If there was an overarching theme at this year's Online News Association conference (which took place in San Francisco this past weekend), it was this: Embrace failure.

Speaker after speaker repeated the same message: To figure out what works in the digital world, to find sustainability, news organizations have to be willing to try stuff knowing that a bunch of it might not work and be OK when projects fail.

From VoiceofSanDiego.com CEO Scott Lewis:

"Vision isn't seeing exactly what will happen it's seeing what needs to happen to prepare for it.... There are so many people that want to write out exactly how it's going to go for the first year, and they think that that's what a business plan is, and if it skews, they think they've failed or something.... Understand that mistakes are good and that being smart is also knowing that you may have screwed up. You may not know everything. Being able to do difficult things like change direction or fire people or having to make tough decisions that make you look like you made a bad decision before are things you just have to deal with."

From Ann Grimes, acting director, Stanford University Graduate Program in Journalism:

"One of the toughest things we've seen with our students, and I think with journalists who try to move from reporting to the business side, is they think they know the answer. One of the things we get our students to do is to fail early and often—take that idea, test it out, get feedback, come up with a new prototype, go back out, get more feedback, iterate all over again, get more feedback, and then refine your idea according to what your users or customers [tell you]."

More insights, after the jump.

From Jesse James Garrett, President of Adapative Path, a strategy and design consultancy that has worked with the Economist, NPR, and CNN:

"Try things out and throw things out. Be willing to experiment with different kinds of approaches and build into those initiatives success and failure criteria. If things don't meet those standards, in terms of feedback you get from users or the interest that you get, throw them out and try a different approach. By constantly iterating and evolving the approach that you take, rather than falling into a few set patterns, you can continue to push the boundaries and discover the different ways that you can deliver news online and meet the needs of people who are turning to you."

From Lee Byron, an interactive information designer at Facebook:

"Nobody is doing it right. And that's because 'right' is a goal that can never be attained. The right answer is always proven wrong as soon as it's implemented and someone says, 'Yeah, but why not this way?' 'Always right' is something you should aim for, but it"s not a destination."

From keynoter Ev Williams, CEO of Twitter:

"I get motivated somewhat by the world telling me I'm going to fail."