The Man Who Saw Tomorrow’s Disruption—and Gave Me Hope for Journalism

Newsrooms, like so many other workplaces, were hit hard by the financial crisis of 2008. I was working as an editor for a division of Canwest, Canada’s largest newspaper and broadcasting company at the time, when it declared bankruptcy the following year. By 2011, I felt the way many other journalists felt at the time: exhausted by an ever-increasing workload, frustrated by the lack of risk taking in my newsroom, and confused by the bleak prospects for an industry that—a decade and a half into the internet era—still couldn’t right itself.

Eager for a break—or a way out—I applied for a Nieman fellowship, a nine-month program at Harvard University, with the intention of learning MBA-speak. Journalists, I felt, needed to regain control over their own destinies, and I wanted to be a part of that solution.

I got the fellowship. Sitting in a packed Harvard Business School classroom at the beginning of the fall semester, I met the professor: Clayton M. Christensen, a 6-foot-8-inch gentle giant with a