So what are ‘Table Stakes’?

In 2015, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation asked Doug Smith to establish a challenge-centric approach to helping big city legacy newspaper organisations find their way to both journalistic and financial sustainability. They designed the programme, named it “Table Stakes”, and agreed to oversee a pilot that would work with the Philadelphia Media Group (Inquirer, Daily News, philly.com), Dallas Morning News, Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald, and Minneapolis Star Tribune. “Table stakes” comes from a framework of strategy that uses a poker analogy to ask, for any industry/business, what are the table stakes – what’s the ante or minimum needed to even have a seat at the table: that is, to even be in the game. (The framework also asks for ‘differentiators’: that is, how one wins the game.)

In November 2015, Knight Foundation gathered more than sixty executives from these news enterprises, including both newsroom and business side. The American Press Institute to joined in this effort. The programme team shared with them a list of specific roles/skills (e.g. copy editor), work/workflows (e.g. editorial meetings) and technology/tools (e.g. CMS) that would be key to successfully transforming their news rooms and news enterprises.

All participants have been asked to describe what is required to be at ‘table stakes’ versus ‘not table stakes’ for a list of scores of specific roles/skills, work/workflows and technology/tools. The level of detail they provided proved the hypothesis that they did know what was needed. And, when they were asked how their enterprises compared to what they themselves identified as required, they confirmed our second point: they were not doing the needed table stakes.

At that point, the programme shifted into the challenge-centric methodology to use specific performance challenges that could help them close the gaps between being in the new game versus not. Each of the enterprises identified three performance challenges in early 2016 – and they took advantage of the challenge-centric methodology and tools, coaching, peer group gatherings, and other resources to focus on achieving success. By September/October 2016, there had been enough progress – results, capabilities, closing table stakes gaps – that Knight Foundation along with the new Lenfest Institute chose to expand the Table Stakes programme, now officially called the Knight Lenfest Newsroom Initiative, in 2017.

Since then, close to eighty news organisations (newspapers, TV, and radio) have successfully completed the Programme.