I recently heard a newspaper chief editor say something quite shocking. I attended a meeting arranged by the Norwegian consortium New Media Network where the chief editor of the second biggest national tabloid in Norway, Dagbladet, was to give a speech. And believe it or not, chief editor of Dagbladet, Anne Aasheim, said: “I have been a media executive for 20 years now and I must say; it’s more fun today than ever before!”

More fun today than ever before?  Everybody at the meeting knew that Dagbladet has suffered massive losses in recent years – much more than their competitor VG, which is the flagship of Schibsted, one of Europe’s most successful and innovative newspaper publishers, according to The New York Times. Dagbladet is probably the newspaper that has suffered the most in the Norwegian newspaper market in recent years. What could possibly be fun about that? Was Anne Aasheim joking?

Anne Aasheim wasn’t joking. She soon explained what she meant: “When the crisis becomes big enough you no longer just mend things. Your tear everything apart and then you re-construct it. We are now searching for the power to do disruptive innovation. It’s going to be a cut-throat competition to have the greatest power of innovation.”

Then she smiled before exclaiming: “And we are gonna win that competition!”

I thought this was an interesting argument – especially since I have conducted much research in the Dagbladet newsroom during the last four years. Dagbladet is one of those newspapers that always wants to be the first mover. When new technology comes around Dagbladet jumps on it. Dagbladet was the first Norwegian newspaper to launch an online edition, it implemented bloging as the first online newspaper in Scandinavia, etc, etc. Dagbladet’s position in the shadow of the bigger and more successful newspaper VG has forced it to push for innovative initiatives.

The key question for Dagbladet and any other firm that push for successful innovations, is of course: How do you know if a innovative initiative will be a success? I shall not claim that I have the answer to that question (if I did, I would probably be very rich man). However, I have done some research in order to pinpoint the factors that influence processes of innovation in newsrooms. In an article in the current issue of the journal Journalism Studies I argue that there are five factors that affect whether an innovation is diffused successfully or not in an online newsroom:

1. Newsroom autonomy: are innovative projects initiated and implemented within an autonomous newsroom and with relative autonomy within the online newsroom? (If not, the project is less likely to succeed)
2. Newsroom work culture: does the online newsroom reproduce editorial gatekeeping or are alternative work cultures explored? (reproduction of “old media” work cultures is likely to prevent innovative initiatives from being successful)
3. The role of management: is newsroom management able to secure stable routines for innovation?
4. The relevance of new technology: is new technology perceived as relevant, i.e. efficient and useful? (New technology can be costly and time consuming to utilize)
5. Innovative individuals: is innovation implemented and understood as part of the practice of journalism?

These factors derive from an ethnographic case study of a process of innovation in dagbladet.no – the online edition of Dagbladet. The findings of this case study are compared to all other research on innovations (or lack of innovations) in online newspapers. This body of research consist of – among many other studies – the research done by Pablo Boczkowsi in his book Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers; David Domingo’ Ph.D-thesis Inventing online journalism: Development of the Internet as a news medium in four Catalan newsrooms (which can be downloaded here); Lucy Küng’s When Innovation Fails to Disrupt. A Multi-lens Investigation of Succesfull Incumbment Respons to Technological Disconuity: The Launch of BBC News Online; and Jody Brannon’s quite old, but still very interesting Ph.D.-thesis Maximizing the medium: assessing impediments to performing multimedia journalism at three news web sites (parts of it available on here website).

One last point: Innovation and crisis tend to go hand in hand. Businesses, organisations and nation states alike have always pushed for innovations in times of crisis. There are two reasons for this assumed causal link between recession and innovation, according to an article by Geroski and Walters published in The Economic Journal. First, in times of recession the value of existing rents usually falls, thus making it more attractive for firms to implement new products and processes that hopefully will yield higher returns. Second, to invest in innovations requires a firm to divert resources from activity/production to product development. Such a diversion of resources is more likely to be feasible when the current production is less profitable, e.g. in times of recession.

No wonder why the chief editor of Dagbladet, Anne Aasheim, was so enthusiastic about the opportunities for disruptive innovation…

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What could possibly be common between a detailed account of America’s historic role in Middle East peace and a story about urban acrobats leaping across buildings in London and Beirut? Perhaps, the way in which you choose to tell them.

Designed to look and read like a magazine, complete with the swishing sound that accompanies each turn of a fascinating page, the innovative young site Flyp media, which is being hailed as a “future media lab,” is attempting to straddle the boundaries between the old and the new, between print and celluloid, and between Web creation and journalism.

