Manage News? Is Your Output "Content" (Or Discontent)?

Virginia Heffernan is The Medium columnist for The New York Times Magazine. Previously she spent four years as a television critic for The New York Times newspaper. Before coming to the newspaper, she wrote for Slate, and before that she was an editor at Harper's and Talk magazines. She makes some assertions I think you need to make sure your people understand are about them and how they do what they do:

• "Content that thrives in the new distribution-and-display systems is suspiciously different from the American popular culture we used to love even 10 years ago...
• "We have to change. We have to develop content that metamorphoses in sync with new ways of experiencing it, disseminating it and monetizing it...
• "It’s not possible to translate or extend traditional analog content like news reports and soap operas into pixels without fundamentally changing them. So we have to invent new forms...
• "All of the fascinating, particular, sometimes beautiful and already quaint ways of organizing words and images that evolved in the previous centuries — music reviews, fashion spreads, page-one news reports, action movies, late-night talk shows — are designed for a world that no longer exists...
• "For 10 years, journalists have hoped to avoid radical job retraining. And who can blame anyone in any profession, midcareer and set in her ways, for avoiding seminars on writing Google-friendly leads or opening her sources to readers? At the same time, a huge number of mainstream journalists have taken to blogging, signed up for Facebook and Twitter, linked to video and experimented with new forms...
• "The fact that articles live in digital form and no longer, primarily, on paper, frees them from certain constraints that seem absolutely normal to old-media people and archaic if not just stupid to everyone else...
• "People who work in traditional media and entertainment ought either to concentrate on the antiquarian quality of their work, cultivating the exclusive audience ... that might pay for craftsmanship. Or they should imagine that they are 19 again: spending a day on Twitter....
• "Then they should think about what content suits these new modes of distribution and could evolve in tandem with them."

The article I lifted these quotes from is titled "Content or Discontent," implying that this change isn't being fully embraced even in the venerable "Times" newsroom. So, you're not alone if you're not yet completely up-to-speed. To get there, three quick questions:

1. How 'flexible' is your most experienced people's approach to keeping your listener up-to-date (in ways you can still package and sell to advertisers without losing audience and attention)?
2. Do you tell great stories, create engaging, viral content?
3. Do your news personalities understand how very important this is, now?