Everybody has blind spots, handicaps in the way we see and perceive the world. I know people who are smart and knowledgeable and everything who will never bridge the gap between an email message and TCP/IP. Whether it’s just too foreign a concept or that they have a sort of mental block halting understanding modern technology, it’s always going to be a black box. One they can usually use without incident, but a black box nonetheless.
The good thing is that these folks probably will not be asked to take email into the future any time soon. But executive editor or publisher might.
Robert Hernandez imagines a dialogue with one of the above and he gets to a place think everyone who has evangelized new media will recognize, the napkin drawing, excited babbling, we-could stage.
But then I’d stop… perhaps mid-sentence… put my pen down… look the person in the eye and say:
Look, the biggest obstacle in journalism right now isn’t whether people trust “us” or not. It’s not even the revenue crisis we are all facing and feeling every day.
The biggest obstacle is… you.
Preach it!
Seriously, the twin foolishnesses of trying to get top management’s heads wrapped around new media and technology that, frankly, is way below their pay grade and of said top management trying to be visionary about concepts they don’t grasp have got to be more dragging on journalism than the ad revenue crisis has been.
This isn’t to say top management doesn’t have a vital, critical role to play, but trying to be the guy who saw into the future and purchased X or convinced the newsroom to produce Y isn’t it. It’s far more likely the top boss is going to lock in the newsroom to a CMS that is clunky as hell (but has a damned good salesman) or that demand staff all sign up for and constantly monitor an Orkut account because Google just bought it. Nor is it to say that top managers should be hands-off all the time. But listening to your staff more than salesmen and pundits, and trusting them to give you the best advice they can in areas outside your expertise, is a far safer bet.
