How fast is fast in journalism today? Fresh off their creation of the Publish2 Election News Network in Knoxville, Tennessee, Publishing 2.0’s Scott Karp and Jack Lail at Knoxnews.com have set a new base time for launching an innovative feature on a newspaper site: 48 hours from start to finish.   

A week before the Tennessee primary, the two brainstormed about using Publish2, Karp’s Web startup, to aggregate election coverage from around Tennessee and the web, and then post it on Knoxnews.com. Lail suggested recruiting some bloggers from the Knoxville Blogger Network to aid the journalists.

Operating on a principle of “keep it simple,” Lail and Karp had the Publish2 Election News Network up and running in 48 hours, subtitling the webpage as “links to the best election news we can find.”

In an article, Lail called the idea an experiment [that’s] a bit out there as far as “news coverage” of an election.” However, it is an experiment that seems to be paying off.

A key lesson from their experiment is that innovation is faster when it is not centralized.  Jack Lail’s is continuing to experiment with Publish2, but rather than call an editorial meeting for each feature he wanted to add, he made the call individually to incorporate the new feature, in this case, a use of the publish2 bookmarking system to tag other relevant blogs onto an existing story.  

As Dave Cohn points out, “Trying stuff is cheaper than deciding whether to try it.” In other words, it is much more effective to experiment than to remain indecisive and miss the boat.

Two other newspapers, The Herald News in New Jersey and thenewstribune.com in Washington, registered almost immediately to incorporate the Publish2 election service in their respective sites.  Both publications (see photo above of The Herald News site) then immediately began changing and upgrading the service, setting an equally fast pace for innovation.

Sources: Publishing 2.0, Random Mumblings