Where do we go from here?
Where is here, anyway?
The Learning Newsroom Steering Committee early on identified a need to breathe some life into our website and to find a way to accellerate attitudinal change in the newsroom towards the web.
Our timing was good - management committee was identifying similar needs and had declared 2006 to be the Year of the Web here at the Spec.
We organized a preliminary session with Howard to hear about his plans and needs - one key need was a newsroom committee to advise and assist him in remaking our web site.
Thus was the tech gang born.
We brainstormed a list of “quick hit” must-dos for the web (See Appendix A)
and did the heavy lifting for a lot of the new features added to our website, usually simply by shouldering the extra workload.
Finally, the management infrastructure is beginning to catch up to us - we have a senior web editor, we have some of the tools we need, we have had the value of our updating work recognized by seconding staff to the web updating position a week at a time.
But the changes run deeper than that and they have forced us to re-examine our role.
What next?
In discussions at the steering committee, one-on-one with tech gang members, with Howard, and as a group a couple of key themes emerge:
The group should be:
- A source of innovation and ideas, but also a way to get things done
- We should develop and apply expertise
- We should act as evangelists for the kind of future newsroom we believe we need.
- We need to advise Howard, provide feedback on the web, and steer innovation his way.
- Policy Advice (wait! don’t run away yet)
- Education/training
- New Product Development
- Provided managment with concrete and continuing evidence of newsroom support for broad and swift change to web policy
- NewsNow - daily news updates on the front page - designed, staffed and managed the system with zero budget and zero lead time.
- Photo slide shows on the web
- Slide shows with audio on the web
- Mini-docs on the web
- Added blogging to our arsenal
- Mini-sites now seen as normal
- The News side is now thinking about the web each and every day
- Doubled web traffic and increased page views (See Appendix C)
- Columnist podcasts
- Spec Books
- Story commenting
- Readers submission page
- The View From Here
- Incorporation of photo sharing
- Web polling
- Web Cartoons
- Searchable restaurant and movie listings (a natural for premium tier?)
- Readers group email blasts
- A tag system for stories (your own private Spec story bookmark database)
- Web chats with staff
- Mail-to links embedded in bylines
- The week in photos
- An Idea incubator
- An Idea generator
- Assessors of what works, and what doesn’t
- Innovators
- Inventing new forms of journalism
- Doing things - much more than grunt work
- Executors
- Dreamers and Doers
- Advocates (for ideas and other innovators)
- Studying, researching and doing
- Experimenting
- Receiving pitches from staff, “ideas brokers”
- A resource on web tech for the newsroom
- Bringing new ideas to fruition - like Google Labs
- Trainers and educators
- Doing post mortems on our web work
- A liason between the newsroom and the web managers
- Collaborative
- Creative
- Profitable
- FUN
- Productive
- Bright
- Welcoming
- Diverse
- Trail-blazing
- Nimble
That’s actually a pretty tall order.
I’m going to outline a structure and some responsibilities that I think might help us fill that order, but as always - this is a draft.
Make it better. Lots better - that’s why you’re here.
So, How do we do it?
I’d like to suggest we focus our selves on three areas:
Let’s look at them one at a time.
Advice
We have a web editor. He has a boss. We don’t TELL them what to do; the web is their responsibility in a way that it isn’t — can’t be — ours. Their careers will rise or fall on their success.
So, we advise.
We can also lobby, yell, kick, scream and fight for what we believe in, but ultimately it’s their responsibility, and we all need to remember that.
Examples of this work are Rebecca’s exploration of what priorities and principles should govern our decisions on the Home Page’s news hole, and Rebecca, Naomi, and Ross’s look at what our front page should be.
This work will flow out of our personal interests and observations - and will be directed by the group via our regular meetings.
This is pretty much a continuation of a large part of our work.
Education - Webdays, blogging and more
We need to get and keep this newsroom excited by the possibilities of the web and anxious to take part in our growth there.
We’ve had Howard do sessions, we brought Rick Hirsch up from Miami, we’ve arranged for training sessions in camera operation and editing. We need to do more - the newsroom’s comfort level with web technologies varies enormously and we can improve that easily.
How about hosting a weekly brown bag session for a month — Web Wednesdays — where we explain and demonstrate things like video sharing (YouTube), photo sharing (Flickr and Picasa) or Tagging, Podcasting or RSS?
I would hope that each of us would be able to find some corner of the Web that we’re passionate about and happy to share.
But the prime focus I’d like to suggest is a Tech Gang Blog. We’ve already got one - we’re just not using it.
Let’s create a group blog that draws attention to the best of the web - let’s give our newsroom the benefit of our own surfing experience and expertise and show them just why nobody under 30 is buying our paper and just how amazing the possibilities truly are.
The Listerine Man project - which blew so many people away in this newsroom - came about because Lesley and Barry were shown a couple of examples of how this very simple technology (slide show and audio) was being used.
How many other great new tools will people pick up, once we start putting them in their hands?
New Stuff - The Spec Lab
Lastly, I’m proposing that we create a “Spec Labs” space on TheSpec.com — and that this space be the responsibility of the Tech Gang.
(Nothing, however, would be posted to it without sign off by the web editor, or higher)
If we want to nurture innovation, if we want to feed creativity, staff need to see that they have the freedom to fail and the opportunity to succeed brilliantly. Creating an on-line lab, a place where people can try things out and get feedback from a real audience, all within the safety of an “experimental” space, could do that and do that very well.
The Spec Labs would not be prominently featured on the web site - it’d just be one choice among many in a pull-down menu or some such. Or perhaps it would be listed under one of our “Multi-media” tabs or some such.
But.
We would create a “Friends of Spec Labs” newsletter that readers could sign up for and be altered every time anything new goes up in the space. We’d solicit their opinions and ideas as well.
There was some thinking at the committee that we should somehow vet or approve new multi-media projects for the web - I think that’s unworkable and unwise. We don’t want to create a bureaucratic bottleneck for new web initiatives. Most new ideas should be pitched to the print content editor (who controls our time) and then heaved over to the web editor for approval.
The Spec Labs would be a place, not for the the “I want to do a slide show with audio to go with my feature on the Tim Hortons Hockey Tournament”, but rather the “I’d like to try a video column.” or “I want to try flash animation” or “I really want to try my hand at (directing, producing, animating, shooting)”.
These are the pitches that are not final product, but experiments to see if they work or to demonstrate that someone has what it takes to pitch for the big time.
Bill Dunphy
Appendix:
A) Done and Not Done
We met first on Oct 5, 2005. Now, five months and one day later:
Things we’ve done (or helped bring about):
Still not done:
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B) Dreams and Goals
Here’s what the committe thought it should be doing in 2006:
The Tech Gang should be:
Asked what adjectives you’d slap on the Tech Gang, they said:
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