Knowledge Management in the Digital Newsroom

Stephen Quinn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136028892
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

If you are an editor or newsroom manager seeking new and more efficient ways of managing the ever increasing flow of information through your newsroom, this book will provide the information you need to make informed decisions about crucial organisational and equipment changes. Case studies from newsrooms worldwide are used to present an overview of the information management tools and processes that are available to help journalists and media executives deal with information. Answers are suggested for some of the most pressing issues, including: What are the factors driving change in newsrooms?
How are news organizations around the world re-organising their newsrooms to deal with information in new ways?
How are the opposing needs to cut costs and yet maintain journalistic quality being met?
What digital tools are currently available, e.g. for computer-assisted reporting?
How can reporters become more mobile?
How can trainee journalists be better prepared for operating within the changing newsroom environment?Each chapter is supplemented by a 'how to learn more' section, suggesting further resources for tackling each issue. Whether you are planning major change in your newsroom or simply wish to keep up with the latest industry trends, this is the book you have been waiting for.

1Knowledge management and journalism

Executive summary

This book proceeds from the idea that journalists and editorial executives need to work smarter in the information age. Productivity and success will come more from intangibles such as knowledge management rather than from doing the same things over and over again, such as looking for more ways to cut costs. Knowledge management is one of the key tools of the information age. This chapter looks first at the big picture, presenting the drivers that are producing massive change all over the world. It then defines knowledge in relation to the tools journalists have previously used – data and information. And then it considers the possible scenarios that will lead to change in the newsroom. All of this is coming about because consumers expect news to be available in a variety of forms to suit their lifestyles. News organizations must consequently learn to accommodate their customers. In this book, each summary lists the sections of that chapter in the order they are covered so that busy people can go directly to the relevant section. Topics covered in this chapter include:

• information a glut product

• from information scarcity to surplus

• declines in circulation

• technology a powerful driver

• social and economic causes of change

• the role of media giants

• changes in consumer attitudes

• managing knowledge in the newsroom

• new skills for the knowledge age

• new approaches for a new age.

Data and information are the raw materials of journalism. Good journalism attracts audiences and advertisers to all forms of the commercial media. It is also the reason people listen to public service broadcasters. So the ability to produce good journalism – itself the result of high quality newsgathering – should be one of the major activities of news organizations. But, in the new millennium, content based on simple data and information will not be enough. As the information age evolves, journalists and editorial executives will also need to work with knowledge. From the start we should distinguish these three things in the context of journalism. So let’s begin with a few definitions. Data are raw, undifferentiated facts. We could liken data to apples on a tree: until the apples are harvested or processed, only a few people have access to them and those apples have relatively low value. Read or placed out of context, facts often have no connection or link with other facts. But apples can be picked and boxed for sale or export. The people who pick and process the apples make them more manageable, more accessible. They also make the apples available for further adaptation or processing – apple pies or toffee apples, perhaps – and the apples consequently acquire more value.

Similarly, information is data that has been processed, refined and placed in context. The root of the word comes from the Latin informare, to give shape to, or fashion. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines information as news or ‘the act of telling or informing’. It has the related connotation of teaching and imparting knowledge. People who possess information are said to be ‘informed’. Leading journalism thinker Professor Tom Johnson of Boston University believes that in the opening years of the twenty-first century journalists, journalism educators and scholars must recognize that huge amounts of data of all sorts exist somewhere in the world in digital form. He builds on the seminal insight of information theorists Shannon and Weaver (1963) who pointed out that data are the raw material of analysis. ‘Information is that which reduces uncertainty and, therefore, assists in making a decision or reaching a conclusion about a question or issue’ (Johnson, 2001: 4).

Knowledge is the result of further refining of information and further placing in context, into a form that readers and viewers find even more useful or that saves them time and money. Knowledge management consultant Alan Burton-Jones rejects the traditional economic view that information and knowledge are the same. He defines knowledge as the ‘cumulative stock of information and skills derived from the use of information’ (my italics). The value and meaning we ascribe to knowledge increases in relation to the thinking and acting involved to create it and place it in context (Burton-Jones, 1999: 5–6). This book proceeds from a simple premise: knowledge management is important for media groups because they must become information-based organizations to compete in the information age. Knowledge management enhances journalists’ use of data and information, their raw material. It is about improving professional practice and helping journalists learn how to do better journalism. It involves learning how to store, transfer and share information in a form that makes it useful both now and in the future. It involves a new professional culture that fosters teamwork and collaboration. And it involves learning how to manage information systematically, rather than the chaotic approach that too many journalists have used in the past. Knowledge management began primarily as a business tool, but it should not be dismissed as merely a business process. Media organizations are businesses and journalists could learn much from what business has gained in terms of data management and the knowledge economy. Indeed, journalists need to be willing to learn from the professional practices of many different groups, among them information scientists, librarians and data architects.

