Why I love working in the news industry
I remember when Avicii died. I hadn’t worked in Omni1 for long, but was already getting stuck in resolving site reliability issues. I was out at a bar, and one by one, people would pick up their phone and get notifications from different news sites. Omni hit the largest traffic spike in it’s history up til then. Everyone was reading the news, and the work we did in our normal day-to-day meant that when a news story that mattered to people broke, our website did not break. A sense of sadness spread throughout the bar, but also everyone collectively remembering the good times they had listening to his music. We wanted to know more, what had happened and why? Our news sites, including Omni, were updating the story as quickly as the information flowed.
I remember sitting in Gatwick. A drone had been flying overhead the last couple of days2, and the airway had just be reopened. But alas, another one was spotted, so I spent several hours in an airport. The screens on the wall didn’t match the website, but somehow our journalists got the real information out there. It was a pretty stressful wait, hoping I’d be able to return home soon, while also dreading the thought of hitting a drone on the way up. In these situations, the lack of information and control bugs me. I want to know what is happening, and when, regardless of how bad it is. I was able to follow the story from a newsroom in Sweden, better than I could actually being in the airport or through the BBC.
I remember when a misdelivered email meant that our domain renewal was also missed, and our services could no longer talk to each other. One colleague was on the mountain, investigating with his laptop. I was in my apartment. The journalists were frantic, trying to figure out how to talk to our users. We pulled out all the tools we had available, including serving the frontpage off of a laptop. It was a pretty bad situation, but we took it as a chance to improve our handling of future incidents. We talked to as many people affected as we could - stakeholders, journalists, product and tech people. We figured out which parts went well, and where to improve. We figured out how to communicate to each other better, and make sure that everyone in the team is aware of what’s going on, how long it will matter, and how our users are affected.
I remember Netflix coming out with a documentary which everyone was talking about, and it sounded familiar. Because it was, The Tinder Swindler3 was written by one of our sites. Norway’s a little country of 5 million people, but sometimes the news we cover and create travels the whole world. Because our journalists are just that good at reporting. It’s not the first story like that, and it’s not the last. And our newsrooms recognize when a story could go international, and publish stories in English so that the rest of the world can read it. These days we don’t even limit it to Swedish, Norwegian or English - our CMS supports articles having multiple languages, first for the students in our schools who use our Junior product for reading, but also for the global society, as societies elsewhere are not always in a position to do so themselves.
I remember preparing for the elections. I spent a good couple of weeks simulating peak traffic behaviours, tweaking configurations until finally, I could throw everything I could at our servers, and they still worked. I remember looking at all our metrics, our graphs and logs, identifying patterns and trying to preempt issues before they occurred. For some news stories, you can predict when they’re going to happen. Others are complete mysteries. And we have to be ready for both, because our societies rely on us. We don’t ever try to create completely unbreakable systems, but learn from when things go wrong, fix the problems, and understand how to respond to bad situations better.
I remember countless times when something goes wrong, and everyone jumps in to help. It doesn’t matter whether it’s 15:00 or 02:00, there’ll be people joining and making themselves useful. All it takes is one phone call, and our on-call engineers are activated. They triage any problems, figure out what to do, and what the next steps are. When something goes seriously wrong, we devote time and energy to understand why, and how to avoid similar problems in the future.
I remember all the experiments we’ve done with emerging technology, not to just play with new toys, but always rooted in how we can offer our readers a better experience. How we’ve looked into personalization4, so that readers get the content that’s relevant to them, without missing out on the important news that everyone should see. How we trained a machine learning model on one of our journalists speaking 3000 sentences, so that we could use text to speech to ensure our readers could listen to articles instead of reading. How we’ve used generative AI to solve real problems, like summaries of articles for those short on time. How we explored the different needs of each group of society, and what kind of content they’re interested in. Not all of them succeed, and that’s okay, because we use and share those learnings to improve all our news sites.
I remember passing through border control, being asked where I worked. When I answered Aftenposten, the staff member pulled open his window. I’d never seen them do that before, and assumed the worse. I looked at him nervously, unsure of what I had done wrong. He then opened a wide smile, and told me how much he loved the comment section. That he was an avid reader, and that he loved the discussions and debates that our articles led to. I thanked him and told him I’d pass it on, and he gave me back my passport and wished me a good trip.
I remember how each time I tell people where I work, I beam with internal pride. Because I’ve seen what happens in countries where news destinations are either too biased or trying too hard to be unbiased. I’ve seen how disinformation leads to a collapse in society and a shift in politics to extremes. Where even though corrections are required, they’re often buried several pages deep in small text. Norway has the highest press freedom in the world, Sweden is number 4. To get there, it’s not enough to simply have trustworthy journalists5. The sites have to be reliable. The stories need to be quickly covered. The product needs to be clean. Readers have to be presented with things they care about. Notifications shouldn’t be overbearing. Ads need to respect the reader. None of that is possible if the leadership or organization doesn’t help it happen, and the Schibsted model shows that it is possible.
The people I work with are some of the most passionate people I’ve ever met, and together, we ensure that society works. Our democracies depend on independent journalism, and that’s the business of everyone I work with.