Second in a series on Media innovation.

It’s happening. Agile is finally meeting media.

I noticed the trickle down about a week or two ago when Tim O’Reilly wrote about what happens when book publishing meets agile. Then, yesterday, I read a piece Ben Palmer from Barbarian Group, an up and coming NY webdev firm, had in AdWeek, “Agile in Adland.” Two mentions in a week: must be a trend, right?

Agile is not Flex

OK trendsters, if you don’t know Agile—sometimes called XP or Scrum; see your Wikipedia for the all important shadings—now’s the time. To begin with, Agile may be flexible but it has nothing to do with Flex (Adobe’s asynchronously data-driven version of Flash).

Agile is all about process. It began as the revolt of a bunch of software developers who were tired of the rigid hierachy that propelled most development through the early 1990s, and by 2001 were frustrated enough with that pseudo-military mindset—the so-called “waterfall process”—to set down their ideas in the Agile Manifesto (Shades of 1962’s Port Huron Statement if you ask me—and no I wasn’t around then!)

The seventeen (yep, 17) guys (yep, guys) who wrote that manifesto were in flight flight from the traditional hierarchical process of product management that basically aims to finish a project with military precision (is that an oxymoron?). The so-called “waterfall method” sets development in strict step order: from business requirements to func spec to code, design, content creation, and qa, etc—a strictly enforced product management demarche that leads, hopefully and purposefully, to a launch.

Agile, in contrast, focuses on getting stuff done in and through a group process that emphasizes progress over documentation, collaboration over silos. Instead of aiming for the Mission Accomplished banner over the ship’s prow, Agile posits that end products never really come to an end, but are rather destined for  a lifetime of lifecycle iterations. (Shades of Google’s infinite beta.)

That process actually begins on day one of development when a team—if you’re lucky, a truly self-organized, self-assembling group—comes together to tackle a project, a problem, in a closed, face-to-face working environment designed to lash together individuals across the silos: all the internal customers of a project in one place. Sales and marketers. Coders and designers. UX/IA folks and content strategists. As Dr. Bronner says: All One.

Projects are drafted as “epics” and “stories,” planned in “backlogs” (before there are actual backlogs) and then worked through  “sprints” and daily “scrums.” Working face to face, bringing business owners in contact with business creators, getting stuff done on a daily basis together: these are just some of the adaptive realities of the Agile and scrum process.

But notice that I said nothing about Business and Edit. The church/state divide that inhibits media innovation has been immune to organizational as well as editorial change. These articles by O’Reilly and Ben Palmer may mark the start of some real change in this regard.

Making media agile

indeed, imagine magazine editing and book publishing were run this way. (Newspapers represent different problems.) Not just on the digital “side” where, already, some  companies have already adopted Agile, but in the strategic allocation of resources that combine content creation with digital output. That’s right: what would happen if you put marketers and editors and coders and business managers together in a room to work on projects all the time, not just four (two?) times a year? Lots of big companies pay lip service to teams and to restructuring around teams, but there’s no process around that decision or around the team work environment.

The implications are massive, and they run directly to the kind of Luceian survivals of Church/State Business/Edit wall separation that still, madly, survive in traditional editorial businesses (and nowhere else more than in newspapers). Mind you, I’m not advocating the dismantling of this structure. I’m questioning its process.

Image via Wikipedia

Take book publishing. What would happen if we began to think of acquisitions not only as bets on a title’s author based on previous sales, other comps, and sniff, but rather on the constellation of natural community resources that clearly attach to a title? You can see obvious relationships to almost any non-fiction trade title, fiction a little less so. A little while ago I was in someone’s office and picked up the first book on his desk to illustrate the point: It was a forthcoming title by a mom with addiction problems. Bingo: pre-assembled communities of interest around addiction and parenting. Now instead of making the acquisition and then letting the author go away for a year or two to write that book, what other marketing resources in the house could be marshalled to support the book’s publication when it happens? What Twittstreams exist or can be created by the author to support this book? What blogs can the author create or manage or make sure his feed gets to? How can we create a place in the publisher’s own site to actively support the pre-sale and post-publication addenda to the book? Yes, we’ll need to rethink the business assumptions of p-books and e-books and the costs and revenues of all this new activity, but it’s better than wallowing in the duck ‘n’ cover fear that e-books are coming and will ruin p-books (or, ridiculously, that e-books won’t survive).

One more thing to notice: as workflow, this is not a once in a lifetime event but rather an ongoing cooperative, collaboratve process.

Magazine publishing makes that ongoingness even more tantalizing: How do we think through each and every article as an opportunity to catalyze the preexisting community an article captures within various publication frequencies? (And yes, I am most definitely thinking print here, but also not only print.) How do we bring photography to the writing process from assignment day? How should the writing be angled considering the mix of other pieces in an issue? What online elements—blogs, twitterstreams, interactive tools, live online panels (remember them?), etc.—should advance the story? What sources can be pulled in that the writer doesn’t have access to. What resources does the title have that the writer wouldn’t know about. What links can we aggregate around the story? What business can be sold against the story (travel ads for “Escape from New York,” in the  New York magazine, for example)?

Yes there will be times when business considerations will need to be looked at by editorial and vice versa: so how do you set processes and practices in place to ensure a free editorial culture? This is where it gets tricky with newspapers. Business side considerations may be welcome online but at the print entity, still behind its cordon sanitaire—I’m thinking more about newspapers like the NY Daily News for example, where the edit side sits on the other side of the building from webdev and then the other side still from business—they’re nowhere to be found.

Finally, these adaptive elements need to be considered against the entire lifecycle of a book and possibly even a story. Writers do lots of revisions; revisioning now needs to take place pre- and post-publication. This is blog country. Does it make sense for a weekly? For a monthly? What kinds of resources need to be applied here. To my mind it’s kind of a no-brainer that you’d want to do this—except for the obvious and glaring remunerative question: are you going to keep paying writers and editors for continual updates? (The answer is probably that you do it on a rev share based on continuing impressions.)

Beyond organizational happy talk

If you read this and you say, my edit organization is already Agile, already in Scrum mode—and you can do it with a straight face after reading this, cool for you. But for those who do the happy talk of collaboration without set processes, it’s time to stop bellyaching that there’s no innovation in media when the tools are lying all around you. Publishers and editors of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your paper.

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