• The Guardian, Tuesday, July 8, 2008 9:33 AM

U.S. newspapers today are obsessed with creativity and innovation, but they need to focus more on just producing good journalism, according to Richard Aregood, media critic at British paper The Guardian.

"Corporations love creativity. They say so all the time. Some, like the Chicago Tribune, even have a guy in charge of innovations," he writes. The problem is that truly creative people are frequently not team players and "are often total pains in the ass who frustrate traditional managers because they keep bringing up new things to think about."

In the end, the delivery system doesn't matter, whether it is "print, Internet, carrier pigeons," he says. People need and want news. People enjoy having something good to read. It doesn't help matters when the people at the top "try to be creative without having a clue what it means."

Read the whole story at The Guardian »