Any technology project

should solve problems  journalists are having,

even if it’s a problem they don’t know they have.

Mohamed Nanabhay
Al Jazeera

This week’s Knight Mozilla News Lab lectures — particularly those about technology in the newsroom — resonated deeply with me. They recalled challenges I have faced in my career and mission to inspire, encourage and entice my professional peers into looking at journalism from a broader perspective than that to which they are accustomed, and in building bridges, particularly with developers. They echoed much thinking and some exposition that went into my featured post last week, about the divide between news and open development cultures.

The lectures made it clear that although there has been progress, the challenges I previously identified are far from a relic of the past.

It’s something I pursued with developers in my own news organizations with varying success: Senior managers, often traditionalists, have typically put a stop to this sort of collaboration as a poor use of time, typically because they don’t understand it.

What is now changing is that there is a realization that developers have a key role to play in enabling deeper, richer, more accessible and diverse storytelling, and that everyone in a news organization — and increasingly, outside of them, too — are potential partners and collaborators.

 

The question

How does your project take into account the need to facilitate collaboration in the newsroom (whether real or virtual), while acknowledging that team members will have varying technological skill sets?

Journalists work in a competitive environment in a way that is at odds with other fields, especially open source technology and software. Reporters in particular compete not only against external rivals, but  against peers in their own organizations. Every day, they have the challenge of making their story the top story. Deep, meaningful collaboration typically occurs only in small units, if at all.

 

 

That is why Al Jazeera’s open approach is particularly intriguing: Releasing content under a Creative Commons licence,  and beyond that, the tools it develops, as Mohamed Nanbhay said:

Open source is important to us.

It’s important that we put back into the public domain…

[and] leverage off of each other.

 

I strongly believe and have long argued that this is the best approach.

The biggest limitation on technology adoption in the newsroom is journalists’ willingness to use it, which is often a function of time and skill. As Mohamed Nanabhay noted:

 

The newsroom is fast-paced.

There’s not always time to sit back and reflect on how we use technology.

 

User-friendly, simple, easy and easy-to-understand collaboration is the core of my Investigate Net tool, the thin edge of a wedge to create a collaboration culture, even for technophobes. It uses familiar skills and behaviours to fill a need of journalists everywhere: Getting high-quality, reliable information, quickly, easily and cheaply — even for journalists who don’t know it’s a problem they have.