From Print to Digital: Transform Your Business

There are no sacred cows.

"Where someone does even content or sales better than we do, we partner."

The next day, JRC announced a deal with the Street for digital content.

"There is no roadmap for this: you have to experiment."

Experimenting is the part of my job that I find most exciting. You try out new things and see what works. Which isn't to say everything is a shot in the dark. There is tons of advice out there: the latest Editor & Publisher's cover story features newspapers who are doing it right.

"trust the crowd & especially your youngest employees they will lead the needed experiments" #naamxc11 #jrcbenfranklinproject#idealab #jrc

"You have to disrupt your own business models. The people we used to call the audience have already done that. Now we call them the crowd. They create more content and they create it faster than we do. Harness it, work with them and experiment." "We've harnessed the power of our employees, and we've started to create a culture where they are empowered to experiment. We share all of the information tools publicly." "We encourage all of our employees to experiment. We actually pay some of them to do just that. We call it our Idea Lab."

I know first-hand that my company does this because my superiors (including Kelly Glass, VP of Marketing and Ken Swanson, CEO) always heard out my ideas for new initiatives (and demanded more when they didn't think I had been forthcoming enough). They agreed to try, even though we might have failed. They listened to me, even though I was the newest and youngest person in the (metaphorical) room.

I'm also exposed to our New Product/Service Development process through Kelly and am amazed at the breadth of our pipeline and the resources committed to continually expanding what we can do for clients, based on the domain expertise we have in important segments such as newspapers, ad agencies, retailers and more.