OJR: The Online Journalism Review

David LaFontaine

Los Angeles, California

I've been a journalist since back when cut & paste meant Exacto knives and rubber cement (what can I say - the college newspaper I worked at was a little backward at the time). I've worked at the Arizona Republic and Caracas Daily Journal and currently freelance from Los Angeles.

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These articles are the work of their author, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of nor an assignment by OJR.

How General Motors refused to change, and what newspapers can learn from that example

March 31, 2010
[Editor's note: Dave LaFontaine's been observing online news for years, and has spoken at our OJR conferences for news entrepreneurs in the past. He wrote this piece for his personal blog and it impressed me so much that I wanted to bring it to the OJR audience.]

I strongly urge you to listen to this great piece from This American Life about the NUMMI auto plant in Fremont.

It's about how the U.S. auto industry could have saved itself by actually paying attention to the way its business was eroding, and listening to the people who came back from Japan and transformed the Fremont plant from a place that was "like a prison … with sex, drugs and alcohol freely indulged in during the working day … where the workers maliciously sabotaged cars, and the managers didn't care, as long as they got their bonuses for churning out pure numbers…"

…into a place where the workers actually looked forward to coming to work each day, and where the quality of the cars they turned out was so high, that even now, 22 years later, many of those cars are still on the road. NUMMI stands for "New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc." and there is an excellent Wikipedia entry about it, if you want to get a little more background.

The situation bears a strong resemblance to the newspaper industry, and the reason papers are in the same place as the auto industry. Let's take a look at the places where the news industry and the auto industry screwed up: More...

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Old-school community journalism shows: It's a wonderful 'Light'

August 25, 2005
A legendary print weekly offers online publishers important lessons on how to earn the respect and support of the communities they cover.

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