Archive for the ‘workflow’ tag
The newsroom: where alternate workflows go to die
Martin Langeveld has written up a great description of how a newsroom might reimagine its workflow to create a much richer, more contextual news site.
Why should a reporter have a quota measured in “stories,” whether it’s two courts-and-cops reports a day or one in-depth investigative masterpiece a week? In the cascade model of content management, every reporter follows a portfolio of issues, topics, trends, trials, personalities, businesses, governmental entities, towns, streets, buildings, non-profits — and a day’s work may consist of finishing a major investigative piece on one of these, while blogging about new developments touching on a handful of others, and adding new facts to the wiki entries for a bunch more. And the process of augmenting or correcting the wiki never really ends.
If you’re a newspaper editor, I’ve learned, it’s really difficult to imagine this workflow in practice. Your entire job is structured around defined products (stories, pages and sections), not floofy things like “cascades” folks like Martin and I keep harping on. I suspect the biggest reason workflows like this haven’t taken off in newsrooms is that the work of editors would have to change as dramatically as that of reporters. Instead of spending more time planning pages and sections, creating budgets for stories and visuals, and processing copy and images for print, section editors would have to make a fundamental shift towards synthesizing the best of the reporter’s work into printable material. It means having to take a longer-term view of a reporter’s work. It’s almost a completely different art, requiring entirely different skills.
Among the things I’ve come to appreciate about newspaper section editors is their view of the product they create. They are responsible for composing a page or a section to suit an overlapping variety of audiences, day after day. This means planning far enough ahead that you know today what mix of stories and art you’ll have in hand and finished by next Monday to go to press on Tuesday, while being flexible enough to accommodate the news that’s likely to occur as the pages are coming together. Meanwhile, you’re reviewing copy for stories set to publish tomorrow or the day after, keeping one eye on the massive Sunday piece your reporter’s been working on for three weeks, and juggling promos to and from other sections and the Web. At any moment, the A1 editor might come by your desk to tell you that Sunday centerpiece has been pulled instead for the paper’s Friday cover, so you’ll have to do some quick thinking to rescue your weekend section front from mediocrity. Among your only tools for managing this mess are the fleet of earnest, quick reporters at your command.
Martin’s workflow, which I love, upends the fragile chaos of an editor’s life. When people like us talk about being “Web-centric,” we’re telling these editors that their new prerogative is to sift the borderless dumping-grounds of a reporter’s whimsy for shards of insight and curiosity that they might glue together into some recycled wreck of a page. All the while knowing that this page and the ads it contains are what pay the vast bulk of that reporter’s paycheck, when you get right down to it. If I were a print editor in these conditions, I would probably nod vigorously when my executive editor handed down the order, then do whatever I could to preserve my precious workflow just as it is.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reorganization of a few years ago aimed for a workflow that might have made a process like Martin’s possible. The editorial division was rearranged into four quadrants: News and Information, Enterprise, Print and Digital. The two former divisions were content-focused, charged with finding and creating good stories and pitching them to the two latter divisions, which were product- and audience-focused. N&I, it was thought, would have a slight bias towards pitching to digital, while Enterprise would be more print-centric.
I’m not sure how well it’s working, but it was a bold and imaginative arrangement. When I think of the print editor’s workflow, what strikes me is how vastly different it is from the ideal Web workflow Martin imagines. It’s worth acknowledging up front the breadth of the gulf between these two media.
