Tag: #innovation

Posted on

Nieman Lab Prediction 2024: Everyone in the Newsroom Gets Training

Up to now, the world’s newsrooms have been populated by roughly two phenotypes. On the one hand, there have been the content people (many of whom would never call their journalism “content,” of course). These include seasoned reporters, investigators, or commentators who spend their time deep diving into subjects, research, analysis, and cultivating sources and usually don’t want to be bothered by “the rest.”

On the other hand, there has been “the rest.” These are the people who understand formats, channel management, metrics, editing, products, and audiences, and are ever on the lookout for new trends to help the content people’s journalism thrive and sell. But with the advent of generative AI, taking refuge in the old and surprisingly stable world of traditional journalism roles will not be an option any longer. Everyone in the newsroom has to understand how large language models work and how to use them — and then actually use them. This is why 2024 will be the year when media organizations will get serious about education and training.

“We have to bridge the digital divide in our newsrooms,” says Anne Lagercrantz, vice CEO of Swedish public broadcaster SVT. This requires educating and training all staff, even those who until now have shied away from observing what is new in the industry. While in the past it was perfectly acceptable for, say, an investigative reporter not to know the first thing about SEO, TikTok algorithms, or newsletter open rates, now everyone involved with content needs to be aware of the capabilities, deficiencies, and mechanics of large language models, reliable fact-checking tools, and the legal and ethical responsibilities that come with their use. Additionally, AI has all the potential to transform good researchers and reporters into outstanding ones, serving as powerful extensions to the human brain. Research from Harvard Business School suggested that consultants who extensively used AI finished their tasks about 25% faster and outperformed their peers by 40% in quality. It will be in the interest of everyone, individuals and their employers, that no one falls behind.

But making newsrooms fit for these new challenges will be demanding. First, training requires resources and time. But leadership might be reluctant to free up both or tempted to invest in flashy new tools instead. Many managers still fall short of understanding that digital transformation is more a cultural challenge than it is a tech challenge.

Second, training needs trainers who understand their stuff. These are rare finds at a time when AI is evolving as rapidly as it is over-hyped. You will see plenty of consultants out there, of course. But it will be hard to tell those who really know things from those who just pretend in order to get a share of the pie. Be wary when someone flashes something like the ten must-have tools in AI, warns Charlie Beckett, founder of the JournalismAI project at the London School of Economics. Third, training can be a futile exercise when it is not paired with doing. With AI in particular, the goal should be to implement a culture of experimentation, collaboration, and transparency rather than making it some mechanical exercise. Technological advances will come much faster than the most proficient trainer could ever foresee.

Establishing a learning culture around the newsroom should therefore be a worthwhile goal for 2024 and an investment that will pay off in other areas as well. Anyone who is infected with the spirit of testing and learning will likely stretch their minds in areas other than AI, from product development to climate journalism. So many of today’s challenges for newsrooms require constant adaptation, working with data, and building connections with audiences who are more demanding, volatile, and impatient than they used to be. It is important that every journalist embraces at least some responsibility for the impact of their journalism.

It is also time that those editorial innovators who tend to run into each other at the same conferences open their circles to include all of the newsroom. Some might discover that a few of their older colleagues of the content-creator-phenotype could teach them a thing or two as well — for example, how to properly use a telephone. In an age when artificial fabrication of text, voice, or image documents is predicted to evolve at a rapid pace, the comeback of old-style research methods and verification techniques might become a thing. But let’s leave this as a prediction for 2025.

This post was published in Harvard’s Nieman Lab’s Journalism Predictions 2024 series on 7th December 2023.  

Posted on

The Power of the Middle – Not even media leaders themselves think that they have the best ideas

Middle management in companies more often than not suffers from its infamous reputation. They are branded as rule-abiding busy bees, nitpickers who stick to processes just as much as they stick to their own chairs, managers, definitely not leaders. If they were, they would have long been promoted to the top – or so it is taught in many a business school. Former Siemens CEO Peter Löscher once spoke of a “clay layer,” the term even survived his own career in the company. A word that is like a slap in the face of all those tireless getting-things-doners who not only keep the company running on a daily basis, but also strive for constant improvement and overhaul, whether there is a crisis or not.

In the media industry, bosses are apparently no longer so sure about that clay layer. In the new “Journalism, media and technology trends and predictions” report by Nic Newman, which the Reuters Institute in Oxford publishes regularly at the beginning of the year, top managers were at least refreshingly self-critical about their own capacity to generate top ideas. Only about one in four (26 percent) of the 234 executives surveyed from 43 countries said they were convinced that top management generates the best ideas. The problem, as Nic Newman frames it: Innovation might not come from the top, “but companies are still run that way”. The report is not representative, but it is a must-read in the industry precisely because the respondents tend to be leaders who are particularly concerned about progress.

But where do they see innovation coming from? Nearly three-quarters revealed that data and audience research were most likely to give them a leg up, 68 percent bet on mixed teams from different areas, and still just under one in two admitted to borrowing the best strategies from other media companies. Okay, according to the survey, editors-in-chief and media managers trusted middle management as such even less (17 percent) than they trusted themselves. But who meets in the mixed teams, who evaluates audience data and derives strategies from it, who attends the relevant industry meetings, reads up on foreign material and then reports to the C-level? That’s right, in the very most common case, it’s the mid-level.

It is often those who are not celebrated as heroes in any industry publication and who neither management literature nor research has an eye on. They are the ones who are closest to the difficulties – and often therefore to the solutions. But they are also the ones for whom demands from employees and customers alike pile up into a sandwich of expectations. They are expected to be both operationally reliable and to think strategically and manage change. And if something goes wrong, it’s up to them to pick up the pieces and rebuild them into something else – in management-speak this is coined as “celebrating failure.

This layer of dedicated and loyal drivers of innovation, many of whom are at an age and in situations where family work demands additional work from them, is – no surprise – most at risk of burnout. Lucy Küng, who researches cultural change in media companies that go digital, has revealed this in countless interviews, including in her latest book: “Hearts and Minds: Harnessing Leadership, Culture and Talent to Really Go Digital.” This results in a huge brain and talent drain, she emphasizes again and again.

Yet many managers consider the mid level worthy of support only as long as they themselves are part of it. As soon as they have made it into top positions, they recoin themselves as visionaries. Gianpiero Petriglieri, a professor at INSEAD Business School, calls this “leaderism.” Instead of valuing reliable and constructive management, which is so necessary especially in times of crisis, he says, people celebrate visionaries whose ideas all too often go down with them. The glorification of leadership on the one hand and the devaluation of management qualities on the other is a dangerous pair of opposites that is still taught, but does more harm than good, especially in crises, he eloquently describes in the essay: “Why leadership isn’t a miracle cure for the Covid-19 crisis (and what can really help).” It is time to put less hope in leadership and more humanity into management, Petriglieri said. Judging by the “Trends and Predictions” report, many media managers already understand this. Humility can be the first step toward innovation.

This text was first published in German with Hamburg Media School Blog on 15th January 2021, then translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator and edited.