Obama and newsroom leadership
Good post from Innovation in College Media: Can newspapers learn anything from the Obama campaign? Number one suggestion: Excel at leadership:
Excel at leadership: Whatever you think of his politics, Obama led his campaign with poise and calm. While John McCain “suspended” his campaign to deal with the financial crisis, Obama maintained a calm head and famously said “a president should be able to do two things at one time.” Obama’s top advisers, too, kept cool heads – Axelrod, Plouffe, Gibbs – were cool heads in the midst of a tempestuous campaign.
Newspaper leadership doesn’t seem too calm right now. They chase quarterly profit margins by laying off hundreds of workers, producing short-term gains with long-term harmful consequences for their products. In this way, their actions are more in line with the McCain campaign’s “news cycle” approach to the election.
Bryan is commenting on leadership at the institutional level. But leadership at the personal level is just as important. The idea that good reporters must make good editors (and by extension good managers) has created a generation of too often toxic leaders, who are ill-equipped to exercise steady leadership, particularly on a personal level. The notion was that good journalism could substitute for good management. Well these days, that doesn’t cut it: Newsrooms need both.
Obama won not because he reinvigorated our trust in the political system, but he spoke to individuals’ concerns and built trust that he’d personally address those concerns to the best of his ability. How many of us have experienced that type of leadership in the newsroom? Yet many newsrooms are simply changing around seats under the name of “reorganization” instead of identifying who the truly managers are and putting them at the center of innovation in the newsroom. That approach is only going to deepen the whole.