Building Capacity

A mistake a lot of old media people make, is to think that they can rescue their organizations with a clever app. That if they have bells and whistles on their site the users will come.

They aim to do this by hiring a Web staff that has little interaction with their editorial team and getting them to make the bells and whistles.

But that is not going to help the organization in the long run. Change for old media organizations has to be systemic. Every member of the the radio station or newspaper has to understand the the goal is not to make a newspaper, or a radio station. Building capacity is what is needed.

To understand this idea, listen to Randy Frescoln in Act II of the This American Life show 336: "Who can you save?" He describes why you don't hand our high-tech equipment when a country is starving. You start at the bottom, building capacity. You hand out shovels and seed. Maybe some watering cans.

That's where most media is now. We need to build capacity