While researching innovation and the media for Northwestern University's Media Management Center, I was impressed by a guy named Rob Curley. Rob is VP Development and runs a skunk works organization for the Washington Post. What's great is the ability of his small team of 5 people to jettison the whole company into new and creative markets on the web.
They work as a small company within a large one and have the speed and flexibility to do things virtually overnight. They were one of the first news media firms to design a successful widget for Facebook. Here's how they are organized vis-a-vis the 300 person washingtonpost.com team:
Our team has its own dedicated programmer; he’s been working with us for a long time so he knows how programming relates to journalism. This is a guy who practices his journalism with code instead of with sentences. We have a full-time dedicated senior designer who’s also a motion graphics animator and a Flash developer. Then we have two multimedia journalists — one in an editor’s role and one in a producer’s role, but both can do just about everything. They can write very well-written news stories, they can produce daily audio podcasts, they can shoot and edit video. You throw something at them and they can probably do it, or they’re going to figure out how to do it. They’re kind of jack-of-all-trades when it comes to storytelling.
“Then the fifth member of our team is this really smart guy who has the strangest role on our team. In fact, we had to make up a whole new title for him and that’s ‘Journalism Technology Specialist.’ He’s a weird guy because he’s a dang fine journalist; he can really write well and understands new media journalism really well, but he can also code a little bit, he can write CSS. Basically, this guy sits between the journalism and the technology. So once all the code has been written, all the sites have been designed, all the Flash animations have been built, all the stories have been written, all the virtual reality photos have been taken, he’s the guy who assembles all of that. And that makes him a pretty useful guy to have around.'
Rob was telling me about a hyper-local site they developed for Loudoun County, VA - one of the fastest growing counties in the DC area. It's called Loudounextra.com. Rob's group wanted to include a list of all the restaurants in the county. Someone suggested they buy the data from the Yellow Pages. Imagine all the time, money and debugging that would take for addresses and phone numbers. Instead, their staff called every restaurant in the county, found out opening and closing time, pricing, type of cuisine, details that brought value to using the site. With free Google database software, it was done - fast, cheap AND good.
Conventional thinking is that skunk works organizations are good for ideation but present problems when ideas scale and you have to assimilate the products and services back into the larger organization. That's the beauty of the technology of content companies however. The software itself creates the scaling. Watch for even better innovations coming from washingtonpost.com.
