Building belief in a news mission

CLIENT: Savannah Morning News
CHALLENGE: Align corporate, site management, employees and the community around goals and values.
RAPIDCHANGE ASSETS: Scenario Planning, Four I Performance Management System, Breakthrough Leadership, Community Facilitation.


When Rexanna Lester and Dan Suwyn showed up at the Savannah, Ga., Morning News, in the mid-1990s, they found employees who had largely bought into a belief their corporate owners did not want them to produce a quality newspaper – they just wanted them to make as much money as possible.

Of course, there are a number of ways to define quality. Unfortunately, management and employees at the Savannah site hadn't had that conversation.

Employees saw the newspaper as a cash cow being overly milked by its owners. It had been years since the owners had invested much, if any, money in the physical plant, equipment or image of the newspaper. Management indicated that employees had out-sized ambitions for a newspaper its size. If they wanted more capital investment, they needed to demonstrate their product was growing in audience and profit.

Savannah, the city, was growing and there was more advertising revenue coming in. The challengers, however, were getting more aggressive. Competition from television was growing and there were now hundreds of channels, not just three or four. And this thing called the Internet was starting to take hold.

The industry was starting to feel under siege and those who reported the news all of a sudden had to face the financial realities that newspapers were a business – not a public trust or a non-profit.

“We had to shake loose the idea that a newspaper couldn’t practice quality journalism and make money at the same time,” Suwyn said. “We controlled how good we were; we made the daily decisions that determined the quality of our work. We had a lot more power than we thought we did.”

That was the founding principle of what became known as the “Big Brain” theory, a collective of many players and skill sets that was developed with the help of the RapidChange Group. The 2002 book, “Leading by Example,” published by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, described it this way:

It starts at the top of the newsroom with Rexanna Lester and Dan Suwyn. Forget the managing up and managing down training for these two. They are a team; they manage together. They complement, respect and support each other.

Lester and Suwyn do have different personalities, which is part of the reason for their success as a team. Lester is vibrant and a self-anointed idealist. Suwyn is more cerebral.

The two editors finish each other’s sentences as they explain a management approach that begins with this premise: “We are only as good as the quality of our conversations.”

Suwyn speaks analytically about how newsroom teams examine issues and how he and Lester morphed management ideas from different industries to fit their newspaper.

Lester, a consensus builder who spends a lot of time listening to her community, says it differently.

“You have to hire people you like to talk to and then listen to them,” she says.

Lester and Suwyn blew up the old newsroom structure that pitted departments against each other and reinforced a “silo” mentality. Performance reviews were redone so they were based on the company’s values and goals going forward.

These kinds of changes didn’t suit everyone. Some staff left. Most stayed.

Most important, the remaining staff members were given latitude to do their work and encouraged to be creative.

“Lester said, ‘Keep doing great work,’ “ said former investigations editor David Donald. “Dan understood that for years the paper would address only the concerns of the white power structure – and that’s not smart for anyone.”

So what did this approach produce:

    • Aging Matters – a civic journalism project and consumer guide about how an influx of senior citizens moving to Savannah was changing the political, demographic, medical and philanthropic landscape of the city. In addition to winning the Pew Trust’s Batten Award, the stories helped the city and county develop a blueprint for addressing senior and retirement issues as an economic development tool.

    • Vision 2010 – an national award-winning 18-month education project that engaged the community in exploring solutions to the area’s ailing school system by posing the question: “Imagine it is 2010 and the Savannah-Chatham County public schools are among the best in the country. What do they look like?”

The project spawned extraordinary results, with a still-active citizens’ group that formed a 501c3 foundation that funds teacher and school-driven innovation. The project’s citizen and business members have since become school board members and have reshaped the political debate about education in the community.

    • Water - A project that examined who controls water in the region – a full two-years ahead of the issue that divided South Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Alabama making its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

    • SavannahNow.com - Savannah was an early adopter and groundbreaker of local news on the web, providing ground-breaking website coverage as early as the 1996 Olympic Games. The website, Savannahnow.com, was one of the most recognized local news sites in the country during the late ‘90s and early 2000s, pushing revenue ideas as well as storytelling innovations.

Suwyn’s role focused on the architecture of such projects.

“We start with an ideal and reverse engineer it,” said Suwyn.

Lester says that micro-managing is managing from fear, and results in the most destructive behaviors. Instead, she turned to RapidChange tools normally seen in more forward-thinking businesses. They used scenario planning to look at trends pushing on their industry; audience research to hear the voice of the customer; goal-based management and employee performance system, and RapidChange Facilitator training for leaders.

(Parts of this story were first printed in Leading by Example, copyright 2002, American Society of Newspaper Editors and The Poynter Institute)