Sorry, you’ve failed to convince me. You cite no examples other than your own beliefs, and those can be questioned almost immediately. (Saying designers have strong news judgment immediately throws your cred into serious doubt.)

It sounds as if you, like many failing journalists, keep rubbing your little rabbit’s foot in the vain hope that somehow the failed and failing design-based approach will right itself. It won’t. Best to realize this quickly and to look for a real solution. It won’t come from the design crowd.

It’s really frustrating to want to learn but being discouraged from putting any of that learning to use. Editors seem to be afraid of change and being unpredictable.

Fact is, things definitely have to change. We have fewer people, and we must collaborate more and better to survive. People who cannot and will not work with others, who maintain some misguided superiority and who are unable to appreciate another’s contribution are absolutely useless if not destructive in the business of innovation. The ship is sinking. Start pumping with the rest of us or get off the boat.

Also - perhaps readers have noticed that 20% of us do 80% of the work and that the 80% don’t like being pushed to do more? It’s not just about fear of change on the part of management. While they’re strategizing about where to go with news, in the newsroom there are issues of workplace bullying, jealousy, and lack of training. There are a lot of us who want to do what you’re suggesting - that’s why we’re reading your blog, pestering management, working on ideas on our own time and dime and not sitting on our butts complaining, trashing and gossiping about co-workers. We’re DOING it…or trying to.

What it will take is a management team committed to excellence, zero tolerance of bullies and incompetence and someone not afraid to embrace radical change - including its *failures* (failure = piece of the puzzle that doesn’t fit where you’re trying to put it) - because out of failures comes success.

The true key is excluding the non-journalist designers. Don’t include them on the teams. Then maybe they’ll get a clue and pack up; they can be replaced with real journalists, and this will allow the newsrooms to move forward.

Newspapers have got to cast aside the failed approaches and get back to what works: good content, written well and edited tightly. Designers don’t make this happen; they just get in the way.

Management blew up the newsroom, dynamited all the silos and created “teams.” The teams included reporters, photogs, designers, even copy editors for project teams. The teams decided, as you suggest, what ought to be covered and how to cover it.

We quit covering meetings. We did advances instead to tell our readers what was going to happen at the meeting. Same with performance reviews. We’d cover a concert in another city to preview it for our audience.

We blew up the newspaper, too. The entire staff participated in a redesign. Our sections had two fronts — one on the “front” and one on the “back.” Among the biggest mistakes was putting Sports on the back of a section. I forget now which one.

We did not, of course, have Web sites, email, video and the like in the mid-80s, but we put section editors’ phone numbers on the section fronts — if not a first, certainly avant garde.

This experiment lasted about nine months, if memory serves. The staff loved it, but the readers didn’t go for it, I’m sorry to say. So, the teams were then dynamited and the redesign tweaked.

I agree with you, Mindy. It’s time to try it again. The Trib always was about 20 years ahead of its time.

(Scripps announced in August that it will close the paper unless a buyer is found… Another harbinger of things to come?)

–dave