Is your IT department making editorial decisions?
No? Are you sure?
An anonymous newsroom manager who was surveyed for the Tow Center's Publishers and Platforms research project. (Image courtesy of Facebook.)
We are in the midst of a highly experimental era in news publishing. Whether it's testing new storytelling formats like VR and Video 360, distribution channels like Facebook Instant, Apple News and instant messaging, or alternate revenue streams like Blendle, the overwhelming theme is one of experimentation.
But it seems in many cases the ability for newsrooms to experiment is hampered by the inflexibility of their own IT infrastructure.
Take the above comment from one of the respondents to the Tow Center's Publishers and Platforms study. Here, the anonymous newsroom manager seems to be suggesting that tightly restricted sandboxes, like Facebook's Instant Articles, provide more creative freedom than the newsroom's own systems.
This is astonishing. We should expect that platform tools like Instant Articles might provide superior reach and distribution. Given the often aging and rickety nature of newsroom CMSes, we might also expect that the platforms would provide a slicker editing experience.
But what newsrooms should never accept in 2016 is an in-house environment that constrains the creative freedom of its writers and editors, to the point where the social media platforms' regulated tools offer more storytelling flexibility.
On the contrary, a newsroom's own IT infrastructure must provide the ability for its teams to rapidly assemble and experiment with a wide range of innovative homegrown and third party products and tools. With Instant Articles and Apple News providing a very smooth but ultimately homogenized experience for readers, the news website must become the place to showcase unique reading experiences.
If IT infrastructure—servers, cloud, CMSes and so on—is limiting the kinds of stories that can be told, then in effect, the IT department is making editorial decisions.
This image and the title image courtesy of Channel 4 (UK).
Over the coming years, nothing will predict the success of a newsroom as well as its ability to experiment with new technologies and new forms of storytelling. And what its IT infrastructure affords is central to that.
The fix for this problem doesn't always require spending thousands or millions of dollars on new in-house systems and services. It could just mean a change in attitudes and subsequent change in process.
If a newsroom has a time-sensitive story that needs to be told in a particular way, it cannot wait for the usual IT procurement processes to complete. By that time the story is dead.
Similarly, the idea that innovative storytelling tools cannot be used because there is no way of hosting them outside the newsroom's CMS needs to be put to bed. The top news organizations find a way for stories to be told using the best format for that story, regardless of whether these stories sit directly within the newsroom's CMS, or whether they're served by third party platforms or hosted in the cloud by AWS et al. This is equally true of bespoke projects developed by in-house development teams as it is of third party tools.
In the same way that tech and development teams have been brought into the editorial fold creating a "product" culture in newsrooms over the last several years, some news organizations will find they cannot improve their ability to innovate until the IT department, too, is held more closely.
In news organizations editorial and storytelling innovation should be driving IT decision-making. The inverse situation, where it still persists, is unsustainable.