Internal Blogging & Digital Journalism Lessons

two lessons from a busy day:

First of all, as I comb my e-mails for details of Movable Type problems and bugs past, I really wish I’d been keeping an internal blog from the start. Then I could just click the “server issues” tag and have a handy list to print out and give to the testers.

Secondly, I’ve realised just how much of a mental re-engineering needs to go on for journalists to adapt to the Web 2.0 age. Traditional publishing fundamentally had one process: research, write, edit, publish. Online journalism provides us with a range of tools, so you still research, but then you pick whichever medium best suits the story: text (long or short form), image, audio, video (streamed or recorded and edited). So, instead of a linear production workflow, you actually have a branching one, with critical choices to be made. And then you start factoring in interactive media, and the complexity goes up another level. That’s a huge, huge change in the job. No wonder it takes time to enthuse people about this.