Experiments don’t always go according to plan. Here’s how to keep projects on track.
P. Kim Bui, API’s Better News,
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Look at unexpected occurrences as opportunities for your projects. This is a series on Better News to a) showcase innovative/experimental ideas that emerge from the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative and b) share replicable tactics that benefit the news industry as a whole.
This piece was inspired by the American Press Institute’s Connection + Collaboration Learning Cohort and Revenue Experiments Learning Cohort, both held in 2025 for alumni of the U.S.-based Table Stakes Local News Transformation Program.
More from API’s 2025 learning cohorts for Table Stakes alumni:
Tiny experiments can add up to big changes in any organization. Experiments allow news organizations to try, fail or succeed and learn quickly and without much risk.
You set goals, design your strategies and make a plan to track your outcomes. You build a coalition of the willing as you share what you’re trying to test with others.
And yet, even when you’re ready with supportive stakeholders and the right conditions — something may throw your experiment off course.
However, with some planning and forethought, you can design experiments that are flexible enough to adapt to whatever gets thrown your way.
An introduction to change management
Navigating change is tricky enough that it is its own specialty: Change management.
Experiments, sometimes called sprints, are part of any project management strategy. They’re short, quick tests of ideas that make progress toward a more complete project. Change management is the people side of dealing with products and projects. It’s how you work within your organization to introduce and facilitate change.
Facilitating change is part of any project, but creating a change mindset in your news organization will affect the overall culture — making necessary shifts easier over time. In short: project management is how you get from one state to another. Change management is how you bring everyone else along from one state to another.
In journalism, where the pressure for change is never-ending, it’s imperative to get people on board.
“No one’s immune from where the industry is headed, where the dollars are headed, the pressures on print (and other legacy products),” said Arvid Tchivzhel, chief strategy officer for the Bangor Daily News in Maine.
Poke around in the arena of change management and you’ll find infinite models and matrices from experts. Almost all of them, however, address two things: How you communicate with others (whether they’re resistant or excited) and how you structure flexibility within the organization or project.
News organizations in API’s learning cohorts for Table Stakes alumni encountered curveballs with personnel they didn’t expect: unexpected staff changes, changing return-to-office policies, mixed responses to new initiatives and more.
Four news leaders shared how they navigated communication and built flexibility into their months-long challenge experiments.
Navigating staff changes
Tom Lappas, publisher of the Henrico Citizen in Virginia, starts every project by looking ahead with a critical journalist’s eye. He plans for the worst. He thinks about every person on the project and considers his backup plan if that person moves on to a different project or organization.
“I need to know what they’re doing and who I can transition to,” Lappas said.
It may be seen as a pessimistic approach, but in his small organization, the work falls on his shoulders if there’s no backup plan. With few people to delegate to, Lappas tries to think critically about capacity in case something happens.
“I think you have to be very clear in what your expectations are of each employee,” he said. He asks himself: “Do we have capacity among these people to actually handle something new and if so, what is it that I’m gonna expect them to give up or ask them to give up?’’
Case in point: In the middle of relaunching a Restaurant Week, his primary salesperson parted ways with the organization. Lappas evaluated his workload along with the responsibilities of four other staff members and found the best split that everyone could handle. He was able to be more flexible because he had considered workload and capacity early on.
Ensuring a smooth handoff also helps. The departing salesperson provided a spreadsheet with contact information for potential warm leads and detailed notes on interactions with restaurants and potential sponsors.
Even if it seems like there’s no room in the timeline, pausing and gathering before you pivot is necessary.
In Bangor, Tchivzhel and the newsroom launched a paid politics newsletter. Then, a pivotal member of the team passed away. It was important that the team took time to process the loss, no matter the delay to the project.
“We were more concerned about … how do we manage it from an emotional standpoint versus maybe the marketing standpoint,” Tchivzhel said. “It took a while just to recover.”
That intentional step was helpful, especially for people like Tchivzhel who interacted with that colleague every day.
Luckily, the team already set up efficiencies that gave them flexibility during this time. For example, some of the newsletter’s marketing messages were automated. So while a few planned emails were shelved, the minimum viable product was still met on the marketing end.
“Having documentation, things that can be automated,” Tchivzhel said, “all those things are just good for the long term.”
Communicating with intention
A team of Knox News reporters in Tennessee launched a number of new staff engagement initiatives such as lunches and onboarding activities. The group gathered together once a week to talk through ideas and what they could try next to build connection in the newsroom.
However, they realized the newsroom didn’t fully understand how these ideas came to be, resulting in some resistance and skepticism of the new efforts.
“It was kind of a big realization of like, oh, we really, really need to actively be intentional,” reporter Allie Feinberg said, as well as “keeping other people informed of ‘here’s what we talked about in this meeting.’”
While it helped that the stakeholders in the project included reporters and producers, what made the most difference was adjusting their rollouts to include more listening and flexibility. Feinberg said the team tried to sit down and understand what was behind the skepticism.
“Whether or not you understand that reason or can relate to or agree with that reason,” she said, “you can validate them.”
Changing the process to include more transparency helped the group in Knoxville. Flexibility in how they talked about the project became one of their biggest lessons.
Embracing happenstance
There’s a theory posited by a career theorist John Krumboltz. Happenstance theory boils down to this: Many of us believe that planning will bring success, but most of our career’s big stepping stones happen because of unpredictable occurrences. The key is to view those occurrences as opportunities.
The Salt Lake Tribune cultivated a perspective around projects that makes the team more resilient. During a pilot experiment for live event formats, a few staff members left and others were hired as the newsroom went through a strategic shift. Ciel Hunter, chief development officer, said taking small risks and giving time for tweaks and adjustments was crucial.
“I absolutely do love the grand big experiments,” she said. “But I think there’s a lot to be said about continuing to make sure you’re [improving] on what you consider to be the basics that you already have under control.”
Take that thinking to your projects. Something will happen. If you’ve planned enough, you can take that unexpected thing and turn it into an opportunity.
Four lessons to remember
Anticipating change can make any project run more smoothly, even if nothing goes wrong. Here are a few ideas to keep in mind when planning your next project:
- Do the pre-work: Steps like documentation and planning to mitigate risk can be onerous but helpful to remind you of where your project started, especially when you’re evaluating where it needs to go.
- Build in constant communication: The team at Bangor Daily News met weekly to run through status updates, and aimed to talk about questions and issues immediately. In the week before launching a new premium newsletter product, they met every day. What’s the best cadence for communicating at different phases of your project?
- Look for the lesson in the unexpected: When something throws your team off course, pause and take stock of what you can learn and how you can adjust. Turn happenstance into opportunity.
- Keep experiments limited: In retrospect, the team in Knoxville thinks that it would have been better if they had launched one to two initiatives first and waited to get feedback, instead of implementing every idea quickly. Limiting risk means a limited impact if something doesn’t work as expected.