Information a glut product

Knowledge management guru Karl-Erik Sveiby points out that mass media markets teach people that information is a glut product. Indeed, media companies seem increasingly happy to give it away. Witness the flood of free daily newspapers and weekly magazines in cities as far afield as Boston, Melbourne, London, Singapore and the Scandinavian countries, and with more planned in other parts of the world. Sveiby also notes that information requires readers and listeners to work – they have to convert it into something useful (1996: 386). Journalists have traditionally changed data into information during the newsgathering process. Some of the key roles of journalism in the information age will be to turn information into knowledge – to make it more useful for their audiences – and to find ways to preserve knowledge for later adaptation. This takes training and skill, both of which require investments of time and money. As Sveiby notes, ‘ittakes knowledge and energy to convert passive information into something that can be acted upon’ (1996: 386). Academics have given the new era we live in various names, including the ‘information age’, the ‘third industrial revolution’ and the ‘post-industrial age’. Information-rich nations tend to be rich in other ways. The more complex a society, the more it needs information and knowledge workers. The boom in the US economy in the last decade of the twentieth century came about because its infrastructure, laws and government encouraged the availability and free flow of information. During the Cold War from the 1940s until the 1980s the American government funded the vast bulk (85 per cent) of the country’s research and development. Information tends to increase with the invention and introduction of new knowledge-handling technology. Groups of knowledge workers arise, who in turn increase the amount of information for that group, especially as their work gets more complex (Cortada, 1998: 10). Certainly that has been the case in the past. The telegraph forced journalists to boost their skills and education levels radically in the middle of the nineteenth century, otherwise they could not compete. Similarly, journalists needed to acquire other talents such as learning Pitman shorthand and typing to make themselves employable (Standage, 1998: 69–70). The same need for training and learning arises in the information age.

Figure 1.1 The control room of the converged newsroom at CNN Asia-Pacific’s headquarters in Hong Kong. Photograph Stephen Quinn

The information age will require better-educated journalists and need organizations that invest in their staff. News organizations will need both to be able to evolve and survive. Put simply, knowledge management concerns the organization of a company’s non-tangible assets. Given the primacy of information and knowledge in the information age, editorial staff need to understand and apply the principles of knowledge management to their job. This chapter describes the concept of information and knowledge and applies it to journalism, in the context of a changing profession and a changing world. Several factors are driving change in the modern world of journalism. In no specific order of importance these drivers include an oversupply of data, declining weekday circulations at newspapers, declining audiences for free-to-air television, and major social and economic disruptions. Rapid developments in technology are also producing major upheavals. All of these mean major changes to the ways that consumers want to receive their news. These drivers have already changed, and will continue to transform, the journalism environment in coming years. It’s useful to begin by discussing them.

From information scarcity to surplus

The first driver for change is information overload. It is referred to in various other terms such as data smog, information anxiety and data excess. But the problem remains the same – overwhelming amounts of data distort our attempts to make valid decisions quickly. Steve Yelvington, a news consultant, believes the challenge for media companies is to understand this radical shift from information scarcity to surplus. This means a new role for journalists as guide rather than gatekeeper, he says, and the need for new ways of running news businesses that will support the journalist’s new role. Yelvington noted that this was ‘infinitely harder than keeping up with technological changes’ (quoted in Outing, 2000). The Economist magazine reported that in the late 1990s mankind produced about a million books a year, each with an average 300 pages. Americans sent about 610 billion emails in 2000. The magazine estimated that the world produced about two exabytes of information that year (an exabyte is roughly a billion times a billion bytes), and predicted that the production of data would continue to increase. IBM consultant James Cortada noted that humans have always tried to augment human knowledge and develop ways to store it. People then look for standards, as a way to improve that information capture. ‘We see [the] need for information followed by standards and conventions to ensure effective use of the tools’ (Cortada, 1998: 6). Thus the Egyptians invented papyrus and the Chinese paper ‘to augment human memory’. After that came books, moveable type, adding machines, typewriters, calculators and finally the computer. The volume of information grew. The great Library of Alexandria that Ptolemy I established in 290 BC reportedly held 700 000 volumes. By the start of the sixteenth century in Europe there were between 15 and 20 million books. In 1998 the USA alone published 40 000 books a year. In the half century to the year 2000, the world spent more than US$4 000 000 million on computers (Cortada, 1998: 7). The Hudson Institute (http://www.hudson.org), an international public policy institute based in Minneapolis in Minnesota that forecasts trends and developments, summarized the complexity of twenty-first century life: ‘In one year people now have to absorb an amount of information that took [them] 100 years to absorb 400 years ago’. Huge improvements in technology are driving much of this excess, creating the need to manage change.

