Last Updated: March 27, 2000
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Innovations, like trains, need all aboard
If everyone in your organization doesn’t understand
the importance of a big change, then they are the weak link in undoing
that change
By Don Fry
When you introduce something new into a newspaper, you have to include
the whole staff. Otherwise, old habits and old engines will pull you right
back into the past.
In a workshop on story form for a Canadian daily, I convinced a roomful
of reporters to start writing endings on their pieces, something the paper
had never done.
One cynic objected, “The copy desk will just whack them off, so why
should we bother?” Whereupon the copy chief, a huge florid Scot, leapt
to his feet and shouted, “The copy desk does NOT chop off endings, because
none of you has ever sent us an ending to chop off!” When the room subsided
a bit, he added, “Send us one, and we’ll treat it with loving care.”
One reporter called his bluff by submitting his first ending ever, and
the copy editors carefully rewrote the two paragraphs above it to create
a stunning close. The next day, the story appeared with the last three
paragraphs deleted. Someone “had cut it on the stone.”
We have met the enemy
This teamwork problem does not always involve “someone,” nameless strangers
mindlessly chopping out all the new goodies in the murk of production.
Sometimes, the innovators themselves fall off the team without realizing
it.
I invented some new business-story forms for a chain of city weeklies.
We held two national meetings for their editors to introduce the new structures
and let them try them out. They reacted positively, and took the new tools
home.
At a follow-up regional meeting, the same editors asked why so few stories
in these new forms actually appeared in their papers. In a group epiphany,
they figured out that their reporters were indeed writing in the new forms,
but they themselves, working on deadline autopilot, were editing them back
into inverted pyramids.
(The inverted pyramid, in case you missed my recent column on the subject,
is the worst form ever invented by the human race for explaining anything
to another person in words.)
The future prevents the future
Sometimes, innovations get clobbered by other innovations, when we fail
to keep our efforts coordinated.
I convinced a group of business weeklies to use lots of information
boxes with their stories to keep data, resumes, chronologies, compared
numbers, etc. from clogging up the main-body paragraphs. The reporters
liked the idea, especially the practice of letting them, rather than the
editing desk, break out the blocks. Yet, when I read stories on their extensive
Web site, not one of them had such boxes. Had they reverted to old
habits so quickly? No, their Internet software automatically stripped all
the blocks off, depriving their most desirable readers of vital information,
such as the subject companies’ phone numbers and URLs.
You may think you’re putting your pages online (and I do hope you’re
doing more than that with our new tools), but it may not all get there.
The moral of these three anecdotes is simple: you can create your own
future, but you have to move your whole organization, all your people and
all your engines, into that future.
Fry, an affiliate of the Poynter Institute, works as an independent
writing coach out of Charlottesville, Va. Call him at 804/296-6830, or
use e-mail: donaldfry@cs.com.
