Photo by Flickr user Rick Harris.

Jeff Sonderman is deputy director of the American Press Institute, a nonprofit educational organization that produces research, tools, insights and events to advance innovation and sustainability in journalism. Today the institute is releasing a report on changing newsroom culture to promote innovation, which is funded in part by Knight Foundation.

Would you describe your news organization as “innovative”?

Does it create products that reach new audiences and solve problems? Does it experiment with new tools and techniques for creative storytelling? Does it have processes and a culture built for ongoing transformation?

Some of you reading this will say yes. Far too many, however, will answer no.

At the American Press Institute we were deeply intrigued by this entrenched problem: Why — despite having the right intentions, knowledge, and sometimes even resources to make innovation happen — do many news organizations fail to execute on change.

Our colleagues at Knight Foundation share this interest, and helped shape and fund our latest effort to study what hidden factors either foster or inhibit innovation in news organizations.

Today we are sharing what we learned. We are releasing a new report titled “A Culture-Based Strategy for Creating Innovation in News Organizations,” which is based on months of research involving news organizations around the country.

We went about the research on two tracks.

One research method involved visiting news organizations in person to conduct human-centered design research that probed the human, cultural and institutional factors that either enable or stifle innovation in those organizations. That process was led by Laura Cochran and Reggie Murphy, experts in design thinking with backgrounds in journalism.

We also commissioned an in-depth report examining best practices and ideas from some of the most innovative news organizations and news leaders. That report was researched by Craig Silverman, an award-winning journalist and a longtime studier and teacher on newsroom processes.

What we found starts with one major idea: Innovation is a product of culture.

The right culture — expressed in part through things like priorities, workflow, and org charts — unleashes the natural creative and innovative impulses of talented, empowered employees. The wrong culture can do the opposite.

What does that mean, practically? How do you go about grasping and moving something so large and abstract as “culture”? How do you change what you are?

We found many examples where relatively small changes to the structure (the way an organization arranges itself both administratively and physically) and processes (the things people do together at work) can improve the culture.

Here are the keys steps news organizations need to take, according to our research. The report contains more details and proposals about how to address these.

1. Create clarity about the vision

First, an organization must have clarity about what future it intends to create (its mission) and what problems it is solving to do so (its priorities).

This is a shift in thinking for some legacy news organizations, whose job in the past was simply to continue to exist. Today’s disruptive climate forces leaders to be frequently forecasting, reevaluating, and setting a new course.

What hallmarks do you expect your news organization to be known for? What business plan are you striving toward that will make it sustainable? How do the various content, revenue and technology efforts weave together to make all this happen?

If you (and everyone else in the organization) can’t answer these questions, even the most innovation-minded people in your organization will be ineffective. Innovation is the act of solving a problem to reach a goal. It requires a clear goal.

2. Build strong tribes

You probably recall the famous Margaret Mead quote: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” The same is true of your organization. Most innovative efforts will be driven by thoughtful, committed, small groups; you must empower them and remove obstacles.

In our report we call these groups “tribes” — people who share similar roles, motivations, personalities, values, vocabulary, and experiences. In the context of a news organization, reporters form a tribe, as well as groups formed around one coverage area. So do Web producers or visual journalists.

Our research finds that these tribes can “provide each other creative energy, motivation, support, learning, enjoyment, companionship, and problem solving. They also flourish when given freedom and autonomy to develop their own cultures, vocabulary, norms, histories, expectations, and path for advancement.”

3. Get tribes working together

It is also essential to unite tribes around the larger shared goals of organizational change, while still allowing them to function creatively.

A few examples of doing that include:

• Create a shared project in which people across tribes work together and see the benefits of doing so.
• Seat the tribes that must collaborate near one another.
• Make the people in different tribes working on similar priorities accessible to each other. For example, link the people who handle newsroom website analytics with the circulation people who analyze subscriber data, and the marketing people who analyze the commercial value of the audience.
• Create new virtual spaces for interaction that are accessible and ambient. For instance, internal chat systems, such as Slack, help break down silos by creating virtual “rooms” around roles and projects, breaking out of department silos.

When innovation fails in a news organization, it’s often because the tribes from the news, business or technology departments have failed to work together. The organizational structure needs to connect strong tribes and help them collaborate for the greater good.

How to build on this insight

Based on this new research, the American Press Institute has designed a strategy that we believe will help news organizations enable innovation and problem solving for the future.

The approach is designed to help news organizations enable innovative cultures by first diagnosing what their biggest obstacles to innovation are, and then offering solutions that they can customize for their needs.

We encourage you to read the report, and get in touch with us if you might like to try this approach in your news organization, if you have ideas or examples to add to what we describe here, or if you are interested in backing our implementation of this culture-based strategy for creating innovation in news organizations.

Jeff Sonderman can be reached via email at [email protected] or on Twitter @jeffsonderman.