Videos, podcasts and interactive images are embedded on pages that could well be bound and dropped into your mailbox. It is as much the art of story telling as the story itself. “Flyp the magazine is really a proof-of-concept experiment in terms of multimedia story telling. It is not a product that we’re aimed at as much as the message and the form,” says Editor in Chief Jim Gaines.

Covering topics as wide-ranging as science, business, politics, the economy, and every day life, Flyp’s connecting thread is this very commitment to mixed-media reporting. The well-crafted semblance to print (what Gaines calls an “architectural vestige that is comforting in this transition period”) with its margins, page numbers and folio lines might seem excessive until you factor in the number of people that stay away from the Amazon Kindle because it doesn’t have the look and feel of paper.

What happens at Flyp is true convergence of media. “We start with everybody in the room – the videographers, the animators, the designers, the audio person, the editor, and the reporter and try to figure out what is the best combination of media to tell that particular story,” says Gaines. “The story is created in all media at once.”

Reason why a piece detailing the Afghan conflict doesn’t rely merely on text to illustrate Pakistan’s vital role in the forgotten war; the accompanying videos convey opinions from public officials and experts, and vivid pictures and infographics reinforce the facts. It is this same propensity to interactive technology that prompts Bernie Madoff to wink from the cover page of an in-depth article elucidating on his elaborate Ponzi scheme.

Could excessive use of multimedia, however, take away from the significance of the message it tries to deliver? Not when you can keep the medium and the message sufficiently discrete, says Gaines. “What’s good about multimedia is that we can allow people to do either one – we can run the material in layers as we did with the Madoff story.” Articles are available in text-only formats or as audio podcasts for as much the reader’s convenience as for Google’s ability to track them. Flyp may be slightly ahead of its time as search engines still have trouble keeping up with flash animation and rich media technology.

The upside of this same technology, of course, is reader interactivity. Interactivity at Flyp is more than a comments thread and a survey poll. Clickable tables, charts and graphics allow active interplay with the user, and quizzes and games supplement stories to keep the reader absorbed. Complex topics such as bioterrorism and astronomy are creatively explained through the use of schematics and animation. Little wonder then that the Flyp team insists on calling its creations “experiences,” as opposed to mere stories.

Few things do more justice to new media technology than personal narratives and citizen accounts, and Flyp taps into these formats well. Iraqi students talk about their experiences at US universities and laid-off Americans offer innovative ideas to network and market oneself in today’s economy, as you “leaf through pages” of the accompanying articles.

“Telling stories through the lens of a fellow human being’s life is always the best way to get something across,” says Gaines, who spent many years telling human-interest stories in traditional journalism, as former editor of Time, Life and People magazines. “When you can see someone talking about their pain or their experience or their joy or their sorrow, it makes video and audio so compelling as a method of storytelling.”

Gaines believes that magazines with healthy audiences and good advertising franchises need only to make a revolutionary transition in the method of telling a story. Many traditional organizations are not thinking creatively enough to get themselves out of trouble. “When you’re in the middle of a car accident and you see the crash coming, you can’t think of anything else, and I think there’s a metaphor there for where print finds itself at the moment,” he says.

Talking of the crisis, what about new media monetization? Despite partnerships with Fortune.com and Warner Music, Flyp Media hasn’t yet tried to monetize content, like hundreds of innovative new startups out there.

Gaines’ answer to that is not very different from his solution to creative news delivery: multimedia technology. It is in the best interest of advertisers to create rich media advertisements that audiences really want to engage with, he says. This would have another useful consequence: creating a new demand equation because there is only so much rich media that the traffic can bear. This would create less ad space, and hence, more revenue for target sites.

It is certainly tempting to embrace this as the new business model for journalism. But do time-starved readers who refuse to scroll through unforgiving columns of long text, and often satisfy themselves with summaries from their RSS feeds, be willing to watch a 3-minute commercial in addition to the video clip that was an integral part of the news story?

Just how limitless is this thirst for new media consumption? That is what remains to be answered, and Flyp Media comes as close to posing the question as anyone else.

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Try new stuff! If it doesn’t work, just stop doing it. Then move on and try something else.

That’s what Mackenzie Warren, director of content at Gannett Digital (that’s the digital division of what’s currently the USA’s largest media company), advised a group of Norwegian media executives at the Norwegian Institute of Journalism this week.

Now, let me first point out that Mackenzie Warren has been a journalist since the age of 14. He’s been a photographer, reporter, online editor, managing editor… just about anything you can be in a newsroom. Except that at Gannett, and at Fort Myers News-Press, where he worked before heading up the digital content section at Gannett, they no longer call it a newsroom.

“We’ve done away with the word “newsroom”. There’s no news in a newsroom (desk reporters are often the last to hear of a story). Plus, it’s not news we do – it’s aquiring, processing and distributing information”, he said.

