Perugia highlight: how to learn from failure in your newsroom

Left to right: Shirish Kulkarni, Chris Moran (Guardian), Anita Zielina (Better Leaders Lab), Steffi Dobmeier (STERN)

Credit: Francesco Cuoccio #ijf25 via Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-ND 4.0).

If we are being honest with ourselves, we all make mistakes. In an candid session at last week's International Journalism Festival in Perugia (12 April), newsroom leaders normalised their mistakes and discussed what positives there are to take from the wreckage.

Power is not always formal

Anita Zielina, founder and CEO of Better Leaders Labs broke down her screw-ups into four buckets: power plays, priorities, preparation disasters, and pain management.

On the power front, she learned the hard way not to gauge power by job titles alone: "I totally failed sometimes to identify the people who actually were powerful and to stakeholder manage them," she admitted, recalling missteps at Stern and NZZ where she ignored key influencers.

Quick tip: figure out who really calls the shots in your newsroom, not just who has the fancy title, and include them in your thinking. They will have been around a long time, earned the respect of their peers and people listen to them when they speak.

Her own battle with procrastination was another hurdle in response to stress management. She acknowledged her less-than-deal response as the boss was to shut down communications.

Quick tip: know your stress triggers and how they affect your work. Leaders, especially, need to stay vocal when things get tough.

Biting off more than you can chew

Chris Moran shared a classic error from the Guardian, as its head of editorial innovation. Its "atomic explainers" – neat little pop-ups with definitions – had solid research, editor love, and fancy data tracking. So what went wrong?

"Whenever editors decided to put a reader question at the bottom of their article, they were committing not just to creating one short piece of content, they were committing for the rest of their natural-born editing lives to continue to keep that up to date," Moran laughs. Even one explainer a day became a nightmare to keep up.

Quick tip: do not underestimate the long-term maintenance of launching new content. Consider if AI could help manage the workload first.

The power of reflection and going rogue

News research fellow Shirish Karkani tackled the frustration of projects meeting a brick wall.

Sometimes, work fails for reasons you could not see coming, like a lack of will at the top to implement difficult projects. Anticipating potential resistance to an unconventional project called Is Work Working in a previous role at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, he kept this project secret as it meant directly involving precarious workers.

It turned out to be one of the biggest stories the Bureau ever published. "We have to be open to failure otherwise no innovation gets done," he argues.

Quick tip: news organisations must carve out time to do feedback sessions, retrospectives and post-mortems: analyse what worked, what did not and the broader implications for future projects and organisational culture.

We used a transcription tool, Good Tape, and a generative AI Gemini, to help structure this article before it was edited by a human

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