eVersity and The Innovator’s Dilemma (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

Believe it or not, they put me on the board of directors of the Alliance of Area Business Publishers, an international association for companies that do what we do here at Arkansas Business — business publications for local markets. I was, therefore, the token editor at the AABP’s winter meeting of publishers and board members last month.

One presenter blew everyone away. His name is Clark Gilbert, and he’s currently CEO of Deseret News Publishing and Deseret Digital Media, which are the print and online news arms of Deseret Management Corp., which is a conglomerate owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. In April, he’ll become president of Brigham Young University-Idaho.

That may sound like a strange career change, but it’s actually a return to academia for Gilbert. He was previously a professor of entrepreneurial management at Harvard Business School, where he was a protégé of fellow BYU graduate Clayton M. Christensen. And Christensen, as devotees of business management literature know, is the author of “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” the 1997 best-seller that introduced the scary idea of “disruptive technologies” that can displace even smartly run, market-dominating companies engaged in legacy industries — like, say, ink-on-paper news or brick-and-mortar colleges.

See the connection?

In his presentation, Gilbert delivered a directive that astounded the publishers: You have to separate your online news — your disruptive technology — from your legacy print news. You have to treat it like a different company. You have to staff it with people who have digital DNA. Online news and print news are different products with different business plans, he said, and their staffs have different jobs to do for different customers.

(At the same meeting last winter, I learned that I’m a digital immigrant and will never think or behave like the younger digital natives. So I understood what Gilbert was saying about me.)

This was astounding to the publishers because it was a 180-degree departure from the “best practice” most had adopted, known in the industry as the “integrated newsroom.” Gilbert brushed off that idea in short order: You may be smart enough to pull it off, he said, but if you do, you’ll be the first. Ever. In any industry. And he and Christensen have done the research that led him to that conclusion.

A sympathetic publisher — not an oxymoron, it turns out — leaned over to me and said, “This must be killing you.” But it really wasn’t, because we had never really figured out a way to integrate print (Arkansas Business, with me as editor) and online (ArkansasBusiness.com, with Lance Turner as editor).

The calls and emails I get about stories that first appear online tell me that the distinction is imperceptible to readers, which suits us fine. That reader response, coupled with Gilbert’s directive, also relieved me of a nagging worry that we weren’t doing this thing right. In fact, our failure to integrate — something we had been told we should do — may help explain why we’ve maintained our print audience while continuing to grow our online audience.

Suddenly I also understood why Walter Hussman’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette often sends two reporters, one print and one online, to cover the same event. It still seems extravagant in an age of dwindling news resources, but maybe not completely crazy. Just as Gilbert says is necessary, Hussman seems to be cutting expenses on the legacy side but not on the digital side. (Even here on our much smaller scale, we’ve shifted some staffing dollars from print to digital.)

Before he was hired to apply his theories to the Deseret organization, Gilbert had led BYU’s foray into online education, much of it designed to serve Mormon students in parts of the globe that don’t have colleges and universities every few miles. And guess what: He says the online university has to be separate from the brick-and-mortar institution. The product is different, the business plan is different, the customer is different.

And the faculty and staff have to be different. Legacy professors think the answer to online learning is to videotape their lectures and post them on YouTube. Needless to say, that’s not the kind of online learning that appeals to the digital natives.

As Gilbert was speaking, I had a light bulb moment: The disputes between the University of Arkansas System, which is plowing ahead with its eVersity program, and the brick-and-mortar campuses were utterly predictable, weren’t they? But to succeed, eVersity will have to operate as an independent unit because, with all due respect, I don’t think the UA is likely to be the first legacy organization ever to master a disruptive technology.

Email Gwen Moritz, editor of Arkansas Business, at GMoritz@ABPG.com.