Now, the Gannett publications have more of a control centre where section editors (sports, news etc., not print, online or TV) monitor the competition and also what the readers and viewers are responding to at any time.

“We monitor what people actually read or use – which isn’t always what journalists consider the most newsworthy story. Being a journalist is about collecting information and connecting, packaging and distributing it,” Warren said.

Mackenzie Warren is known to some as “Mr MoJo”. At the News-Press, they have equipped their reporters with cameras (both for stills and video), laptops and mobile phones, and expect them to spend most of their time in the field. They write, shoot, and publish from anywhere, anytime.

“At first, there was a lot of reluctance toward learning new technical equipment. But, once given the proper training, they find being a MoJo both fun and rewarding. It’s the beeing a journalist part that’s difficult, the technical stuff is easy. I’d rather reeducate trained journalists than trying to teach a techie to report,” said Warren.

This MoJo – mobile journalist – is now in work throughout Gannett’s publications. This is Mackenzie Warren’s approach to development: Try it, refine it, then spread it to other’s. Then move on and develop something new. And if it doesn’t work, just stop doing it.

“We keep trying and improving and developing all the time. We don’t have to be perfect, we just need to start somewhere and get better from there.”

Warren thinks the curator-journalist is someone we’ll meet more often in the year to come.

“Everybody’s a publisher and participant now. The journalist may not have to be the storyteller, but the story manager. We need to create the space where people feel secure about coming to tell their part of stories – curating the audience. The curator-journalist may use language like “we” and “I” and “us”, language you wouldn’t normally do in traditional journalism. But he or she manages a community and relates to the members of that communities as a person.”

One example is The Journal News in the Lower Hudson Valley, New York. Their attention to fans of the New York Yankees baseball team includes live web-tv sessions with the specialist reporter, discussions via CoverItLive and more. Another example, perhaps the most exciting one right now, is the USA Today Cruise Log. The cruise log has seen a traffic increase of 1,000 percent in the past year, it’s immensely popular.

Gannett is also looking to find new business models. They create micro-site to target very specific audiences which are popular with advertisers. In the upcoming year, they believe their knowledge of their audience (age, gender, interests, how they behave online and which pages or sites they see) will be incredibly attractive to advertisers.

They don’t know yet if this will be a success. But Warren’s final piece of advice? TRY STUFF.

Three rules for experimentation:
1. You have to give it a try
2. Failure is a part of success
3. You cant really break anything

For a full transcript of Mackenzie Warren’s speech, see the CoverItLive version. The transcript is in English, but there are some tweets in Norwegian there as well.

Norwegian MoJo Frank Barth-Nilsen has written a blog post on Warren’s speech as well.

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German regional publisher WAZ just launched its new flagship website, Der Westen. New features include geotagging, blogs and keyword filtering, monitored from a futuristic-looking newsroom. Martin Stabe has the details.

The concept, writes Der Spiegel, is to let users choose the centre of their world, their perspective on news. Der Westen then provides content around it.

The FAZ today has an interview of blogger-turned-editor-in-chief Katharina Borchert. Numerous online ventures have been playing on regional papers’ turf, from local advertisers flocking to AdSense to local radios breaking news more rapidly, she says. To compete, paper brands must regain their offline roles as community leaders by enhancing the news hole with social features, Facebook-style.

Concerning marketing, the size of web audiences requires looking beyond the traditional paper reader. WAZ offline subscribers currently account for half its websites visitors. They aim at bringing this figure to 10%.

As Bas Timmers wrote, such a shift in scope will come at the expense of traditional brand names. Der Westen already serves as an online window for five dailies.

Economies of scale, in terms of brand familiarity for users and editors, offer an incentive to develop a single frame covering several segments, be they geographic or demographic. The extent of content personalisation within such sites then allow for finer targeting.

In Quebec, regional leader Quebecor aggregated its brand under the single Canoë portal in the late 1990s. According to Jeff Mignon, it’s a financial success story. In France, regional giant Ouest-France built a template for all its papers, maville.com. It just signed a deal with about every other regional publisher to blanket France with maville websites. Time Warner went cross-media in brand-mixing with its portal CNN Money in early 2006.

However, such efforts hardly put traditional publishers back in the Bundesliga of web2.0. Amid the flow of blogopraise, Robert Basic only offers Der Westen the ‘Prize of conservative innovation’. The site lacks a Craigslist-style marketplace, a Twitter feed and state-of-the-art photo features, he says.

Publishers surely are making steps in the right direction with such moves. But the giant leap they need to take to survive online has yet to arrive.

This article was written by Nicolas Kayser-Bril, one of the Online Journalism Blog’s Virtual Interns

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