How old processes blind good people

Jay Rosen is widely known in journalism circles as a sage and opinionated voice for digital-first approaches to news coverage. As I've written previously, Rosen has a blind spot to the business realities of making news pay for itself but he's sharp in many other ways. 

And on a recent appearance on the PBS "Mediatwits" podcast, I thought Rosen raised a very important point about how newspaper production environments blind smart people to the realities of the real world. 

When host Mark Glaser asked what he saw as the "biggest challenge for newsrooms thinking digital first vs. print," Rosen tied the issue to traditional production flow, which is often slow and focused on being perfect rather than being relevant:

"They haven't had to think as hard about serving the user because they could serve the production routine. So the fact you had a certain amount of space enabled you to imagine your job as filling that space and after awhile you become good at that and you call that journalism or you call that news.

"Now when those templates are gone and those slots don't mean as much any more I think people have to go back and kind of like rediscover what serving people with news and information and journalism is really about. And the print era as well as the broadcast era allowed them in a subtle way to kinda distance themselves from the users. So I see that as the biggest challenge. In a way print as well as broadcast production routines were an intellectual crutch that isn't there any more."

Bingo. The momentum of feeding the beast is hard to repel, and Rosen notes that the challenges facing a lot of newsrooms are tied to decisions made years ago. Those aren't insurmountable challenges and good journalists usually are open to new things, but the truth is habits and routines are often harder to change than hearts and minds.