The Evolving Newsroom

I've had a few interesting conversations this week about quality control in newsrooms, in part sparked by the diagram I posted last week showing how many pairs of hands various kinds of news stories go through before being published.

One thing that came up was how irritated people are by the number of typos regularly seen on news websites - including nzherald.co.nz and stuff.co.nz. As Nathan said in a recent comment, "I generally expect better of professionals."

I haven't worked at either of those sites so I can't speak for what goes on there. But in my experience the problem is twofold: inadequate systems (Content Management Systems (CMSs) that require users to undertake multiple steps for simple tasks - increasing the likelihood of mistakes); and poor workflows that were designed decades ago for print and haven't been revised to account for the website.

Some typos simply come from typing too fast - you'll find plenty of these in blogs and comments (including mine) where people type quickly and give only a cursory check before hitting 'send'.

More prevalent in news publishing are cut and paste errors - where a sentence has been edited or moved and during the process a word/punctuation mark/sentence has been inadvertently cut out, cut in half, transposed or reconstituted without due care for syntax or grammar. (That's why you see double words in text and missing full-stops).

How does it happen? Easy. Take a breaking news story. They're often bits of wire stories spliced together with a few paragraphs filed by an inhouse reporter. Very often those paragraphs will have been filed by email and copied and pasted into the web CMS. Just as often, the wire story will have been copied and pasted into the web CMS.

Take all that copying and pasting and re-working of sentences, throw in some time pressure and you've got mistakes waiting to happen. Speed is of the essence so the story goes live without anyone else reading it. Even with less urgent stories there's often only one duty web editor anyway, so there's no one else around to have a look at it before it goes online.

So why doesn't someone read it after it's gone live? Good question. Some structured peer review could go a long way here. And as I keep saying, readers would gladly help if you made it easy for them.

Most stories, though, are prepared for the newspaper first before finally being loaded online late at night by a tired person. On the way, they'll go through nine or more pairs of hands, typically, and two CMSs.

Most likely both CMSs will make hard work of cutting, pasting, categorising and styling text - increasing the likelihood of mistakes being made along the way. Cyber, a system widely used for print in NZ, would fall into this category I suspect, based on my brief encounter with it. If you have a different view, I'd love to hear from you.

What's the answer? One, news organisations need better CMSs which have been designed for neutral input and multi-platform output - no more cutting and pasting, easier editing and mark-up, and the fewer steps the better.



Two, they need to take a critical look at their workflows and redistribute resources: essentially take a couple of those people in the right-hand columns and move them to the left.

"We were being asked to do things that we just couldn't bend the system any further to do."

Sound familiar?

That's PA's IT development manager Paul Berman talking to Silicon.com about the company's decision to use an open source platform, Nuxeo, to build a better content management system.

Like everyone else on the planet PA is handling an increasing volume of video, audio and slide shows as well as text and they need a system that can manage that simply and efficiently.

Anyone who works in a newsroom will know that the legacy systems we have simply aren't up to the job. Older web CMSs weren't built for multimedia in any volume and no matter how many scripts the good people in IT write to make the ageing print CMS talk nicely to the ageing web CMS, it's not a smooth process. In most newsrooms reporters still write into the print CMS.

Invariably getting something online involves multiple steps, things to remember, repetition and miles of mouse clicks and keystrokes.

That makes it difficult to distribute the burden of marking up and loading web copy among authors and editors, who are the natural candidates for the role in a web-first operation.

If it's a really complicated process, they're not going to want to do it, might not understand it well and cut corners, and will be distracted from the business at hand of researching and producing good stories.

"We have some really very specific requirements for our editorial applications in which we want to deliver a very effective tool for our journalists to do things with as few keystrokes as possible, efficiently and quickly," Paul Berman told Silicon.com.

On the reason for choosing open source, he said: "It's a mixture of the flexibility, the cost and the potential to scale it and make it really adaptable for our environment."

Interesting to see a major news group choose open source given the customary preference in such organisations for proprietary 'best of breed' systems.

I like this post from Scott Karp on Publishing 2.0 about the need for simplicity in newsroom systems. He quotes a newspaper exec who wanted any new system to be "so seamless, so transparent, so idiot-proof that I can do it without training — and so that it doesn’t add more than a heartbeat to my day."

I know the feeling. I remember the horror at being asked to teach print journalists how to use an overly complicated legacy web CMS. We didn't do it in the end, which is just as well because it would have been a disaster. Making even relatively minor workflow changes in the overly complicated print CMS was hard enough, and for good reason.

Most people don't give a fig how systems work and few want to expend any energy on learning how to do things quicker or work smarter or with more flexibility. 'Just tell me what button to push' is about the size of it. As Kathy Sierra said at Webstock: people don't want to be tool experts, but experts at what they're using the tool for.

This took me a while to accept, to be honest, I guess because I always like learning about a system so I can work more efficiently and flexibly. I assumed others would be happier once they'd learned a few more tricks. I was wrong. Most just wanted one simple way of working and as little variation as possible. You live and learn.

Scott's post goes on to cite a number of successful ventures based on really simple user interfaces - Google, Twitter, YouTube. It's good to be reminded now and then how important it really is to keep it simple, stupid.

Anecdotally, I have been hearing more about reporters putting up their hands to go over to the digital desk, which is heartening, and not a bit surprising given the doom hanging over the future of print and the fact that online is so much fun.

Also starting to see more posts along the lines of this one from Melissa Worden, in which she notes the online desk can get a bit cliquey in some newsrooms and hard for others to break into.

It's a good point for newsroom change agents to be aware of: make sure that once you've explained how great online is, and given people a taste of it, that they can actually do some of it when they walk out of the training room and go back on the floor.

I like Melissa's point about sharing the toys. She's absolutely right. Ultimately, we want to get useful kit into as many people's hands at possible. Yes, some people will be better at some things than others - maybe audio, maybe visuals, maybe graphics, maybe Flash. That's all good. If you don't give people a chance, you'll never realise the talent you're sitting on.

While you're at it, why not give everyone a point and shoot video/camera/writing tool like an N95 or JasJam or HTC Tytn and show them how to upload, tag, assign categories, write abstracts etc. Give them a bit of time once a week to play and work on stories that need a bit of technical stretching. Make sure they know how to use the CMS and the appropriate workflow - who signs off on what. Then sit back and watch morning news conferences get more interesting.