How to develop a pipeline for innovative storytelling

Thinking about innovation in newsrooms can be difficult. In an industry that often barely gets by on an overworked staff, it can be difficult to justify putting time into innovation that doesn’t guarantee an immediate win. However in the long-run, failing to innovate leaves newsrooms behind in discovering new stories, engaging with audiences and simply staying in business.

But there’s hope. Newsrooms are used to dealing with the unpredictable — journalists, more than most, are great at adapting when breaking news strikes — and innovation is often born when people are resource-strapped and forced to change. Imagine how much our industry has had to evolve with the pandemic in the last year.

One of my favourite readings from my corporate entrepreneurship course was “The Innovation Value Chain” by Morten T Hansen and Julian Birkinshaw. In it, the authors break down the steps that lead to innovation and how we can strengthen our weak spots.

As the tech lead for our visual & data journalism team, I’ve been tasked to push “innovative storytelling.” But thinking simply about the end goal sometimes obscures the steps to get there. Hansen and Birkinshaw’s research shows that a company’s level of innovation is only as strong as their weakest link, so every part demands attention.

The innovation value chain

The innovation value chain views innovation in three sequential phases: idea generation, idea conversion and idea diffusion. Thinking about each phase separately makes it easier to pinpoint gaps and strengthen the links between them.

Idea generation

Questions to ponder:

• Is your team encouraged and given time to explore ideas unrelated to their day-to-day deadlines?
• Does your team bring ideas from outside the team, their competitors and the news industry?
• Does your team collaborate with others in the team and the wider newsroom to develop ideas?

How to strengthen idea generation:

• Create time and space for people to look outside their immediate work and gain inspiration from others in the team, the industry and outside the industry. When I became a tech lead at the FT and was told to boost innovation, I borrowed a concept that Google made popular — 10% time. For two days each month, people on the team are encouraged to spend time looking into a technology or process that is unrelated to a story they’re working on. This gives them time without the pressure of deadlines to gain new sources of inspiration that can drive their future work. One of our recent published stories on face emotion recognition came from a culmination of several lab times exploring machine learning.
• Make idea generation visible and celebrate it. Teams shouldn’t work in a vacuum. Create a white board that people walk past in the newsroom, or in the post-pandemic era, set up a Slack channel or a Trello board. This encourages people across the team and newsroom to drop in ideas they’ve read or reported about that can be picked up by others who have time to do more research. As journalists, we’re often on the front row for new innovations companies are trying out, and we should take advantage of that knowledge.
• Hire people with different backgrounds and experiences who can bring new perspectives to the table. The key lies in the diversity of contacts, not the number of them.
• Put people with different skill sets in the same space together. Before the pandemic, our team of hybrid developer-journalists started a series of “desk rotations” in the newsroom where we would spend around two weeks with reporters with specialist areas of focus. These desk rotations resulted in a number of stories — some winning awards — that couldn’t have been done without those collaborations.

Idea conversion

Questions to ponder:

• Do you have a process for selecting good and rejecting bad ideas? Does everyone know what this process is?
• How often do ideas turn into something publishable or a useful tool for the team?
• How often do good ideas turn into published stories or a tool that can help with the storytelling process?

How to strengthen:

• Help people understand what good and bad look like. The best way to increase the number of good ideas is for people to know what makes an idea good. The more specific you can be about what this looks like, the better.
• Create processes in the newsroom for publishing innovative stories. Innovative stories often look and feel different and therefore need a different pitching, editing and publishing process. While traditional stories might live or die by the hands of one editor, innovative stories might need multiple avenues for getting to publication. To tackle this at the FT, we’re setting up a new visual storytelling team that will have a different process to pitching, editing and publication than other desks in the newsroom.
• Give people room to fail so that people are incentivised to take on some of the risk inherent with trying something new. Put emphasis on learning and iteration so that employees are rewarded for failing quickly. Treat time investment like a venture capitalist would invest in a startup.
• Find reliable collaborators in your newsroom at every level (e.g. reporters, editors, audience engagement, multimedia producers) who can help you choose good ideas and develop them into publishable stories.
• Remove technical barriers to publishing innovative stories. This means giving time for upskilling and training as well as making sure your publishing platforms are engineered with some flexibility for experimentation.
• Conduct frequent retrospectives on projects so that people can hone in on what makes an innovative story good and can improve the process for the future. The process from idea to publication won’t necessarily be straightforward or the same each time, but the principles of collaboration and communication should carry through.

Idea diffusion

Questions to ponder:

• Do other reporters in the organisation want to get involved in future stories? Are they discussing potential new ideas?
• Are high level editors in the organisation excited about innovative storytelling and are they invested in doing more?
• Do other parts of the organisation (e.g. legal, customer support, sales) see value in innovative storytelling?
• Does everyone see innovation as part of their responsibility or are there only one or two “evangelists” in the newsroom?

How to strengthen:

• Develop evangelists in your newsroom who believe in innovative storytelling. They can become your future collaborators and hammer home the benefits when things inevitably get tough.
• Loudly celebrate your wins. Find avenues to talk about the process of developing good stories and find places (e.g. internal talks, external conferences, awards) to boost their profile.
• Spend time understanding the incentives and needs of other parts of the business. Having relationships with others in the business will make it easier when something new comes up that requires their attention. The resources to support innovation will dry up if it doesn’t receive support from others. New products and workflows can result in extra work for other departments (e.g. new privacy policies may need to be written and customer support may need to learn how to support the new technology), so the benefit to them needs to be made clear.

The three phases of the innovation value chain depend on each other. Since every team is different, solutions for one company aren’t necessarily as effective for another. Developing each phase isn’t an overnight process, but the innovation value chain framework can help teams spot their gaps and focus the little time they have to strengthen those weaknesses.

This is the second in a series of blog posts recapping some of my top takeaways for newsrooms from my MBA programme last year. If there are any topics you’d like me to write about, please let me know at @joannaskao on Twitter or email me at jskao at alum.mit.edu.