Tragic Tale No.006

This is the sixth in a series of tragic transformation tales, shared by a diverse group of business leaders, in conjunction with the launch of Angie’s book, TransformAble: How to Perform Death-Defying Feats of Business Transformation.

Today I’m talking to Maggie Langrick, CEO and Publisher at Wonderwell, as she revisits a tragic transformation from her past.

Angie: Business transformation, across any industry, has common challenges and failure points. Maggie, you have a fascinating story about a newspaper taking on the digital world, and how things went very, very awry.

Maggie: Yes, I was a newspaper editor, working at a metro daily newspaper. We needed to modernize the newsroom and save the fortunes of the company as reader habits shifted from the print product to getting their news online.

Angie: A huge change in consumer behavior and expectations, going to digital news.

Maggie: The entire news-gathering industry was slow to embrace digital media, and our paper was no exception—management’s heads were in the sand. When print advertising revenues plummeted after the 2008 economic crash, we suddenly found ourselves behind the 8-ball, pivoting in a panic to replace lost print ad revenue with digital ads. Unfortunately, not only did we not have any experience dealing with a 24-hour news cycle, the value of digital advertising versus print ad revenue was a dime to the dollar.

Angie: Disruption had reached a crisis point and you needed to play catch up. That change to digital is no trivial change. That would have required transforming your entire business model—and people system—from consumer experience to organizational design. And urgently.

Maggie: Exactly, we had no time to lose, but tragically a lot of time was lost. Reporters and editors refused to accept that many aspects of their jobs had to change, that both what we were doing needed to change as well as how we would do it. It was a massive cultural transformation, first and foremost—a cultural transformation that never succeeded, instead pitting those who wanted to forge ahead into the future against those who were determined to cling to the past. This was a transformation that ultimately failed, contributing to the rapid decline of the newspaper instead of saving it.

Angie: Tell me about how it all went down.

Maggie: I remember the day our publisher came into the room and announced: “We are no longer to think of ourselves as a newspaper. We will now be a digital-first newsroom.” In that same meeting, he referred to our reporting as “content.” This got everyone’s hackles up. You could feel the bristling in the room. You have to understand, people were attached to the vocation of the newspaperman or woman. A free press is the cornerstone of democracy, and here was the publisher using language that appeared to reduce our journalism to clickbait fodder.

Angie: Whoa. So from the very start, in that first critical leadership communication, there was a massive misstep. They struck a blow right at the heart of people’s sense of purpose. But first they revealed an unknown future—that is scary enough. And in almost the next breath, their vocation—moreover, their very self-identity—is denigrated. Insult added to injury.

Maggie: Right. And then it got worse. There was no money to hire experienced web editors, so reporters were taken out of the field and put on the web to “feed the beast” with quick updates all day instead of writing full stories, which they found super demoralizing.

Angie: What were the executives thinking? There was clearly a lack of transformation know-how. People are at the heart of any successful transformation. Here there appears to be very little thought for people at all—how they feel, how they are motivated, how to help them along the journey to the new digital world of news. Did they not realize this was a massive business transformation that required transforming the underlying system of people?

Maggie: I don’t know if the company executives appreciated the magnitude of the transformation, but I do know that there was very little attention paid to the impact on the workforce.

Angie: An ominous beginning. What else was involved in making the transformation? I’m guessing some significant changes in work processes and technology?

Maggie: Yes, just when morale was at an all-time low, our management decided to put the whole newsroom on new software that completely changed our workflows and required reporters to take on new tasks, like selecting and digitally managing the photos that ran with their stories. It was just awful software—clunky, buggy, and unwieldy.

Angie: Was it hard for everyone?

Maggie: Younger workers picked up on the technology pretty quickly, but many of the older reporters and editors just would not or could not get to grips with it.

Angie: Was the training that bad? It’s common for companies to trivialize and underinvest in helping employees immerse themselves in the new world. How was that handled by leadership?

Maggie: The training was not great, but it was especially ineffective because there was no buy-in from the senior journalists, who felt really undervalued and disrespected. I think they were also intimidated by the technology and maybe embarrassed by their own inexperience with it. Here were seasoned journalists who should have been looked up to as mentors by the cub reporters, and instead they were being asked to go on a massive tech learning curve that they were disadvantaged by due to their age.

Angie: But did they eventually get there?

Maggie: A percentage of these people simply refused to learn the new systems. They would leave their digital packages incomplete, insisting “this software doesn’t work for me.” Unfortunately, this practice was permitted by management, and the more tech-savvy reporters had to pick up their slack.

Angie: They allowed this? Now the employees who are trying to adopt the new tools and processes are essentially being punished. And those unable or unwilling to adapt are finding their counterproductive behaviors—in fact, harmful behaviors—accepted.

Maggie: The entire newsroom was splintered into factions. One group that was disdainful of the new ways and only hardened in this stance as time passed. Another group, that was good at the new system, and therefore burdened with all the uploads and the helping and training of others. And then a third group: tech-savvy interns and recent grads who could shoot photos and videos, edit them, upload, and who were Twitter natives… They were running circles around the older folks on the web and with the new software, but they were largely part-time and couldn’t get hired fulltime given all the employees with long tenure. Everyone felt that they were being treated terribly unfairly.

Angie: Three factions, all of them disgruntled at a critical time in the newspaper’s existence. The internet is not going away, new competitors are emerging, and they need to change. This is the time when people need to be banding together to take on the world, and yet they are instead breaking apart.

Maggie: All of this was intended to modernize the newsroom and save the fortunes of the company, trying to get ahead of the juggernaut of internet news, but they failed. In your book, you make it clear how much transformation is about rearchitecting the people system, something that was essentially ignored here. Revenues continued to slide and they lost a lot of good people through downsizing, including me, when I finally put my hand up for a buyout and went off to start my own firm. The company ultimately went into receivership, dealt out pay cuts, sold off the printing press, and even had to move out of the flagship downtown offices into a much smaller facility in the suburbs.

Angie: Clearly a tragic ending, driven by a lack of transformation know-how. What did you learn from that experience that has followed you? You now run your own successful publishing business.

Maggie: This experience taught me the value of taking the time and effort to get people to fully operate in the new system. That if you’re going to implement a new system, it’s worth it not to do it by half measures. And if you allow some people to opt out because it’s hard, then you will create a bifurcation that only gets worse over time. It is absolutely worth the investment to do it right.

Angie: A great lesson that many people can learn from. This is a great story, Maggie. Thanks for sharing.

Maggie: Thanks Angie. You know, at the time it just felt like a colossal train wreck, but telling you the story now in light of the insights I learned from your book, I can see so much more clearly just how and where they went wrong.

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Order Angie’s book TransformAble: How to Perform Death-Defying Feats of Business Transformation from your favorite bookseller. 

Angie Tuglus is a transformation expert and executive advisor. She has led numerous business transformations as a former Fortune 500 executive, and has worked in companies ranging from startup to Fortune 10. 

Maggie Langrick is the CEO and Publisher at Wonderwell, an award-winning hybrid publishing company specializing in nonfiction books that help, heal and inspire. She founded the company (then called LifeTree) in 2013 after a 15-year career as an editor for newspapers and magazines in Vancouver and London. Learn more about Wonderwell at www.wonderwell.press 
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© 2021 Angie Tuglus