Application Assignment Week 2

Personal Example

   Reading Jay Galbraith’s Designing Organizations and his concept of the ‘’Reconfigurable Organization” (Galbraith, 2002), I immediately thought of the news business and the dramatic changes we’ve undertaken to preserve and even grow our market share.  The old model of news was to focus all of our resources on the next show.  If something happened at 2pm in the afternoon, then the viewer would hear about it at 5pm.  The new model is much more interactive with viewers whereas in the “good old days” you had your traditionally solid dinner-time newscasts... or not (go to :58 on the clip, you’ll love it).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOc4XgBespw

Both those gentlemen are no longer in TV.  In fact,  a lot of the old models of news gathering have been swept out.  With the explosion of Facebook and Twitter, news consumers have told us that they want to know what’s happening, when it happens.  Galbraith talked about organizational shapers, one of them being speed.  News consumers no longer want to wait until 10 or 11pm to see what happened today.  They want the information now. To keep up, we had to  reconfigure our organization from a traditional news operation where all resources were focused on a few shows to being a 24/7 content factory.

The strategy of realigning our news organization around this constant flow of content would require change in organizational structure.  We added continuous news managers whose sole responsibility was to update our website, Fox5vegas.com around the clock with breaking local and national news, as well as the latest video from our crews in the field.  In Images of Organization ( Morgan, 1998) the author cited Henry Mintzberg and his five types of organization.  Our newsroom shifted from Mintzberg’s professional bureaucracy where news stories went up the chain from reporter to producer to executive producer to news director to air, to a simple structure, where reporters uploaded video to Facebook, Twitter, and Fox5Vegas.com and then involved the producers and EP’s with what would actually air on our traditional broadcasts.  Those stories are then uploaded to our app so you can check out the news on your smartphone.  

Making sure we could get content out around the clock also took a shift in attitude from our employees.  Each one of us was issued a smartphone and expected to shoot video of significant breaking news (no water skiing squirrels) and upload it to the various platforms as we saw it.  Obviously, reporters would be the biggest users of this technology, but on a big story, like the flooding in Las Vegas this month, we all were posting videos.  Here’s something our Executive Producer shot that was posted to our site within minutes (sorry if you might have to watch an ad first).

http://www.fox5vegas.com/video?autoStart=true&topVideoCatNo=default&clipId=7712134

One can see this approach we’ve taken in Designing Organizations That Are Built to Change (Worley & Lawler 2006).  The authors wrote that the more employees who focused on and interacted with customers, the better the company could adapt to changing environments.  Viewers would be a newsroom’s customers and there are significantly more of us interacting with them using this new model.

Like any other mature industry, the TV news business is under constant threat of extinction.  The advent of cable news in the 80s was the industry’s first big challenge.  There is plenty of evidence to show we have lost certain viewers who get their news solely from the Internet.  But by reconfiguring our newsroom to make Twitter, Facebook, and our website priorities throughout the day, we have stemmed the bleeding and have seen positive ratings trends.  Our new approach gives us more interaction with customers so we can feedback on what they like and don’t like and they in turn, give us some great story ideas.  Survival of our business going forward will depend on how well we can get out in front of the next big technology..