By: Elizabeth Coffey, Marketing G2 Digital Marketing Specialist

It’s no secret that the news media industry is in the midst of an overhaul, a digital disruption that is made even more disruptive by the steady decline of ad revenue (the traditional revenue source for news media outlets).

While news media organizations have run many different experiments and initiatives to address this growing problem, they’re doing almost nothing to address their need for behavioral change, a need to get away from the ‘business-as-usual’ mentality.

In order to survive, news organizations need to grow and change. When addressing the need for behavioral change in your news organization, it’s important to implement the following three tactics so you can be successful.

1. You must have flexible and adaptive leadership possessing common objectives – Leadership must share common goals and adopt a flexible and adaptive business mentality. It’s important that leaders within your organization ensure that individuals and teams aren’t competing against one another because of incongruent goals. Cross-departmental teams can only be successful with consistent leadership and support. Leaders should be willing to learn about emergent technologies and marketing strategies so that they share a common language with those on the front lines of the business.


2. You must be willing to set up new roles within your organization – To manage the complexity of emergent cross-functional teams that are becoming more and more commonplace across many industries (even in the news industry), new roles will have to be created. These roles will buck the traditional news industry paradigms providing a foundation not built on the heavily-structured silos of the past. An innovative culture depends on innovative ideas and these can only come from new organizational roles.


3. Implement an effective talent engagement and retention program – Peer recognition through awards, newsletter mentions, etc. is a great way to encourage innovation and retain top talent within your news organization.

How are you encouraging innovation and behavioral change within your news organization?