June 23, 2008
At Boston.com, a programmer
develops a compelling photo blog
How do you tap ideas from non-journalist staff?
Boston.com has started a terrific photo blog, The Big Picture, to much acclaim. Check out how The Big Picture covers Mars discoveries, the Celtics’ NBA Championship, or Iowa flooding.
Worth reading, too, is this interview with Alan Taylor, the Web programmer who came up with the idea and produces the blog.
That a programmer could be doing journalism at a big outfit like The Boston Globe is an encouraging sign that old-school journalists (and I’m one of them) are opening up to new ideas from outside the traditional club.
Some newsroom leaders have mentioned to me that they have trouble attracting good programmers because of all the bad financial news about the news industry. Taylor offers this counterpoint:
“Yeah, I had a lot of friends who looked at me like i was crazy when I joined the Boston Globe a few years ago. But it’s precisely this sort of opportunity I was hoping for. The access to great storytelling resources, a great platform, and the ability to contribute to that, albeit in a more technical role. I saw the opportunity and ran with it, with everyone’s blessing. It’s a very hard question—how to attract programmers to journalism roles. For me, it’s just far more interesting than, say, working on a massive financial services backend system.”
How does your organization attract programming talent? Can programmers help reshape journalism in the digital age? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
(Thanks to Howard Weaver for the pointer.)
By Michele McLellan, 06/23/08 at 5:58 am
Posted in
Multimedia |
Staffing |
Technology
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May 22, 2008
In Tampa, a continuous news desk
translates into online traffic growth
Does your newsroom structure reflect a new news environment?
The traditional newsroom model—with its compartmentalized teams or departments and assembly-line production for end-of-day deadlines—has proven ill suited to a 24/7 news environment that requires speed, creativity, collaboration and the ability to turn on a dime. The structure, systems and processes of the newsroom drive both culture and results. That’s not to say moving desks around a few times a year will change the newsroom. But smart newsroom leaders are finding reorganization—some sweeping, some in small steps—really helps.
The continuous news desk (which now even has the acronym of CND) has come to symbolize digital transformation in many newsrooms, especially larger ones where cross-disciplinary communication tends to be diffuse. I described that change at the Miami Herald here.
This week, I talked with the editor of another Florida newspaper, about a similar change that yielded striking results.
Janet Coats, Executive Editor of The Tampa Tribune, said the organization in the past year:
- Combined online and print newsrooms under the one editor (Coats). (I confess, I was a little surprised that Tampa, a poster child for media convergence, had separate print and online newsrooms as late as 2007.)
- Reorganized into “deep” and “now” teams in an effort to balance getting the story of the moment with investigative and explanatory journalism.
- Moved a significant number of print staff to a new continuous news desk.
“The results,” Coats said, “were immediate and gratifying - a 60 percent increase in (local) page views year over year.” Breaking news page views were about 11 percent of total before the change, Coats said. “Since continuous news desk, that share has grown to about 30 percent.”
Those results in turn pushed culture change in the newsroom, buoyed the staff, and convinced even Web-resistant staff members. “The launch of continuous news desk was the best thing that happened culturally in the time I’ve been here,” Coats said. “It was one of those wonderful moments when we actually launched the continuous news desk we saw immediate results. That was a glorious thing for people who were demoralized. ... We saw that pop, a dramatic pop, in Web traffic. The only thing that had changed was the journalism. That was powerful.”
I bet other newsrooms have similar stories of change. I’d like to hear yours. Please share them in the comments to this blog.
April 13, 2008
One editor’s advice: Focus on early adopters and watch the crowd follow
Who are the early adopters in your newsroom and how are you cultivating them?
Ryan Sholin has terrific advice for pushing change in the newsroom: Don’t waste your time trying to change the whole newsroom at once. Cultivate the early adopters.
I’ve seen this approach work in newsroom after newsroom, as Tim Porter and I described in “News, Improved.” Once the early adopters go to work, the discussion can move from the abstract (and fear-inducing) notions of change to concrete examples of new forms of journalism. Conversely, I have been in many newsrooms where executives thought that merely telling their staffs en masse to change meant they would. That’s a formula for frustration.
As Sholin says: “.. you can’t mandate mindset. But you can grow culture.”
What approach has worked for your newsroom? Do you have a way to identify and foster early adopters?
Exploring innovation, transformation and leadership in a new ecosystem of news, by journalist and change advocate 
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