Another plug for RSS, and a great new tool

Like many of you, I suffer from "media overload". Too much news available to consume. Too little time to see it all, much less analyze it for the betterment of myself or my company.

RSS is a great simplifying tool, and now I've got two great products that let me plow through hundreds of targeted, relevant stories from about 120 pre-selected sources of my choosing.

The first tool I've used for over a year. On my Treo smartphone, I use Free News. FreeNews isn't free, alas, but it's worth every penny of the $20 I spend to subscribe every year. FreeNews is a fully-customizable RSS viewer. I can scan headlines and read entire stories quickly, even e-mail them to myself (for future viewing) or share them with others. It's built for one-handed operation (like all Treo/handheld programs should be). If you have a Treo, you need FreeNews.

The second RSS tool I love is new, and I use it on my PC at work and my laptop at home. It's called NetVibes, and it's built on the new Ajax wb-development platform. That means it's sleek, fast, easy to use, and very interactive. NetVibes allows you to customize your own Internet home page. It's the same scheme that "MyYahoo" and other portals have done for a long time, but with those old portals you had to select from a closed set of content choices. With NetVibes, it's built around RSS, and almost all news/information sites (and many blogs) publish RSS feeds today. NetVibes is free, and since it's not a standalone desktop application (but rather a web-app), it shouldn't be a problem for your IT folks. You can even put the latest YouTube videos on your NetVibes page.

Here's a quick look at how RSS headlines are displayed on NetVibes. Click the photo to see a larger screen-grab of my NetVibes home page.

The third week of the month

It's Magazine Sunday here in Texas, and I've got another stack to plow through today. Many of my coworkers know I'm a serial magazine subscriber. It's my one throw-back to old media. Most subscriptions are cheap ($10 a year), and it's easy to send in the postcard to start the subscription. I like to keep up with dozens of topics, so my subscription list reflects that need for variety. There's old-favorites like Sports Illustrated and Texas Monthly, tech/gadget mags like Laptop and Wired, industry mags like Television Week, and business/future-thinking magazines like Fast Company and Business 2.0. My regular favorites, however, are none of those. Though I work in the news business, I love reading The Economist. It's the one weekly news magazine that's filled with news I've not already read (or rewritten for broadcast/web at work). I also love reading The Atlantic.

The third week of the month? It's the week that all the monthly magazines hit my mailbox.

Gotta go, I've got lots to read.

"Good to Great" -- leadership, technology and hedgehogs

These are the last few moments of my 10-day holiday break, which has gone by like a breeze with all the commitments to family and friends. I didn't meet my goal of reading five business books in these 10 days, but I did finish three. I've got the next two books ready to go, and I'll start on them next.

The book I finished tonight is Jim Collins' legendary "Good to Great". How influential is this book? It was published in 2001, and at this moment on Amazon.com, the book is ranking #55 of all books being sold right now.

Here's how "Good to Great" spoke to me, with regarding to the news industry:

Collins writes about the Hedgehog concept, part of which is to determine the answers to three questions:

1. What can our organization be the best in the world at? Finding your answer to that question, and then focusing your resources there, is a key differentiator between good and great companies. It's not just good enough to say "we're really good at TV News". You need to be more specific unless you can say you do TV News better than anyone in the world.
   
2. What are our economic drivers? Nielsens? Always. Hitbox, increasingly. Households, demos. Absolutely. But are all these the right/best indicators, the best way to keep score, so to speak? And will they be in the future?
   
3. What are we truly passionate about? What really turns us on at work? Winning the big breaking news story? Beat the competition in demos in a key daypart?

Collins illustrates theses questions as three interconnecting circles. The area in the middle is where all the circles interconnect. It's where your three answers to the questions above should meet, and it's where you should focus your energy, your talent and your resources.

So that's one lesson, in a nutshell. By the way, buy the book. Now.

Another lesson involves technology, and this is a key one for our business, which is undergoing such a profound change. New news-gathering technology, cameras, edit decks, websites, citizen journalists, backpack journalists, HD. We are in the midst of the fastest tech changes in our industry's history. (It's the same for every other industry too, of course.) One of Collins' key points is to measure technology opportunities against your Hedgehog circles above. If the technology you're evaluating fits the center of your company's three circles, then you should be a pioneer of that technology. You should own that technology. Tech for tech's sake is not the answer. Collins' advocates a "crawl, walk, run" strategy for adopting new technologies. Again, the objective is to evaluate new technologies against the three circles above. For example: should you produce podcasts? If they fit into the answers you created for the Hedgehog questions above, then "yes you should produce podcasts", and you should focus your best resources toward that opportunity.

Finally, what I've saved for last here is what Collins' puts first. The most important thing a "G2G" company leader can do, and should do first, is hire great leaders to work with him. Hire the great people first, then decide where you should go. The companies who have visionary leaders won't sustain greatness if those leaders don't hire great people to work with them. Many companies have achieved short-term greatness, but failed to sustain it when their charismatic leader departed. For a one-day-soon (I hope) news director like myself, this is enormously comforting and challenging at the same time. On the comforting side, I no longer feel like I have to walk in to a newsroom, and on Day 1, pronounce the greatness of my vision that will lead my new newsroom to the promised land. On the challenging side, there's the reality that my most important job (starting on Day 1) is to get the right people in the right jobs, to make sure I'm developing them, challenging them, coaching them, hiring and firing some of them (when necessary), and then listening to them to make sure we're on the right track, and that we stay focused toward achieving the goals we set in front of us.

Did I tell you already to read the book? It's one of the very best I've ever read. For a non-business educated journalist like me, "Good to Great" looks ominous with lots of charts and graphs, and an appendix that's about a 1/4 of the book's total size. But it turns out that "G2G" is one of the easiest and most understandable business books out there.

By the way, there's a whole 'nother (Texas talk) lesson in here called the Flywheel, and how great businesses find their success over a long period of time. Many years, in some cases. Decades, in some success stories like Wal-Mart. Consider then the stations in your own market, and the local ratings race over the years. When the rankings have changed, was it because of something temporal like a new set or a new anchor team? Or was it because of more subtle, fundamental changes taking place inside the newsroom? A commitment to better journalism, or perhaps a long-term focus on hiring and developing the best staff in the market? I've got specific examples of such changes from my travels around the country, but I'll save those for a later post.

On deck on my reading table, "The Long Tail". In the hole: "The World Is Flat [Updated and Expanded]: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century".