Comments on: Finding time to innovate

By: CS Stanley’s Blog » What comes in = What goes out.

CS Stanley’s Blog » What comes in = What goes out. — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:52:11 +0000

[...] read a post on Mindy McAdam’s blog recently that is the latest manifestation of a long-standing principle I’ve been convicted [...]

By: Mindy

Mindy — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 13:39:09 +0000

@Jack: Thanks — I think you’ve made a great point. I know I wasted a certain amount of time most days in the newsroom. I think all white-collar workers do. So instead of doing the crossword or checking your fantasy football, that’s the time you could use to follow your bliss — work on some journalism that you really care about, under the radar.

By: Jack

Jack — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 13:22:22 +0000

I just used my 10 percent to read the comments on this blog…

An old-time reporter once told me to quit complaining about all the work my editors were piling on. He said — and I think he was right — that if I were truly interested in a subject, I could write/develop/code on company time, that I could get the “must” work done by lunch time and spend the afternoon on “want” work. That’s a riff, I suppose, on Woodward’s quote above (“All good work is done in defiance of management.”)

By: matt

matt — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 12:52:53 +0000

@ Mindy and Amy.
Agree re having the space to fail in innovation. Google has got a lot wrong over the years but it does keep trying new things - a most admirable quality to me. This is a print media story, but I think it has some relevance because of the innovative thinking, look at the Raleigh N+O boosting its comics section rather than reducing it - look at the consequent reader response. All they have done is do something counter-intuitive to the prevailing economic orthodoxy. Sounds easy right, well, why isn’t everyone one else doing it? Thinking creatively - and simply, is hard. Inside an organisation, newspaper, broadcaster, whatever, this requires patrons to allow the creative ideas to come up through the hierachy. This is rare in my experience. The digital wave is a great opportunity to secure some of this patronage for those of us who care about how information is made and diseminated. We have an opportunity to try and seize the chances it offers*.

* And beat all the attendant problems at the same time

By: Technolo-J : Ask for your 10 percent, or 20

Technolo-J : Ask for your 10 percent, or 20 — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 05:45:42 +0000

[...] about workflow, Mindy McAdams has found an answer. Actually, she found BBC’s 10 percent answer, which came from Google’s 20 [...]

By: Brian Cubbison

Brian Cubbison — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 05:21:55 +0000

A history of newspaper innovation would include a few big events and a lot of small steps. Somewhere between offset printing and USA Today there were a few. Some newspapers were early adopters of bulletin boards and interactive text services, perhaps too far ahead of their time. The rise of free metro dailies like Red Eye and Dallas Quick are not quite as revolutionary as USA Today but still bold. Then there was Cue Cat.

Newspapers seem to be on an awkward scale. National chains but local in focus. Too big to be two guys in a garage with nothing to lose, but too narrow to think of creating ESPN.

On an individual scale, maybe innovation is like the Bob Woodward quote, “All good work is done in defiance of management.” In the case of USA Today, it was one large-egoed tycoon who defied the industry.

By: Electric Fishwrap › How to build innovation in newsrooms

Electric Fishwrap › How to build innovation in newsrooms — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 03:02:56 +0000

[...] the question Mindy McAdams asks in her Teaching Online Journalism blog. Mindy points us to the Fleet Street blog, where the blogger [...]

By: The Journalism Iconoclast

The Journalism Iconoclast — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 22:32:05 +0000

[...] Mindy McAdams suggests that newsroom staffers be given 10% of their time to work on their own projects. [...]

By: Rachel

Rachel — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 22:17:03 +0000

Hear, hear from a new reader!

I fear commenters #4 and #5 will be proved right–heck, I worked at a newspaper so fearful of innovation that it wouldn’t even let a crime reporter take half a day (on a slow news day!) to write a fun piece of fluff about a local statue.

We have to get past that before we can get to the project-level of innovation you’re talking about, not to mention innovation on an ideological level.

By: Pat Thornton

Pat Thornton — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 21:50:51 +0000

Mindy,

My main complaint with Soundslides is its buggyness. It crashes a lot, and it doesn’t follow XP user interface guidelines. It doesn’t behave like a Windows program should, which I find annoying and strange.

I believe Soundslides was originally written for OS X, so that explains many of its XP issues. I’ll have to download a trial on OS X to see how it works before passing more judgment.

I have not tried Soundslides Plus, so I don’t know if it behaves better and how much better the program is with the added functionality.

My other issue is with how it functions. I haven’t found out how to turn off the feature where when you change the length of one photo, it changes the length of the photo next to it. Soundslides is easy to use, but in a lot of ways I find Flash less annoying to use.

I’ll have to try Soundslides Plus, especially under OS X.