For the past 10 weeks I’ve been a fac­ulty mem­ber of the Knight Dig­i­tal Media Cen­ter Lead­er­ship Con­fer­ence, help­ing edi­tors from 10 news­pa­pers learn how to incor­po­rate social media into their news­rooms. The online train­ing ses­sions cul­mi­nated in three days of hands-on, in-person work­shops this week in down­town Los Angeles.

Some top-flight social media con­sul­tants — Susan Mer­nit, Amy Gahran and Paul Gillin (whose slide show Get­ting Over Fear of Fail­ure to Make Rapid Deci­sions is embed­ded at top) — and USC’s Dana Chinn were also on hand, with Vikki Porter and Michele McLel­lan run­ning the show. (Fol­low KDMC and Michele on Twitter.)

I came away from the ses­sion more hope­ful than I’ve been about the fate of local news orga­ni­za­tions. While news­pa­pers still face for­mi­da­ble obsta­cles in address­ing the sys­temic shifts under way in the medi­a­s­phere away from mass mar­keted prod­ucts and toward spe­cial­ized, social­ized, frag­mented media forms, I was intrigued to see the energy and cre­ative fer­ment that ani­mate sev­eral of the projects.

That will­ing­ness to exper­i­ment comes largely from the man­agers, edi­tors and jour­nal­ists who make the daily mir­a­cle of news­pa­per­ing hap­pen. Said one edi­tor about the need to tran­si­tion to a dig­i­tal future — despite obsta­cles imposed by upper man­age­ment: “We have bosses who think we’re on bat­tle­ships when we need to be on speedboats.”

“We have bosses who think we’re on bat­tle­ships when we need to be on speedboats.”

Another par­tic­i­pant made the point that retain­ing cer­tain employ­ees in legacy jobs, when those jobs will go away, only does a dis­ser­vice by delay­ing retrain­ing and entry into a 21st cen­tury workforce.

Some of the projects that res­onated for me included:

• The Philadel­phia Daily News came up with the idea of Hot But­ton, a lunchtime online water cooler dis­cus­sion around a hot topic of the day.

• The River­side Press Enterprise’s plans to roll out a new con­cept, Inland SoCal, which will include con­tent ver­ti­cals such as arts/entertainment, din­ing, things to do, pets and shop­ping, to name a few, with chan­nels cre­ated through con­tent from both staffers and strate­gic part­ners. The Sacra­mento Bee is try­ing some­thing sim­i­lar with Sacra­mento Connect.

• The Char­lotte Observer will deliver a news­pa­per for young read­ers in a Face­book format.

None of the projects goes as far as I’ve advo­cated in urg­ing news­pa­pers to open up their sites to become “open com­mu­nity plat­forms” expos­ing the rich, wide-ranging con­ver­sa­tions and activ­i­ties tak­ing place in the civic town­square. But sparks of blue-sky think­ing flew freely through­out the three days.

Fail­ure is an option

Almost any­one who lives within Sil­i­con Val­ley has become famil­iar with the mantra of “fail often, but fail fast.” It means that if you’re not con­stantly inno­vat­ing and try­ing new approaches — most of which won’t ulti­mately pan out — then you’re not open­ing your­self up to big suc­cesses. Cre­ative fail­ure is an inevitable, even wel­come, part of the process.

Paul Gillin riffs on a related sub­ject in his blog entry In praise of fail­ure:

Social media offers unprece­dented ways to avert this syn­drome, or at least to cut it short. By lis­ten­ing to cus­tomers, we can iden­tify and fix short­com­ings much ear­lier in the prod­uct life­cy­cle. By engag­ing in con­tin­u­ous dia­logue, we are more likely to hit the mar­ket head on with new prod­ucts. If we don’t let fail­ure become some kind of ref­er­en­dum on our self-worth, then we are much freer to experiment.

That nails it. News­pa­pers have tra­di­tion­ally been very con­ser­v­a­tive insti­tu­tions when it comes to embrac­ing change. That may prove to be their undo­ing — but not if enough edi­tors are allowed to paint the sky blue.

Related:

• Michele McLel­lan: Cre­ative car­nage: social media takeaways

• See the #kdm­cleader tweets from this week

• Paul Gillin: Get­ting Over Fear of Fail­ure to Make Rapid Deci­sions (slide show)

• Paul Gillin: Con­ver­sa­tion mar­ket­ing for news­pa­pers (slide show)

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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