Artist :Aya Brackett http://www.featureshoot.com/2009/06/aya-brackett-san-francisco/

This post could be one of my items tagged blown to bits. I included it on my blog because of the referral to organizations that are struggling also with collaboration. And as organizations are you and me, please feel free to connect  and react!!

Source: http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/blogs/all/newspapers-arent-only-ones-struggling-with-collaboration/?cs=33202 by Ann All 8/6/2009

I’m a former print journalist who’s been working more or less exclusively online for about a dozen years.

(Yeah, I’m old.) Several other print veterans work at IT Business Edge.

All of us have friends who’ve been laid off from newspaper staffs in the past 18 months. Many of our still-employed friends are being asked to take more and more unpaid furloughs. It’s tough out there.

It doesn’t take a genius to see the viability of the traditional newspaper business model has been in decline for years. Newspapers spend far too much money on printing and delivering newspapers to the shrinking number of people who want to consume their news that way. There’s paper, ink, offset presses and the unionized labor that runs them, distribution centers, fleets of delivery trucks, etc., etc.

Yet newspapers appear to remain mired in the second stage of the five stages of grief, anger. They spend more time lashing out at Google, blogs and other media they feel are responsible for their decline than in trying to come up with workable solutions moving forward or to address issues such as a lack of expertise in search engine optimization.

As Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine points out, in its latest in a series of attacks on blogs, The New York Times shows its unwillingness to abandon “journalism‘s myth of perfection” and to see journalism as a process rather than a product.

Writes Jarvis:

Online, the story, the reporting, the knowledge are never done and never perfect. That doesn’t mean that we revel in imperfection, as is the implication of The Times’ story – that we have no standards. It just means that we do journalism differently, because we can. We have our standards, too, and they include collaboration, transparency, letting readers into the process, and trying to say what we don’t know when we publish – as caveats – rather than afterward – as corrections.

Old-school journalists want to cling to that control-drven model, as I wrote last month. But how long will that remain possible?

The push toward collaboration is happening all around us, including (for must of us) at work. It’s no longer about producing a “perfect” business report or spreadsheet or chart. (As if there is any such thing.)

It’s about wikis and instant messaging and Sharepoint and other tools that help us collaborate with our coworkers — and increasingly, with customers, suppliers and others.

Sadly, many newspapers continue to simply put the same old control-driven content online rather than involving their readers in the process.

In the same way, many companies simply adopt social tools without making necessary changes to their underlying processes. For those companies, Dion Hinchcliffe offers 12 rules for taking your business social.

Among them: Do not use social channels for traditional push communication. Censorship kills participation. If you’re not sure where your organization ends and the network begins, you’re doing it right.

Read more at http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/blogs/all/newspapers-arent-only-ones-struggling-with-collaboration/?cs=33202

Artist :Aya Brackett http://www.featureshoot.com/2009/06/aya-brackett-san-francisco/

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