Lesson #2: You Need the Muckety-Mucks

The web department still operates as something of a ghetto at many media organizations. Despite pockets of leadership and innovation, public media organizations are, for the most part, no exception.

Sure, everyone knows the future’s in digital, but, more often than not, the people with power and influence work in the organization’s legacy media area, such as print or broadcast. I witnessed this directly during the election collaboration, which primarily involved web managers and producers at partner organizations. This hampered the project’s impact, either by limiting promotion or preventing more meaningful editorial collaboration. (Much of our “collaboration” during election 2008, aside from the NPR/NewsHour map, took the form of cross-promotion — a type of collaboration, to be sure, but not the deepest type.)

Having learned our lesson, the kickoff meeting for EconomyStory included multi-disciplinary teams from each partner organization. We then broke off into strands for in-depth brainstorming sessions. At one point, producers of several blue-chip public media programs locked eyes and admitted they didn’t trust each other. Then they laughed about it. Then they started talking.

via www.pbs.org