An important step in changing your newsroom is assessing where you are now and what you need to do.
As we seek to unbolt Digital First Media newsrooms from the culture and processes of print, I suggest starting with a detailed assessment of your current processes and culture.
To start work with the four pilot newsrooms for Project Unbolt, I developed a questionnaire in Google Forms for each of the editors to complete. I said they could fill in the answers themselves or consult with other editors or the whole staff as long as they used the same process in answering the questions later to assess their progress.
The questions largely reflect the characteristics of an unbolted newsroom that I blogged in February. The assessment asks six to nine questions in each of the six primary areas where unbolting newsrooms need to transform:
- News coverage and storytelling.
- Processes and workflow.
- Engagement.
- Planning and management.
- Mobile.
- Standards.
For each question, the editor (or whoever is assessing) rates the newsroom on a scale of 1 to 5. I describe the 1 and the 5, and they decide where their newsroom is performing on the scale. For instance, one of the news coverage and storytelling questions asked: (more…)
The Buttry Diary 