to ask, and still want to ask — why don’t big news organizations open the floodgates and let the sources talk directly to the people who read their publications. At least that’s what I was trying to ask. Not sure we even speak enough of the same language for that question to make sense.”

If you’ve been listening to the series you know that’s one of the recurring themes