Insomniactive

This from Adam Reilly’s blog:

Future-of-media bigwig Jeff Jarvis earned some jeers when he suggested that the entire city of Philadelphia could be covered by a 35-person newsroom, rather than the 300-plus one currently in place at the Philadelphia Inquirer. In fact, though — and despite the unpleasant human costs — there’s a strong case to be made for cuts that seem draconian, but that actually manage to put papers in the black.

I recently asked Jay Rosen, Jarvis’s future-of-media peer and a professor of journalism at New York University, what he’d do if given the reins of a hypothetical midsize daily. “I’d be very tempted to cut immediately to a sustainable level and build from there,” he answered. “Then what you do is, you hire new people every time you find new revenue, and you employ every method you can think of to do that. The debilitating thing is not knowing how far the cuts are going to go.”

Having been in the business I’m in for as long as I have been–18 dog years–I find myself channeling what I have heard wise board members say in meetings gone by.  In hard times, three of the smartest are these, and rhyme nicely with Jay Rosen’s prescription for struggling dailies  Darn good business advice coming from a journalism prof:

• Have a “parking lot plan.”  Even if you never implement, do the thought experiment of calling everyone–from the CEO down to the receptionist–out into the parking lot.   This is a thought experiment after all, so inclement weather is no excuse for not doing this.  Let them back in the building one by one, in order of their importance to the enterprise.  Generally, a lot more wind up still standing outside when the sun goes down than you might have expected.
• Responding to good news is a whole lot more fun than reacting to bad.  Cut as if you will get one more batch of really bad news before you hear anything good.  Then you are responding to opportunities, which is great for morale.  Death by a thousand cuts is terrible for morale, because it undermines the credibility of leadership.  “If you didn’t know how bad it was going to get last time, why should we believe you this time?”
• Have One Really Bad Meeting.  It beats lots of kinda shitty meetings.  Corollary to #2 above.