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It’s official: Our Rethinking leader is departing

March 4, 2008 | Author: cobrien | Filed under: Milestones

Matt Mansfield, who has been leading our efforts to Rethink the Merc, has announced he’s accepted a buyout and is leaving the Mercury News after 8 years. Matt was most recently deputy managing editor and business development director.

You can read a profile of Matt here, written by a Merc alum, Jonathan Berlin. But let me highlight from that story a post mortem Matt gave on our process here: 

“As many people know, I’ve been working on a rethinking project here. Our aim was to use a great deal of observational research to reposition our product portfolio as massive change in media use has hit the newspaper industry hard.

That’s a fancy way of saying we needed to do something — and we needed to do it quick!

Look, I’ve been on the front lines of the online revolution. I live in Silicon Valley, after all. My faith in what we do is stronger than ever.

But because I have grown up loving digital media, I know the imperative for change demands a different look at how we do business as journalists. I hope the industry begins to confront that in meaningful ways.

I have immense interest in and passion for the news, information, entertainment, technology and social media spaces.

I also know that building new audience segments is more important than ever because it helps define the overall impact of our media reach. So that means we have got to create some niche products that will draw in people who might never look at the traditional paper.

Trust me, I know that newspapers are in a tough market position because so much of the existing revenue model depends on the part of the franchise that’s getting less audience reach than it used to. I don’t side, however, with all the traditional folks who think that, if we hope and pray long enough, the good old days might just return. They won’t.

Media use has fundamentally changed. Smart people see this, both in that macro sense when they look out at the world and in the micro sense when they check out their own habits. We need to make media products that we want to use, and that other people might want to use even if we don’t.

For all those reasons, doing nothing (often the advice I hear) seems like doing harm. We must do something. Anything.

My advice: Try as many things as your organization can afford. And give until it hurts.”

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