The internal ones tend to die without managment support though. More importantly managment understanding enough to give them a free reign.

Maybe thats why they call them skunkworks – they leave a stink in an organisation worse than skunks when they die.

Listen to me, Im very pessimistic this week. More skunkworks.

I think the disruption model is a bit like a weapon – a great persuader when used in the right hands. Unfortunately many are waving the weapon around and firing it at anyone. Maybe I’ve seen too many star treks to know what a clueless idiot waving around a loaded disruptor can do.

I think the thing I recognise is that many, if not most, on the inside of the industry at an enabling level don’t have an understanding of the next step. I think most will recognise the impact of disruption but they only take their response so far – hence the stagnation comment.

It generally frustrating when you know that many organisations seem to have got the hang of the ‘threat motivation’ part of disruption but lost the develop part. There is a lack of investment – money, kit, training, everything – because they don’t embrace the development just the input. The old reactive rather than responsive thing.

It’s sad when many set-ups have to run, almost as independent ‘skunk-works’ in their own newsrooms, not because they want to be lean and responsive but because the make-do-and-mend mentality of old newspaper world still hasn’t shifted.

Like you, I think the quantity over, and I use this word advisedly, quality question is an easy one right now, quantity – Try it out, make it happen.

My hope is that those really getting to grips with it keep their eyes forward and manage to dodge the blasts.

When I talk about disruption, I mean this – come in at the low end, figure out what job people are trying to get done, be good enough at that job, and start growing an audience. This is a fairly proven strategy. It is disruptive to television because the vast majority of TV news stations are still stuck shoveling segments of their news broadcast onto the web. Rather than trying to figure out how to make video more suitable to the web, they think the same crap they put on TV is going to work on the web. I’m not seeing that model get any real traction. So while TV is stuck in a sustaining strategy, newspapers have an opportunity to use video in a fresh way, a low cost way that gives them a great deal of flexibility to learn and grow and adapt to the audience.

The model of disruption is well established. That doesn’t mean in this case, or any case, it’s going to work. Innovations fail all the time, even when following the established path. There’s no magic formula.

My position has been for some time, if we (newspapers) are being disrupted by blogs, crraigslist, et. al, we need to do more than just be defensive (and we should also take defensive measures), we need to figure out who we can disrupt and how — two clear areas are video and yellow pages. These are growth opportunities.

Just to underline: never have I said be stagnate. I’ve said, don’t waste time, don’t waste effort, don’t waste money, and don’t wait for the stars and moon to align behind some boss buying all the perfect equipment. Take whatever you have available and do something with it. Don’t be afraid to experiment, don’t be afraid of failure, don’t be afraid of being less than perfect, don’t be afraid of getting it wrong — if your department has only X-amount of money to spend, spend it on equipment that is going to allow you to start getting video online now and often, whatever that equipment may be, and it’s better to get cameras in the hands of more people, then just one camera in the hand of one person, if that’s your choice. Figure out how to take available resources and do video now, faster and more often. It’s not so much quantity vs. quality, as it is quantity does two things for you: It helps educate your audience to “you’re a multimedia site, not just a text in pixels site,” and it allows you to make more mistakes faster and therefore learn faster (if you’re doing it right). Shooting just one video a week (which is what you’ll get if you take all your money and invest in nothing but the best equipment) isn’t going to help your organization learn to the extent it needs to learn (though it might be great for one invidividual), and one video a week, no matter how stunningly good it is, isn’t going to grow your audience. To use video to grow audience, you must have multiple videos per day.