Thought leaders point to the importance of technology platforms for newsrooms, but the underlying message is that it all still comes down to people management.

Emily Bell, Director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and previously head of digital at The Guardian recently gave a speech saying that media should be using technology to provide better journalism.

Her principal point was, “For the first time in 200 years news publishers are not in control of how news is created and distributed” and that with the rise of social media, they are now" a much smaller part of a bigger ecosystem.”

Bell went on to note that newsroom workflow is now breaking down into three parts. The breaking news feed has become mobile alerts, the daily publishing output now appears as the social media presence, and “websites are ‘effectively becoming the archive.”

Most of us, newsroom dwellers, started with paper as the leading news outlet. Unless you’re reading this at your desk in the NY Times or The Guardian, you are probably in a newsroom that still works to the beat of a print deadline drum.

You still have a daily meeting, the time for which was fixed in the years before social media existed. You probably discussed lead stories, but did you honestly plan how they would play out on social media throughout the day?

Bell’s recent speech seems to focus on social media platforms and their power in breaking news. Bell, of all people, knows that the stories don’t appear on social media by magic; it’s all about workflow and people management.

In January 2015, she gave the Hugh Cudlipp lecture in which she observed that “The ‘social media team’ is no longer the group of people bullying you to tweet your story, but now key to the operation of how and what you report.”

As social media has become the main stage for breaking news, so the way social media is handled has become more critical, and with it, more complex. As Emily Bell puts it;

“Today, the ‘new newsroom’ has optimization desks, to make stories work better on social media, data scientists who analyze the information about story performance to tell journalists how to write headlines, produce photographs, and report stories which will be ‘liked’ and ‘shared’ more than others."

"It has aggregation desks, which scour the web to find news that ordinary people have posted for a wider audience. It has audience insight desks that work on how to get more people to spend longer reading more journalism. And it has data desks, which take the newly available sources of information in vast quantities and use the latest mining tools and techniques to clean, interpret, and visualize information in new ways.”

So social media isn’t just about pasting a link. It requires thoughtful optimization, and unless you have a newsroom full of super-beings capable of doing everything unaided, that means that a story will need to benefit from the talents of several staff members. Which ups the ante when it comes to newsroom organization and scheduling.

Of course, the ‘new newsroom’ Bell describes in the present tense isn’t the ‘today’ that most of us are looking at right now.  Most newsrooms are doing well if they manage to program social media output at all, let alone run it past the ‘optimization desk.’

That day will hopefully come. When it does, its success or failure will not be about technology, but about getting different people with different talents to combine their skills throughout the day.

Looking for an editorial management tool to streamline the workflows of your newsroom? For an idea of what Kordiam could do for you and your team, contact our sales team.