Management guru Peter Drucker once said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” It became a mantra at Ford and is said to be still on the wall of its management war room. I take it to mean that no matter how cunning your plan, it’ll fail if the work culture isn’t receptive to it. 

In the publishing and media industry context, I quite like an extrapolation of the Drucker line to “culture eats strategy for breakfast and transformation for lunch.” It sometimes feels like our industry has been in a state of transformation for decades, and it can be exhausting. But don’t expect the pace to slow down or the disruption to lessen. 

Newsroom culture

That was the clear sense from the third and final module of the launch Newsroom Initiative master class this week: Impact and Influence. It set the tone for what I suspect will be a strong thread through the initiative this year: culture in the newsroom, especially ways to get the newsroom to align with but also influence overall corporate strategy.

The focus on readers and reader revenue is the key to unlocking that power.

David Walmsley, editor-in-chief of The Globe and Mail in Toronto, talked about tapping in to what motivates journalists and giving them great tools and data against which to measure themselves. Espen Egil Hansen, founder of consultancy Fyrr and a leader in Scandinavian publishing, said culture had to come first before strategy could succeed. And Maribel Perez Wadsworth, president of news at Gannett, showed how results drove change. 

“There is no greater mover of culture overall than seeing results … driving the business and connecting those dots from the work you are doing in the newsroom. This very important work that we do in journalism and how specifically it is helping to drive the business,” Maribel said in her presentation that highlighted achievements at the Detroit Free Press.

I always believed culture would be a critical part of the Newsroom Initiative, but maybe I underestimated how it would come up time and again in the three master class sessions. We will take this on board in planning the rest of the Newsroom Initiative since entire degree courses focus on culture. We want to find a formula that works for you.

Please send me your ideas on what you think works and what you need: peter.bale@inma.org.

Ukraine crisis poses challenges to media

In each module of the Newsroom Initiative launch master class, we highlighted different aspects of the Ukraine crisis and its impact on media and journalists. 

At least five journalists have been killed, several others kidnapped, in this first month of the invasion, reminding us all of the risks of reporting and the responsibilities newsroom leaders have to their people in the field, as well as staff at home dealing with the war remotely. 

In the last module — the culture section titled Impact and Influence — all speakers honoured those journalists killed. At that point the Committee to Protect Journalists had logged four deaths. It has now risen to five with the death of Russian journalist Oksana Baulina in Kyiv.

Baulina worked for several publications, including CodaStory.com, whose co-founder Natalia Antelava spoke in the second module about the risks of reporting from Ukraine. Here is a special report Baulina did on how Russia is wiping away the history of the Gulag. 

Publishers outside as well as inside Ukraine and Russia have worked to keep the flow of accurate information going and to give subscribers and new readers alike access:

•  The INMA Ideas Blog reported on Nobel Peace Prize co-winner Dmitry Muratov managing to keep Novaya Gazeta publishing against great odds.
• INMA blogger Camilla Brække, head of video innovations at VG in Norway, wrote about how the media company is mapping verified video from Ukraine.
• Fact-checkers from 70 countries have formed ukrainefacts.org to collaborate on getting accurate information out from the fog of disinformation, the Reuters Institute reported.
• The Atlantic reported on how the BBC, The New York Times, and other outlets are using other platforms and methods to get around Russian limits on access to western reporting.
• Rob Mahoney from the CPJ reported at Nieman that the Ukraine conflict was proving particularly dangerous for reporters, particularly those new to war.

In the Newsroom Initiative blog, I posted a set of links related to Ukraine that may be of use to reporters and newsroom leaders. Please tell me what’s missing: peter.bale@inma.org.

Newsroom leaders on safety and mental health 

We closed the third module of the master class with discussion led by news safety and newsroom mental health leader Hannah Storm, co-founder of the Headlines Network. All speakers stressed the importance of mental health in the office from fatigue to harassment and the consequences of handling horrific material every day, and more.

This is clearly a critical set of issues for managers, and we will do more on it. 

Resources you may find useful in this area include:

• A recent UNESCO paper led by journalist-turned-academic Dr Julie Posetti on the risks women journalists in particular face from online harassment and violence.
• The Global Investigative Journalism Network has an excellent set of tips and resources on all aspects of journalistic safety from psychological to cyber to field risks.
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a good guide on electronic self-defence. 

Do let me know what else needs to be here and I’ll post it in the Newsroom Initiative blog.

Recommended reading

• A new Global Conflict Monitor, sponsored by the International Center for Journalists, tracks the Ukraine invasion with a verified list of social media and other accounts.
• All speakers in my Putting Newsrooms into the News Business Master Class talked about the critical importance of diversity in newsrooms — from reflecting populations on a racial basis, to gender, and disability. A new report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism suggests there’s a long way to go on race. 
• The Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project released a huge new collaborative report to track the assets of Russian oligarchs.

Recommended follows 

• Jane Lytvynenko @janelytv is a Canadian journalist of Ukrainian descent with a specialty in disinformation and runs the Technology and Social Change unit at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard.
• Yoni Applebaum @yapplebaum is the deputy editor at The Atlantic and often tweets insightful journalism stories, particularly about international affairs.

Bottom line 

The New York Times was the fastest-growing online news brand in the United Kingdom in February, according to the Press Gazette, more than tripling its audience, while the BBC grew rapidly over the same period.

Talk back

Tell me what you want to read and what you like or don’t like in this newsletter, please. Email: peter.bale@inma.org.

About this newsletter

Today’s newsletter is written by Peter Bale, based in New Zealand and the U.K. and lead for the INMA Newsletter Initiative. Peter will share research, case studies, and thought leadership on the topic of global newsrooms.

This newsletter is a public face of the Newsroom Initiative by INMA, outlined here. E-mail Peter at peter.bale@inma.org or newsroom@inma.org with thoughts, suggestions, and questions.

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