In praise of engineers and scientists: their failures are learning experiences

Apollo 13 engineers celebrate safe splashdown.
NASA photo, April 1970. NBC News via AP

Versión en español aquí.

Journalists who are starting their own digital media should learn to think more like engineers and scientists. For them, solving a problem involves repeated trial and error. They view each step not as a failure but as a learning experience.

Engineers and scientists were the heroes of "Apollo 13," both in the movie and in real life.  They searched frantically against the clock to find ways to keep the damaged spacecraft's crew alive and return them safely to Earth.

They had to improvise solutions with the imperfect tools on board the spacecraft and experiment with processes they had never tried before. They had a goal but they weren't sure how to get there. So they tried and failed and kept trying. 

There's never enough time or money

Like them, journalists working in a startup will not have the ideal tools at hand nor all the money and time in the world to perfect their web project. Many of the answers they need can be found only by getting their product into the hands of the intended audience. Test it on the audience. On the web, a new product is always in Beta.

How I ran my newspaper monopoly (and Warren Buffett ran his)

Back in the 1960s, before baseball had a designated hitter, I had a paper route. This was a job formerly given to 12-year-olds but now has been taken over by adults.

It was a measure of the daily newspaper's market dominance that a kid who wanted a paper route had to buy it from another kid. Having a paper route was the pre-teen equivalent of owning an NFL franchise, an enviably profitable protected monopoly. Mine was a particular block on a particular street. The price to buy it was equal to one week's collections -- in my case about $40.

In the grand old days of newspaper monopolies, people had only a few places they could get the news -- either a daily newspaper, the nightly TV news or radio. If you wanted to know if the local major league team won and hadn't listened to the game on the radio, you had to stay up till 11 o'clock and wait until the announcer gave the score. Or you waited until the next morning's newspaper arrived.

Journalism students in Madrid told to "go for it"

During a presentation at the Complutense University of Madrid (center), I talked about the new vision of entrepreneurial journalism (center photo) and some of its advocates. One of the attendees created a collage of the people mentioned: (clockwise, from upper left) Clay Shirky of NYU, Dan Gillmor of Arizona State University, Brian Stelter of the New York Times and Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter.

MADRID -- Traditional news media are suffering in Spain, with some 3,500 journalists laid off in the past two years. Add to that the recent news that one of the country’s most prestigious news organizations, Prisa Group, owner of El País newspaper, is laying off 2,500 workers, or nearly one in five.

The dream of journalism students to work for large media organizations is being crushed by economic reality. I urged a group of 150 at the Complutense University in Madrid to start their own digital media and be news entrepreneurs.


I told the students about a number of news entrepreneurs in Latin America, where I worked for three years, and some of the innovative news projects in the U.S., such as Texas Tribune, ProPublica and Voice of San Diego.