Today in News Tech

How newspapers define and implement “Innovation”

YouTube player

This episode of Today in News Tech is made possible with Audio Articles by Our-Hometown.com. Today, we’re highlighting a piece by  Damian Radcliffe over at What’s New in Publishing about the ways various media organizations approach making innovations in their workflow and technology.

The article, “What do we mean by innovation? And why is implementing it so darned hard for news organizations?” discusses interviews conducted with 10 experts across the media landscape about their philosophies towards innovating within the industry. The experts discussed the lessons they’ve learned from successes and failures as well as gave advice about the biggest barriers to implementing change.

“The pace of change in our industry means that even the biggest, most successful companies need to continually innovate, refresh and reinvent what they do and how they do it.”

– said Damian Radcliffe

Here are a few of our big takeaways:

  • When trying to innovate, make sure to keep your goal in mind. Are you trying to improve the way you gather news, how you package it, or the way it’s distributed and monetized?
  • Before pursuing an innovation, make sure that both your newsroom and your audience are ready for it. You should also make sure you have both the staffing and fiscal resources to pursue it.
  • Remember that innovation doesn’t have to be flashy. A new CMS might not be as exciting as a website redesign, but if it helps your workflow it might be more beneficial.

No matter what changes you make, it’s important to keep things fresh and constantly reevaluate both your paper’s technology and processes to avoid becoming stagnant. Because of this, Our Hometown designed our WordPress platform so that new features and design elements can quickly and easily be added as papers assess their needs.

Thanks for watching Today in News Tech, the podcast where we discuss innovations happening in digital journalism. Remember to like and subscribe to keep up with everything happening in online media.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *