Journalists Can’t Live In Fantasyland

Fresh out of college I started my journalism career ripping stories off an Associated Press wire machine. The slot man, a Brit who ate onion sandwiches for lunch, reedited each one. Then a teletype operator retransmitted them to our audience. Four years later, as a copy editor, I had a colleague who would gulp down tallboys with his lunch on stressful news days. For the first half of my professional life I was caught up in a 100-yearold world of linear journalism, characters and all.

The linear journalistic way of life continues to this day. Social media will eventually bring it to an end. Our incentive-based contributor network forced the dramatic change FORBES needed in a fragmented media world. Now we’re solidifying a new workflow. I call it the Stargate newsroom. In one of my sci-fi favorites, an Egyptologist (played by James Spader) deciphers and aligns asterisms on a circular stone device to open a transport gate to another world. Our version opens the newsroom to a universe of digital monetization. The idea is to align stories with advertising, audience segments, content creators and platforms.

More and more, content must work for the business. That requires editors and sales and marketing people to work together. None of that means less editorial independence. Editors and business types have always formed alliances. Most of them were denied in the name of newsroom integrity. It’s important to acknowledge the partnerships, extend and deepen them.

As this chart shows, the goal is to lock in place the right elements within each ring (Spader did it to open a wormhole). In this case we did it for Fidelity, a Brandvoice partner creating native ad content. We do the same for editorial content.

Journalists who think salespeople alone can solve publishing’s new complexities remain stuck in a linear fantasyland. As their careers fade away, there will be little solace in an onion sandwich or can of beer.