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It's hardly unusual for a newspaper newsroom to reconfigure as changing times and audiences demand it. What I find interesting is how the leadership of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is going about it. Editor Marty Kaiser and Managing Editor George Stanley developed a News Gathering Task Force at the end of 2007. Within months, the task force researched and rallied support for the paper's successful Breaking News Hub, a newsroom team dedicated to producing a steady stream of stories for the Web and the paper, with an emphasis on breaking news.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel The News Hub within the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel newsroom

Again, hubs or continuous news desks aren't extraordinary these days. But giving staff members a real voice in change management is. Some leaders are disinclined to share power. Some feel tough times demand top-down decision-making. That's what makes the Journal Sentinel model noteworthy.

Don't look for the usual management suspects on the 12-person Task Force. It's led by Web-savvy political reporter Greg Borowski and right from the start, it featured a cross-section of word and visual folks from across the paper and Web site: business, sports, features and investigative reporters, an art critic, a photographer, a photo editor, an online producer and the metro editor.

Some are young, some are veterans. What they have in common: They're early adopters and innovators, they're respected for their expertise and their enthusiasm -- and they work and play well with others. Really well. The Breaking News Hub is just one victory. Their work continues. Stanley shared the News Gathering Task Force story at our recent "Leadership for the 24/7 Newsroom" seminar at Poynter. Here's what he told me:

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In preparing for the seminar, Stanley asked the team for feedback on why it succeeded in accelerating the Breaking News Hub launch. Greg Borowski's summary could have come out of a change management textbook, which is why I am sharing it.

• Autonomy: You guys gave us a general charge; we set the more specific direction.
• Support: We had good support as we moved through this -- and continue to move through this.
• Staff-wide input: The process has been very open. We've sought newsroom feedback, distilled common themes, identified issues to tackle and worked as a team to do it. The input also came as all proposals were in the draft stage, increasing buy-in and avoiding folks (i.e., managers) from being surprised. One rule: No blind-siding folks.
• Diverse newsroom representation: We had folks from all departments, each bringing a different perspective and expertise to it.
• Deliberate process: We did research, got feedback, drafted a plan, got feedback, refined the plan and then submitted the plan. We set out to find ways where we could make basic changes that would lead to immediate results. We identified what we do now, what the hurdles are and what would change. We tried to keep proposals to a single page.
• Momentum: By tackling things piece by piece, we could get some "quick wins." We were able to get started on things right ways, not waiting for a 50-page report in six months. This also kept us flexible to adopt to changing needs.
• Communication: Lots of updates for the entire staff and within the committee. This minimized speculation, rumors, hard feeldings. Again, we had the mantra of no surprises.
• An optimistic view: We looked at each issue from the perspective of: What do we do well? What can we do better? What stands in our way?

Each of those points underscores why some change initiatives succeed and others wither. Today's managers, like Kaiser and Stanley, are wise to identify smart and collegial people on staff and give them license to lead.