Mark Johnson: Failing faster
For today and Friday, I’m hanging out at the 2nd annual ICONN conference in Knoxville. ICONN is a “set of individuals, academic programs and professional organizations dedicated connecting student web journalists and campus news websites and to advancing education in web and online journalism” and, from what I know, has a very similar set of goals as CoPress. The first talk at ICONN this year was Mark Johnson on failing faster.
“We have to accept the fact that what we have done as journalists and journalism educators for the last fifty years doesn’t work anymore.” Mark is currently working on completely rebuilding his program from the ground up. During his career, he’s failed at certain things including college (twice), 1st job (fired 3 weeks in), freelancing, the last job before coming to academia, and changing college curriculum.
For college, his dream out of high school was to go to Northwestern University. He did everything he thought he needed to do to get in. When he was rejected, he ended up going to Syracuse instead. There he realized that, instead of writing for a career, he wanted to be a photojournalist.
At the university, Mark teaches three courses a semester and his boss gives him the freedom to do whatever he wants. He failed at getting the entire curriculum changed, but that failure led to this opportunity and inspired some of his colleagues to do radically new things in their courses as well. “If you’re doing the same thing as you did last year, you’re doing it wrong. You need to try something new.”
Embrace failure, Mark says. The standard career ladder for a journalist is completely broken. The New York Times is a billion dollars in debt. Innovation, however, is “how new ideas address issues.” What this means for reporting is to look at the essence of the story, and figure out the best way to tell the story. That’s what’s more important right now. Sometimes you need articles in column inches, but other times you may need maps or infographics.
Norm Larson was a chemist in the 1950′s. The air force needed a chemical to repel water on pipes in their rockets. He failed 39 times before he got it right. On the 40th try, he had a working product that eventually became WD-40.
There’s a difference between innovating and creating. Innovating is trying new things. Instead of covering the council meeting and writing about it, bring an audio recorder, a couple of microphones, and try to tell the whole story without using your own voice. That’s innovating. Creating, however, is about developing a routine that makes you prepared to produce.
Technique isn’t creativity. The people who know all of the ins and outs of Photoshop, but can only produce within the scope of the assignment aren’t creative enough.
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