There’s hope amid the forest fire
I wrote this for the employee newsletter at The Columbian six or seven years ago. At the time, few people found it appropriate or helpful. Not much has changed in the ensuing six or seven years:
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My wife, Kris, comes from a family that owns a cabin on the shores of Lake Chelan.
I thought about the cabin yesterday when I read the e-mail about stress and change, but not because it conjured an image of its serene beauty. I thought about it because earlier this summer a wildfire ravaged the area, causing the entire family to worry about the beloved house.
The fire came at a time when I was staying awake nights worrying about stagnant websites and how to re-invent New Media to cope with a 50 percent cut in resources.
All the while, Kris’s Aunt Margie and Uncle Hugh were e-mailing us pictures of the fire and a diary of events. They asked me to search the web for news stories about the fire, and I couldn’t find many. It occurred to me there was a niche to fill, so I started posting the pictures and diary on the web. I was feeling desperate to jumpstart traffic, so what the heck.
The diary drew about 1,000 visits that day. Not a huge number, perhaps, but enough to create record traffic to the site. Much of that traffic “stuck,” coming back again and again. Record traffic. At a total cost of … $0.
Now desperate to hold onto the increased traffic, I kept changing things around, pulling photos out of the community photo albums and doing unconventional things that didn’t cost anything, then repeating anything that customers liked. Traffic kept soaring, smashing previous records. Suddenly, at a time when listservs were buzzing with colleagues moaning about stagnant summer traffic and a lack of resources to combat it, we were setting records. The more chances I took, the more I had fun and felt motivated. I might not have taken so many chances if I hadn’t been forced out of my comfort zone.
So, I take away four morals from this story:
1. The MORE things change to meet our customers’ desires, the LESS stress I feel.
2. It probably doesn’t make sense to pay me to run the websites when I have in-laws who will do it for free.
3. New Media is the proverbial canary in the coal mine. We’re the first to choke on the fundamental changes occurring in our industry. We’ve been the first to endure massive cuts in resources and the first to have to shed our pretenses and embrace change. And we’ve emerged stronger than ever. So will the rest of the company, because the changes we’re fighting are being demanded by our customers.
4. Resources are less important than resourcefulness. And sometimes resources don’t come in the form of FTEs and discretionary budgets. Sometimes, resources come in the form of a little desperation and a wonderful wife from a family with a cabin on the shores of Lake Chelan.
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Not much has changed in the ensuing six or seven years, except that many newspaper execs are even more entrenched in the conservative mindset that is destroying newspapers.
