Fighting institutional inertia

David Cohn has an interesting post which rhymes with my post on why change in the newsroom is so hard. Among other things, he says:

"The fate of newspapers isn't the fault of any individual editor, reporter, publisher, etc. They are all acting within the confines of institutions. Newspapers are industrial age institutions with inertia that could pummel an elephant. To use an analogy: They operate like the military. It might not be so strict that reporters have to salute their superiors - but there is a chain of command, an expected means of behavior and decisions must go through the proper channels. As a result - newspapers turn like battleships and even implementing one line of code can take upwards of six months."

This also gels with what I wrote on media and disruptive technology and especially the part about The Entrenched Player's Dillema (a post in which I was really just playing around with ideas, but found it a very useful thought experiment which I will return to from a different angle soon).

Another of my favourite explanations of why the media industry sometimes is slow to catch on is this one, which I've taken from Paal Leveraas (unfortunately I don't have a direct link to the post I found it it):

"We stand in the stream of events, while busy chasing deadlines the world changes and we are too busy to notice the change."