Journalism is missing out
TL;DR
- Most of a journalists work effort ends up in the bin. Only end results are captured, while a host of research information gets lost.
- While common in most other industries, knowledge management is largely absent in the journalism sector.
- Fragmented and individualistic processes in journalistic research make automation and efficiency initiatives difficult.
- The introduction of more knowledge management and sharing could unlock large efficiency gains, but requires a mindset shift.
- Making research efforts more transparent could further benefit the accountability and trust of journalistic work.
What if I told you, that most of your work will end up in the bin? That’s a reality for consultants — and many other people. But in most cases, those industries and people involved try to fight this and try to repurpose all sorts of work produced. In consultancies, research material and slides frequently get repurposed and published as “studies”, for sales purposes. At the very least however, research material gets collected, ideally in a structured manner, to build up knowledge and for potential later use. This process is called knowledge management — and ideally, each firm has some sort of “knowledge management system” (KMS) spanning tools and processes, that enable capturing and sharing of gained information and learnings inside the organization. Hence in the end, your work might not end up in the bin, but at least inform a colleague at a later point.
The same holds true for journalists. With the difference, that journalism is not doing much or anything to capture the presumably wasted efforts as:
Journalism (the entire sector) does not know or practice knowledge management.
Harsh thesis, right? But let me lower your eyebrows and engage in some explaining: When claiming that most of a journalist’s work is ending up in the bin, I am referring to the research work that goes into any decent article or piece of content (we live in a multi-medial world). And by journalists, I refer to actual journalists, who come up with a unique new story or unique angle to a relevant known story and engage in actual primary and/or secondary research. Hence I do not include agency-feed-rewriters, social media reporters, or 400-character-news-story-breakers.
In the process of building Varia Research, we have conducted around 150 (up to now) user interviews with such journalists from all around the globe. A preliminary summary of these interviews can be found here. These interviews revealed the following picture as the dominant process of journalistic online research:
Generally speaking; online research starts in the browser of your choice. The first visit is then either to one of your favorite news sources, or to your go-to search engine (still Google, in the vast majority of cases). Then a large number of browser tabs with potentially interesting content is opened. Alongside, some first notes are taken (in standard Apple Notes, Evernote, oneNote or the like, Notion is picking up). More modern journalists will use tools like Pocket or Instapaper to save links. In most cases however, a Google Doc or Word file serves as a sort of central pin-board for all relevant info. Links are copy-pasted there, names and details of relevant contacts or companies are noted, and any further research info gets added until the document grows uncontrollably large. At the same time, there are emails, files and explorer structures piling up alongside, adding to the complexity.
The research then goes on, until a certain point, where story outlining, drafting and writing begins. At the end of this, a more or less cumbersome review process with the editor begins, before the final story (usually written in another Google Doc or Word file) gets transferred (copy-pasted) into the CMS (content management system) of the respective publishing house.
And what about the rest? The other Google Doc / Word file? All the links, notes, highlights, contacts saved in the research process?
It’s lost. Lost, in the sense that it usually remains on a local drive of whichever journalist was occupied with the story, where it later gets forgotten or deliberately deleted at some future point. This realization hurts even more, if you know that research is where journalists spend most of their time, up to 75% of all work hours.
The inefficiencies created by this are immense. Writing a follow-up, or related story gets unnecessarily effortful — if it’s to be written by a colleague (and not the original author), it gets even painful. Research information is scattered over a forest of different tools — hard to search, hard to make use of. What if you talked to one really great expert on cardiovascular diseases in one story — and would like to reach out to her again for another heartwarming story? What was her name again and where are the contact details again? Oh and what about this important article I read, where I found that one quote which would be super helpful now?
Apart from the process creating inefficiencies through its scattered and fragmented nature, the process also hardly opens itself for automation — as every journalist has his/her own, individual kind of workaround laden research process. This makes centralized systems or systematic automation extremely difficult. An abstract level view on the systems and processes landscape in journalistic research look like this:
CMSs are a fixture in journalism & publishing, and they are enforced top-down. Each publisher only has one and journalists usually don’t have much of a say in this. As of the CMS, the process is fairly centralized and when it comes to distribution and monetization also fairly automated. Archiving and tagging is also taken care of by modern CMSs. But before the CMS, the systems and processes landscape is best described as “BYOP” not Bring Your Own Device, but Bring Your Own Process. This makes centralization, automation, and crucially also knowledge management here so difficult.
But more and more, pressure is mounting to introduce such systems — mostly for accountability reasons. Not seldom, journalists and publishers get sued or are confronted with other legal shenanigans, which then in many cases force them to lay bare their research efforts and provide evidence for the claims made in an article. If you can’t find the relevant research information again in such cases as journalist, you are in trouble. Hence such systems and organization can make sense and add value already on the level of an individual journalist, even more so on newsroom/team level.
For these accountability-based reasons, but also as they see the missed potential from an efficiency angle, some publishers and news organizations started to experiment with e.g. Confluence, Google Doc or GitHub based systems, aiming to introduce some sort of knowledge management. But if I have learned anything in the course of my consulting years, it’s that any knowledge management that requires deliberate effort, is going to fail. Knowledge management has to be embedded in the workflow. Even if all it takes is forwarding all related files to a certain location after a project, it’s not going to happen. People are lazy.
Apart from being lazy (like we all are), journalists also tend to be selfish, when it comes to their know-how and especially their sources. Having access to the right people can make or break a journalistic career, so this is understandable. Protecting sources also has other, legitimate (and sometimes legal) reasons, when dealing with sensitive or investigative topics. However this does not apply to all sources, and as seen above, contact information is not the only information getting lost in current research processes. There is a lot more valuable information, of which many downstream stories and colleagues could profit, if it were systematically captured and shared.
How the future of journalistic research could look like:
What if one could connect all research information to a story (and hence later also to the archive)? All means, everything that is not marked private/sensitive. Apart from the beneficial internal knowledge sharing with colleagues, one could also push the accountability dimension a little more and bring that research transparency also to the readers. All scientific papers list their literature review, sources and methodology as a standard procedure. This could, obviously in reduced form, also be done for journalistic articles. Each article could end not just with a link to related pieces, but also with a link to the public portion of the research dossier. In my view, this could not only honor the work and effort a journalist has put into a story, it would also contribute to more trust towards journalism. Julia Angwin, founder of The Markup, also pointed towards that potential in her great article about using the scientific method in journalism. After all, trust is a currency the industry lacks in heaps, as we know (look no further than the latest Edelman trust barometer for evidence thereof).
Varia Research is an attempt at that vision. It’s the idea of bringing the feeling of the old physical Dossier (a binder with all information related to one case/story) into the online world. Smart online Dossiers, with the “one story, one place” credo at the core, combined with customizable media monitoring, so that the journalistic research process as a whole can become less fragmented — and more efficient.
This story was researched and written using Varia Research.
Thank you for reading, comments & feedback!
