August 13, 2001

Today's Leaders: The Big Challenges

By Gregory Favre
Poynter Leadership Faculty

The scene: A networking lunch for the Executive Leadership Program of the Asian American Journalism Association.

The high-profile luncheon participants:

• Robert Aglow, executive producer of news, MSNBC
• Tom Callinan, editor, The Arizona Republic
• Patrick Chu, managing editor, Bloomberg News
• Andrew Fisher, president, Cox Television
• Carolina Garcia, managing editor, San Antonio Express-News
• Rena Golden, executive vice president and general manager, CNN International
• Ann Marie Lipinski, editor, Chicago Tribune
• Wlena Nachmanoff, vice president, NBC News
• David Ng, assistant managing editor, Star-Ledger
• David Yarnold, executive editor, San Jose Mercury News

The question: What is the greatest challenge facing leaders in the media today?

Some excerpts from their answers, which were limited to one minute:

1. Managing talented people and knowing how to keep them. Increasing the skills and knowledge we have to have in order to cover a more complex world.
   
2. Understanding and valuing diversity. Maintaining a commitment to hiring and retaining a diverse staff and providing diverse coverage.
   
3. Remembering that journalism is a living, breathing thing and that we have to learn how to deal with change.
   
4. Knowing that it’s okay to be scared and worried at times.
   
5. Being counter-intuitive and contrary, a strategy that could serve us well.
   
6. Staying relevant and being ready to relate to the next generation.
   
7. Keeping up with a sophisticated multi-media landscape.
   
8. Balancing work and life issues and being there for family and staff.
   
9. Being creative about dollars and cents and making the best use of internal and external training.
   
10. Learning how and when to fight and when to let go.
    
11. Finding the right balance between business and journalism concerns.
    
12. Maintaining good morale and making sure that the economic crunch doesn’t diminish the quality of the journalism we do.
    
13. There were other comments, but those were the basic themes. And they pretty much cover the range of issues that are bedeviling leaders in newsrooms today, print or broadcast.

I was an observer in this room, not a panelist, but I thought about leadership challenges as I listened. There wasn’t anything I could disagree with, but I guess there were a few things I might have added, recognizing, of course, that it is always easier to add after the fact.

I hope I would have talked about the increasing competition today. It used to be a lot easier to know who our competitors were and how we might be able to beat them. Now, with the technological explosion we have witnessed over the past few decades, there are news deliverers in our communities that we may not know exist. And like the ants at a picnic, they are taking tiny bites out of our lunch.

I also hope I would have talked a little about the increasing lack of communication today--with those we work with and with our readers, viewers, or listeners. Generally speaking, we don’t do a great job of providing feedback in our newsrooms or in letting our audience know why we do certain things that we do.

Finally, I hope I would have left the young journalists in the program with this thought: There will be more tough times, but I can’t imagine any job that will bring you more pleasure and more satisfaction. Enjoy. And always give it your best.

What do you think?