Steve Outing
The leaked “innovation” report from The New York Times that made the rounds in May recommends that the company take more risks, move more quickly and consider radical steps to reinvent itself. Steve Outing wonders what would happen if the Times abandoned daily print editions, and he’s built an elaborate “what-if?” model to test the idea.
Outing’s model doesn’t answer the question, but it does provide a new tool with which to evaluate options. “Most news companies aren’t very good at grokking what’s coming at them or what likely futures could be ahead for them,” wrote Outing in an e-mail to us. “What I did was demonstrate one tool of strategic foresight that news companies should consider using.”
Outing would like to get more consulting gigs working for news organizations that need reinvention, and we hope he gets some. A self-described media futurist, he’s been challenging assumptions about the slow-moving newspaper industry for the past two decades. Read more here. We were fans of a blog called Reinventing Classifieds that he launched back in 2008 that recommended radical new ways to revive the highly profitable newspaper classified advertising business. To our knowledge, no on took him up on his ideas.
For this exercise, Outing applies a “Futures Wheel” to envision a Times that only publishes on Sunday. The exercise is meant to envision every impact on the paper’s business, including staffing costs, production savings, new sources of revenue and circulation revenue. Outing has modeled his scenario out to two levels of detail. To fully understand the implications you need to go to third level, and that involves surveys and pilots. Outing will do you that for any newspaper that wants to hire him.
Asked what value news organizations can gain from this exercise, he wrote, “Technological change is accelerating at a faster rate; indeed, exponentially, when it comes to computing power. This means that anyone’s business model can be disrupted, if not obliterated, faster than ever before. So now is a critical time to start seriously using strategic-foresight tools and techniques (futures wheels being just one) to better prepare for likely and plausible challenges and opportunities.”
He’s right. How many media executives have the vision to take him on the offer? Click here to see an enlarged view of the image.
