Productivity tips for newsrooms and journalism departments

These are simple ideas. They mean some members of an organization have to start working differently. That means adapting work style and processes to new tools in efficient and effective ways. This is hard, as many people get stuck in habits and traditions and never stop to analyze how time use or wast and thus cost enters into the “this is the way we do things here” mental model of working together.

clipped from www.journerdism.com

This month’s Carnival of Journalism is topic specific: Finding time in a time-starved newspaper world to do ‘extra’ stuff for the web.

Step 1:
Get some decent web-based collaboration and information organization/production tools and implement them across your entire organization.

If you’re like me, you work on a web team that uses email as it’s primary means of notifying each other about projects, outages, changes, everything that happens in the day’s web production.

Outlook is purely a waste of money, including time (and therefore money) spent dealing with inept software. That time-as-money waste is almost as gross as the mountains of cash spent on the proprietary software that is causing this time suck. It’s a vicious circle.

Cutting down on the number of meetings people attend frees up lots of time. It’s 2008, there are dozens of online project management and collaboration tools out there. Why are newsrooms still holding 2-5 half-an-hour-long budget meetings a day?

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