DEN and Strategy

In the seminar this week we discussed strategy and how this can take place on and/or over a number of levels, from developing an individual’s skills such as training them in computer programming, to an industry wide sector change such as the uptake of digital readers across the publishing industry. We defined strategy as ‘How we move from A to B’ and interestingly it was pointed out that to make these strategies work you need to budget but that this budget does not necessarily mean money, it can instead or also mean resources such as contacts, space, mutual events etc which can help you move towards your goals. It was also pointed out that a strategy can be changed if needed because we can’t always account for variables along the way, but that your overall ‘vision’ can stay constant for what you generally aim to achieve. There were many examples of these changes in strategy at the Digital Editor’s Network event and it genuinely surprised / heartened me that I was one of the youngest people there, since it often feels older generations aren’t as worried about innovating in the digital age. But these guys definitely were, with the main focuses seeming to be on local news with Sky’s new local video news service and The Guardian’s N0tice, and also data with Greg Hadfields Open Data Cities. Both of these are innovations made possible by the internet and very exciting prospects for journalism. I think Greg Hadfield summed up the whole conference, and indeed state of journalism and publishing at the moment when he said “It’s a great time to be a journalist. It’s not necessarily a great time to be a newspaper journalist”. As we said in the seminar, I think it’s a case of holding on to the vision of being a journalist and of communicating and questioning information, but letting go of the old strategies that provided this solely through print.