Journalists, developers, collaboration, and innovation

In Schibsted Media, we have many different types of news products. Not all journalists work the same between them. Having their insight during product development is extremely useful: they understand their reader base, their content, and their message the best.

This is a pretty media-specific post, but it could be a good idea to reflect on the team you work with. When do they have free time? What opportunities are there? Are there different needs and considerations?

Let’s take a look at the different kinds of reporting in newsrooms, and how they work.

Breaking news

Journalists on the breaking news desk are there to cover stories as they develop. Since this is unpredictable, so’s their work intensity. Different publications may have a different level of focus on breaking news. Publications who consider breaking news a core part of their offering will find it hard to find time for “on-shift” journalists to be away from the desk. Breaking news can also be a competing topic: who published first with the best coverage?

Breaking news on most sites are treated differently from regular news.

Consider the BBC’s live reporting:

While it may reuse components from regular articles, it’s presented differently, and composed differently. Tracking is also different: clicks only tell you the entry to the article, and not whether someone has read each part of the story. The summary might be AI powered, but they’re often manually reviewed or adjusted. The article updates in real-time, with a dynamic paging system.

This is quite a departure from the traditional news article, where content is more or less static. The tech involved to provide this feature is more complicated than most articles. There’s therefore the paradox of tech needing to collaborate with the breaking news desk, but breaking news journalists needing to be at their desk and reporting.

It’s not an unsolvable problem, though. Running fire-drills simulating breaking news stories with journalists and engineers in the same room is a great way to give a real test without needing to cover a live story. Since it’s hard for this to be done during a shift, pre-planning with a well defined, time-limited, exercise will help allocate time together.

Sports

Sports is close to breaking news, though with a key difference: sports events are scheduled. Preparations can be made beforehand, then during the event treated as breaking news. A typical case of this is the Olympics, or the World Cup. These happen on a regular basis, so there’s plenty of time to prepare.

However! Breaking news may be covered slower to report the facts correctly. Sports are not like that, during matches. A goal is scored - if the news site does not match the yells of joy and anger that a reader hears in a bar around them, they’ll feel behind. Therefore scaling sports coverage to be as real time as possible is important.

There’s many spaces for innovation here: dealing with sports APIs, watching the content live to report on it, producing automated text snippets, dealing with huge peaks of traffic with minimal latency in the system.

Since there’s a lot of downtime between matches, there’s a good chance to work directly with sports journalists. They might cover other topics, or prepare for the next match, when there’s not any active matches, though.

Long reads

Long reads are articles composed of longer content: typically text, sometimes images and videos. These articles may take a long time to produce, often with multiple journalists both writing and researching the topic.

Since they take a longer time to produce, the journalists are less often “glued” to their seats. They’ll still want to get their articles done, so their time is still very important to use wisely.

There’s more design considerations than technical considerations, for long reads. What may work for shorter stories might not work for longer ones. Is it easy for a reader to lose their place? Can it easily be rediscovered later? Is it possible to turn it into audio or video?

Many long reads will have a longer life time. The BBC article about cave divers recovering their friends bodies is one I come back to often, so it needs to be easy for me to find again later only vaguely remembering the topic. This is where sitemaps, or good titles, come into play. Some sites now have bookmarking systems, too.

Collaboration with long read journalists is often more feasible than breaking news journalists, and just as important. Many good innovations start with long-read articles, as there is time to mix tech, design, and journalism together. Text to speech in our brands started with long reads.

Editorial developers

Many publications will have journalists who are also programmers. They produce a wide range of content, everything from investigative analysis to interactive data. As they’re the combination of tech and editorial, they’re a natural collaboration point for product & tech teams. Some editorial developers or data journalists might be embedded into the product & tech team.

However, they’ll often have different practices from traditional developers: depending on the content they produce, they may focus on short-lived services or throwaway code. This is a different consideration from the long-lived services that the infrastructure of a frontpage or an article may have. Understanding these different mentalities and needs is pretty important.

Front page editors

Front page editors are in control of what appears where, on the site’s most visited path. These are often driven by metrics, and those metrics may be used by algorithms or AI. As a result, these journalists are often deep into the data analysis and algorithmic control. So it’s a natural fit for those working in data science to collaborate with them.

The algorithm, if there is one, is often guided by a gut feeling. Developers can turn a journalist’s instincts into code that makes sure the right stories are seen. Depending on the publication, the front page editor may either need to be at their desk at all times during their shift, or have more leeway. A good way to collaborate is to provide them with an alternative frontpage, driven by different algorithms or manual selection. These are sometimes used for A/B testing, too. The BBC presents a different frontpage for international traffic vs UK-based traffic.¹

Social media

Social media journalists use external platforms to distribute the content, which means they have less need to interact with product & tech teams when it comes to curating a frontpage. But putting content in the right format requires new tools, too. Producing quality videos for TikTok, or images for Twitter, introduces new article formats. They’re mostly drivers to the main site, and can be a considerable source of traffic, particularly for smaller sites. A popular, viral, article from a small publication on a social media page may make traffic spike higher than the entire rest of the year.

Collaboration here can happen in many ways, but there’s a great opportunity in creating tools to produce more interesting platform-specific content.

Finally

Collaboration with all parts of the team is valuable, and sometimes collaboration with the most busy people is very valuable. Scoping the interactions and adapting to their work requirements helps make everything smoother.

1. Although it will briefly show you the UK one before reloading to show the international one.