Does Anything Good Happen at Executive Summits?

It’s amusing to see all the attention being paid in the blogosphere to the one-day gathering of newspaper industry CEOs last week. It’s partly because of how badly managed it was: First it gets announced in a way that makes it look like an event that urgently needs to produce results to save the industry. Then afterwards, the buzz is that nothing really happened, and everyone clams up.

But here’s the question: Have an industry’s CEOs ever gotten together and come up with a great idea for the future that could benefit all of them? Especially in the newspaper industry, there’s not much of a track record of this. But in other industries too, bosses rarely get together and come up with creative joint ideas, unless it’s something illegal.

Probably a more effective (and energizing) meeting would have been one bringing together all the talented journalists and businesspeople the industry has laid off. It’s the people with nothing to lose or protect who will come up with the really good ideas for the future of print and online news. Here’s an idea from one of the big blogging platforms that tries to reach out to all that talent – hope there are others that actually get some new businesses started.