Learning the Wrong Lessons

Editor & Publisher has a well-meaning but depressing article about "Online Flops or Failures" committed by newspaper sites. It's a real collection of horror stories.

The true horror, however, is that E&P seems to be presenting these (frankly minor) failures as discouraging "lessons" in what not to do. In fact, in almost every case, these were good ideas that should not have been abandoned just because they were bungled in execution. Every newspaper should be trying all of these things (and many more), over and over, until they get them right.

My fear is that by presenting these mostly self-inflicted failures as "lessons," E&P is going to scare newspaper Web sites away from being more innovative and experimental. Unfortunately, the message of the story is that it's really easy to screw up this newfangled Internet thing—as if the same sort of mistakes don't happen on the print side. That's counterproductive at a time when newspapers and their Web sites need to be taking all sorts of chances to change the rules of the game they're losing to more nimble and fearless and risk-loving competitors.

Newspaper Web sites (and print newspapers, for that matter) should be throwing every single idea they have up against the wall to see what sticks, and iterating like crazy. You don't throw up your hands because you picked the wrong people to blog (don't miss the anecdote about the hand-written blog posts) or forgot to put profanity filters on reader comments, or gave up on a valid, but underpromoted, experiment after just a few months.

In fact, the most valuable lesson in the E&P article comes from the smartest newspaper Web editor in the business, WashingtonPost.com's Jim Brady, who says: "Failure isn't to be feared on the Web, it is to be embraced. ... If you are not failing, you are not stretching as much."

Exactly. Stretch. Take chances. Don't fear failure. Don't be discouraged. Keep trying until you get it right. The future of the industry—and your job—depends on it.

Comments

[John Robinson]

So right, Mark. Bad execution can kill a good idea every time. Too often we conclude that the idea is bad and walk away when we really should examine how we could have done it differently.

Related: Can you imagine polling editors and publishers about mistakes and miscalculations they've made in the print edition? Newspapers have been around for hundreds of years and we still pursue ideas, editions, special sections, tabs, you name it, that don't work for one reason or another. Do we stop? No, we keep trying to learn.