At the recent MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference, I had the pleasure of speaking to 16 of the most promising thinkers in the area of digital news. Culled together from myriad of disciplines and backgrounds, some had already established themselves as pioneers in the digital space.Others had come from legacy newsrooms. A few had found their voices in the field.
But regardless of their backgrounds, they all were united by a drive to innovate, inform and empower. In short, these 16 new news entrepreneurs had come to Cambridge, Mass., with a plan: Reinvent the news business.
But if I had just one takeaway I wanted to impart in my talk to the newly knighted 2011 News Challenge winners, it was this: Those carefully crafted plans are about to change.
Being Open to Change
There’s an old axiom in entrepreneurship, and it goes something like this: Pivot or perish.
“Pivoting” — the ability (and perhaps more importantly, the willingness) to change your course of action when you realize the ground beneath you is shifting — isn’t just the essence of entrepreneurship, it’s the only way you’ll survive.
Trust me, we’ve been at it for just a little over a year now with Stroome, and in that time we’ve had to pivot plenty.
Now let me be clear — having a plan for the future is just as important as a good, solid pivot. Looking two, three, even five years down the road is critical, not just because it places your idea in a larger context, but because it forces you to realize that no one really knows what the future has in store. In the end, the best we can do is play the hand that’s dealt us. And this is precisely where the concept of pivoting comes in.
When we set out last June to build the next iteration of Stroome, a collaborative online video editing platform to simplify the production of news and video, we sat down and diligently drew up a list of goals. The exact number was just short of a dozen or so, but the three key ones included: increase adoption in journalism schools, forge strategic allegiances, remain open to unforeseen uses.
It didn’t take long before those goals started to come to fruition. Within four months of receiving our grant, Stroome was being used by a class of aspiring digital journalists at Columbia College Chicago to comment on the importance of voter registration during the highly anticipated mayoral election. In April, we partnered with USC Stevens Institution, relaunching the site at the third annual TEDxUSC conference.
And who could have possibly foreseen that we’d have found ourselves smack dab in the middle of the Egyptian revolution? But that’s exactly what happened this past January when protesters began using Stroome to get their video out of the country when the government shut down Twitter and Facebook.
More than a ‘to-do’ list
Remarkably, in less than a year we had accomplished nearly every goal we had set for ourselves. But our goals had became more than just a list of “to-dos’‘ to be ticked off one-by-one. Instead, they became “listening posts.” And by listening to our users, we were able to gain valuable insight into what is truly important to them.
In most instances, their revelations were consistent with our expectations. Yet at times, what we heard was completely incongruous with what we thought we should be building. And when that happened, we had to evaluate which comments to implement, which to set aside for the time being, and which to dismiss altogether. Said another way, we had to pivot.
Because while we may have had many goals, at the end of the day we only had one objective: Create the most intuitive user experience possible. But without those pivots, that objective would never have been achieved.
And as I looked out across the room and into the faces of this year’s Knight News Challenge winners, I could see an unmistakable determination, an undaunted doggedness, an unrelenting sense of resolve. There was no mistaking it: Reinvention of an industry many have written off as outdated, archaic and obsolete is a goal well within their grasp.
They’re just going to have to pivot to get there.
If you’re interested, Los Angeles angel investor Mark Suster has written a great post on the importance of pivoting. Read it here.
Photo courtesy of flickr user Stacy Lynn Baum.
> MIT Lesson: Change Happens Everywhere; Activists Need to Think It Through by Dan Schultz
> Knight Announces 2011 News Challenge Winners by Desiree Everts
> At MIT Knight Confab, Public Activism Looms Large by Martin Moore