There was one colleague who said something I’ve always remembered: He said you might not want the job, you might not have a manager’s title, but you can be a leader anyway. He added: Many managers are not leaders.

And finally, he said: Some people are already leaders, whether they want to be or not. Their colleagues do look to them as leaders.

That might be you. So how are you leading, now?

I’m not sure you’re solution — to become the leader — is actually practical in the real world.

It’s not so easy to become a leader if no one really cares what you say, and they don’t listen to you.

I can go about being the leader of myself and my own schedule. I can decide what I’m going to do every day.

But that does nothing for the overall vision and mission that I perceive that our newsroom would have if we had real leadership.

In the long term the problem you describe is self-correcting.
The underlying economic reality is that the new commodity-based news content model cannot support the monopolistic, multi-layered (bureaucratic), obsolete (paper-based delivery, traditional corporate infrastructure.
If the infrastructure you are working in is collapsing, don’t remodel. The survivors/winners will be the ones who build a new, healthy and adaptable framework. This new infrastructure is unlikely to come from the minds of Zell and his corporate peers.
We do have waypoints. Consider the growth of the healthy minority press. Consider the success of nola.com.

-Joseph Pulitzer

“Your commander will not always let you do what’s right. That doesn’t mean you can’t get it done”,

and I’m not arguing against that at all. A lot of the best stuff I ever did as a journalist were done mostly in my spare time, so I know what it takes. I have no problem with putting in hours and hours of unpaid OT (and have done so multiple times) to put out a great special section, but what about the next one, and the one after that? What about other departments at the paper? And after I leave the paper?

“Doing it in your spare time” makes for good journalists, but not good newspapers. It can lead to great one-time products, but usually nothing sustainable or reproducible, and that definitely should be a concern from the company’s perspective. Journalists who use their spare time to innovate and do good work can most likely always find a job, in newspapers or elsewhere, but a newspaper that relies on its people to do extra work in their spare time in order to innovate and put out a good product is likely doomed. Imagine Google or Apple telling their employees to innovate in their spare time.

To use your example from “The Wire”, the investigators who stood up and did the right things are good cops, but you won’t say they work for a good police department. It’s still hampered by a culture of corruption. The fact that the good cops are punished for doing the right thing should be pretty telling about the kind of work that department would do long-term.

Many of the officers involved are punished after the investigation concludes, because they ignored the warnings and the threats to back off.

The investigators’ best judgment about how to proceed in the case was thwarted by self-serving commanders and by a judge concerned about getting re-elected.

The head of the investigative team was in line for a promotion to major in the police force. But someone else is given the promotion, not him. He takes that in stride.

He tells another cop: You can make this about THE JOB, or you can make it about YOU. The one path leads to good police work. The other path leads to corruption and … well, shit.

Some of the best work I have seen in journalism was done in people’s spare time, for the love of journalism — because they wanted to do GOOD journalism.

Your commander will not always let you do what’s right. That doesn’t mean you can’t get it done.