Megan Taylor: Freelance web developer, multimedia producer and journalist

The next buzz

Posted by Megan Taylor on 12/17/07 • Categorized as posts

We’ve been hearing about convergence and converged newsrooms for a while now. Many papers haven’t even looked in this direction, some are trying, few have made progress. And I don’t think any have perfected it.

In the spirit of forward thinking, I would like to suggest the next trend: virtual newsrooms. What if you didn’t have to go to an office every day to do your job? Instead of a “mobile journalist” sending reports back to a newsroom, she/he would send info to a server, and copyeditors, wherever they might physically be, could edit and post stories.

It’s a big step, and not one that will happen soon. But the technology to do it already exists: we have big blogs with multiple contributors and online-only magazines.

I’ve been playing with this idea for a while, and trying to come up with some workflow concepts. But I only know the newspaper workflow. Can anyone point out the broadcast (TV and radio) workflows?

What do you think of the idea of a virtual newsroom? Good or bad?

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  • I think that the technology isn't there yet for this to work well enough for collaboration to be the same.

    I'm all for getting out and getting the story, and I see the economic upsides to kicking everyone out and tossing their desks. But the specific problem I see is that for smaller newspapers where resources are tight and you have people doing multiple jobs (editing and reporting) then you kind of want them to be around your designers or web editors for presentation considerations.

    Personally, I relish the idea of not having to come into an office and just being equally productive from home, but I think the group dynamic you'd lose would hamper the final product.

    However, I will say that for a web-only product (ie, no newspaper) this would probably work. It seems to work pretty well for Gawker or other networks that have a high amount of freelancers/stringers.
  • Rich Cameron
    At the college level you also have the problem that some students are new to working on a publication and need some modeling. Certainly, some of the modeling SHOULD be 1) Getting out into the field rather than just sitting in the newsroom waiting for something to happen and 2) learning to post online immediately, but I sometimes see students take the better part of the semester to "get it." And they get it by being there. Working on a student newspaper is not a full-time job --though for some students who enjoy it, it is-- and it takes some of that face-to-face and some patience for some students to come around.
  • Yoni, there are always communication problems. I don't think that the mode of communication necessarily affect whether reporters communicate. The problem is in the people/the system, not the tools.
  • Hey Megan - The problem I see is that virtual newsrooms would exacerbate the problems that we have in brick and mortar newsrooms such as not enough conversations between reporters and editors, not enough collaboration and not enough coaching. While I think a reporter could and should spend the bulk of their time in their beat, they need to have a base of operation and that really should be the newsroom.
  • Angela, an astonishing amount of troubleshooting can be done remotely. I'm thinking the server allows collaboration and everything through a "WebOS" of sorts, which would limit the need for individual computer upgrades.
  • I'd enjoy working from a "virtual newsroom." Much of the work I do requires a high-powered computer that's better as a desktop though. So I may need to have my main office at home instead of just using a laptop.

    I bet the IT guys would think it was a big pain in the ass if they had to travel around to do software upgrades and troubleshooting.
  • The big thing I haven't figured out is how to account for extroverts (people who are energized by other people). Certainly you would almost have to have a company-wide IM system or social network. But there is something about sitting in the newsroom and swapping jokes and stories while working, that I'm not sure can be duplicated online.
  • As someone who constantly urges reporters to step away from their desks and hit the streets with multimedia reporting gear to get to know their beats in person, I should be pretty gung-ho about a, uh, distributed newsroom.

    But...

    As a reporter, I love bouncing ideas around a newsroom, getting feedback from my editors, seeing a printout of my story with physical, pen-drawn arrows and lines giving me advice of where to move a quote.

    Of course, there are online equivalents of a lot of this - IM is one way to get things done. An internal social network (or even an internal white-label Twitter) might be another.
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