Is your IT department making editorial decisions?

No? Are you sure?

“Platforms have given us way more creative freedom than we have had in the past to tell a story”. 

How can that be?

We are in the midst of a highly experimental era in news publishing. Whether it's testing new storytelling formats, distribution channels or revenue streams, the overwhelming theme is one of experimentation.

Yet it seems, in many cases, that the ability for editors and their teams to experiment is hampered by the inflexibility of their own IT infrastructure.

The above comment was made by an anonymous newsroom manager in 2016, in response to Tow Center's Publishers and Platforms study. They seemed to be suggesting that the next big tightly restricted sandbox, in a long line that has included Facebook Instant Articles and Apple Newsroom, might provide more creative freedom than the newsroom's own systems. This is astonishing.

We should expect that platform tools might provide superior reach and distribution. Given the frequently aging and rickety nature of newsroom CMSs, we might also expect that social platforms would provide a slicker editing experience.

But what newsrooms should never accept is an in-house environment that constrains the creative freedom of its writers and editors to the point where 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. As platforms provide a very smooth but ultimately homogenised experience for readers, the news website must become the place to showcase unique reading experiences.

If IT infrastructure — servers, cloud, CMSs and so on — is limiting the kinds of stories that can be told, then in effect, the IT department is making editorial decisions.

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 organisations 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 organisations will find they cannot improve their ability to innovate until the IT department, too, is held more closely.

In content organisations, editorial and storytelling innovation should be driving IT decision-making. The inverse situation, where it still persists, is unsustainable.

The original version of this article was published in 2016.