Sveiby says an excess of supply over demand characterizes all modern information markets. ‘Information is becoming ever easier to produce, whereas human capacity to absorb information is changing only slowly. The capacity cannot be enhanced to any significant degree, except by higher education’ (1996: 386). Burton-Jones believes that society is drowning in information ‘but still left thirsty for knowledge’ (1999: 219). In the twenty-first century, information comes quickly but truth takes time, writes Jon Katz. A generation ago, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, would have been a two-day wonder. But powerful technologies such as satellite, 24-hour cable and the Web morphed her demise into a global story. ‘As more Americans wire up to the Internet, the traditional role of the reporter – the one who tells you what is happening – is being radically transformed and supplanted.’ As the Starr Report showed, says Katz, Americans increasingly can get the news before journalists do (2000: 44–45). New technologies make the idea of trained, ethical fact-gatherers and truth-tellers ‘more essential than ever’ (Katz, 2000: 50). Journalist David Shenk, author of Data Smog, similarly concluded that journalists were more necessary than ever in the informationglutted world. ‘As a skeptical analytical buffer and – now more than ever – as an arbiter of statistical claims, the news media is an indispensable public utility, every bit as vital as our electricity and gas lines. In a world with vastly more information than it can process, journalists are the most important processors we have’ (Shenk, 1997: 166–67). The director general of the World Association of Newspapers, Timothy Balding, told the association’s 2001 annual conference in Hong Kong that information overload was driving specialization at newspapers. Consumers were demanding more relevance and advertisers were demanding better targeting. Communities of interest were moving from a localized geographic base to a situation where people formed groups based on interest but the members were spread around the world (Balding, 2001).

Declines in circulation

Circulation in mature markets was declining and newspapers were competing more and more for readers’ time, Balding said. Figures from the Newspaper Association of America (http://www.naa.org) showed that daily newspaper circulation (morning and evening) rose slightly from 53.8 million in 1950 to 56.9 million in 1996. But the population grew from about 151 million to about 270 million during the same period. Data from the Canadian Newspaper Association (http://www.cna-acj.ca) showed that total newspaper circulation dropped from 5.4 million in 1980 to 5.1 million in 1999. Again, this decline came about despite an increasing population. The average number of newspapers that American households bought each day dropped from just over 1.1 in 1960 to 0.5 forty years later (Kees, 2000: 2–3). In Australia, the combined circulation of all dailies Monday to Friday declined just over 10 per cent in the decade to March 2001. Saturday circulation for the same period rose slightly, by 0.6 per cent. Combined, the overall circulation dropped by 4.7 per cent. The Australian data were only available for a decade because the country’s publishers had long resisted pressures to present data separately for Monday to Friday and Saturday figures (Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers’ Association (PANPA) Bulletin May 2001: 10). During that decade, the country’s population rose 11.5 per cent from 17.3 million to 19.3 million (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2001). Healthy economies in some countries in the last three years of the twentieth century balanced the falls in circulation. A booming economy has meant that advertising incomes, in constant terms, were better than the highest levels of the 1980s boom in Europe, North America and the Asia-Pacific region. PANPA reported in the July 2000 edition of its Bulletin that, on a global level, advertising incomes were up 18.8 per cent in 1999 compared with 1987.

The 53rd annual conference of the World Association of Newspapers held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in June 2000 noted tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• About the author
• 1. Knowledge management and journalism
• 2. The re-defined newsroom
• 3. The coming of convergence journalism
• 4. Intranets and knowledge management
• 5. New tools for journalists
• 6. Mobile journalism
• 7. How to involve and evolve the newsroom
• Index