API 'crisis' summit asks media to re-invent itself

For major media organizations to escape their current economic crisis, senior leadership at said organizations must examine "strategic initiatives for re-invention" rather than trying to fix their current business model, turnaround specialists urged 50 media executives at the American Press Institutes's newspaper "crisis summit" on Nov. 13.

The executives met at a one-day, closed-door event in Reston, Va., to discuss the future of the journalism industry, an industry stricken with plummeting circulation and advertising revenue and ever-growing competition from various Web sites and others.

James Shein, Ph.d., turnaround specialist and professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and Steve Miller, also a turnaround specialist and executive chairman of auto-parts maker Delphi Corp, addressed the executives. Shein urged them to understand the phase of crisis: first there is being blinded to the situation; then inaction; then a faulty action or mistake; then crisis; and then dissolution about what happened. Failure to take action at one point, Shein said, moves the crisis further along.

Miller said simply cost-cutting wouldn't work.

"Cutting staffs will reduce costs, but it won't happen fast enough, and will erode the product," Miller said, according to the report posted by API. "You have to reinvent your business model."

Several of the executives made points -- that the problem isn't audience but revenue; that the problem is historically cyclical and companies must cut costs until a recovery; that newsrooms should hire specialists like scientists and lawyers to "highlight expertise."

But one older executive made the most optimistic note of the convention.

"The Internet is the best thing that's ever happened to us," he said. "We have immediacy, and we have unlimited space. The problem is that we have been very slow to react to this technology. But it's an opportunity.

Read API's report of the conference here.

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