Harnessing Innovation: The WSJ Ideas Portal
Where does innovation come from? At the Wall Street Journal, we believe that while new ideas can come from anywhere, those most likely to be implemented and to add value come from people who are working daily on our core product. In other words, the reporters, editors, producers, developers and designers who make up our newsroom.
As the WSJ’s newsroom innovation team, our mission is to empower our colleagues to experiment and test their ideas. For each idea, we want to help answer the question: Should we do this? Should we do this both as a newsroom and as a business, and should we commit to implementing this idea properly, and at scale?
Before we even begin to answer those questions, however, we had to address a different challenge: How to harness those ideas in a way that includes people of different roles, departments and seniority across a global newsroom of 1,300 people.
One answer to this is the WSJ Idea Portal. The Idea Portal is an internal site that allows any WSJ employee to submit an innovation idea, whether it’s for an internal tool, a new story format, or an external feature or product. Submitted ideas are discussed at regularly-held meetings that are open to all staff and always attended by senior team members of the Digital Experiences and Strategy unit.
The meetings not only provide a platform for people who submitted ideas to be heard and to receive feedback on their ideas, they help bridge silos and create a forum for sharing knowledge. During the meetings, we steer discussion towards questioning the underlying assumptions or opportunities behind each idea, whether the idea has wider applications, and how the idea fits in with our strategic goals.
Sometimes, discussions at the meeting reveal that the idea already exists, or that we have already tried implementing it before. In the former case, we learn that we need better communication or documentation to spread awareness. In the latter, we learn that we have data and previous lessons to draw on.
Since the Portal (which itself came out of an innovation hackathon) was created nearly 18 months ago, more than 70 ideas have been submitted and discussed. Several ideas that merited further exploration have resulted in new features for readers and tools for journalists.
An example of this is the WSJ Calendar idea. Brian Fitzgerald, platform editor and former deputy editor of the WSJ’s San Francisco bureau, noted that the calendar is likely among a businessperson’s most used apps. He asked: “What if we could plug our know-how into people’s calendars, giving them a new entryway to our news and analysis?”
To test this idea, we built the Real Time Economics and Election 2020 calendars. WSJ members can subscribe to these calendars to receive event alerts and links to analysis and insight articles relating to those events.
Another example is an idea that came from Daniel Nasaw, an editor in our Washington bureau, who suggested using natural language processing to analyze trends in federal regulatory filings. The R&D team, which specializes in machine learning and data science, built such a tool, which has since been used by the Washington DC in their regulatory reporting.
Our most recent Idea meeting, in late January, was held simultaneously in London, New York, and on Google Hangouts, and discussed seventeen ideas across six categories including smarter curation of stories, innovative article formats, and ways to take readers behind the scenes of the journalism process.
We are continually looking for ways to improve the Portal and the Idea Meetings to create a culture of experimentation and collaboration in the newsroom. Stay tuned for more!
Robin Kwong is Newsroom Innovation Chief at The Wall Street Journal.
