07newsroom

What A Newsroom Creates

Paul Maidment and Bill Baldwin are the new co-editors of Forbes -- one flag, one newsroom, one mission. The newsroom integrates all the journalists from on and offline. Until this week, there were separate print and digital newsrooms, each fully staffed and each with a separate (but overlapping) mandate. Now, everyone is part of the same group and has the same goal. From the editors' mission statement:

What we produce every day is not primarily a physical product, a magazine or a web site, but our intellectual property--Forbes journalism. It is numerate, researched, often contrarian and rigorously analytical. Journalism that delivers the highest value to our readers by making them richer and smarter.

Selling Change In A Newsroom

There can't be many people left in newsrooms who still resist change, but newsroom leaders still seem to be grasping for the right words to describe the magnitude of the changes remaking the media landscape.

Barack Obama took a shot at it on Thursday. Yes, he was talking about the economy, not about the media revolution, but Obama's clarion call for change is worth repeating in newsrooms. It might help more journalists recognize just how much they will have to change their approach to their jobs.

Obama: "There have been some years that simply rolled into the next without much notice or fanfare. Then there are the years that come along once in a generation - the kind that mark a clean break from a troubled past, and set a new course."

If 2008 wasn't that kind of year in your newsroom, 2009 will be.