Last week brought collaboration and some awesome insight on what a news room is like on the inside. The trending theme in all the lectures from mozNewsLab last week was the importance of collaborating and working together in the news room. Shazna Nessa said that at times you may have to drop everything you are doing when news breaks in order to get quality content out as fast as possible.
Aza said in the very first lecture that the hard part about software is not programming but culture. Aza is not the only one that shares this idea. It was repeated in every lecture last week. Communication, collaboration and politics can really spur innovation if they are executed improperly. So what can we do to combat those three things? I think listening to the issue at hand and breaking it down logically is one way I deal with others when they request my help. Really understanding the problem that someone comes to you with makes a huge difference when you are trying to solve things for others.
Knowing who to go to when you want to make change and how to influence the “big fish” of the news room ( or in any work environment ) is very important to the success of you novel idea. One thing I took from the lectures last week is that usually a few people really run the show in news rooms. If you want to make a change you are going to have to sell your pitch to these influential few. To do this it will take patience. You will have to really take a step back and figure out what it is that you are going to have to do to influence the ones that have the largest influence.
At the end of the mozNewsLab some people are going to be placed into news rooms. They are going to be thrown in and expected to preform. We are going in with these novel ideas that more than likely are unlike anything that has been done before in a news room and I guarantee there is going to be resistance. To the lucky few that do get selected, you better be ready to combat this resistance in the most friendly non combatant way possible. If you want to make change you are going to have to find the ones who have the power to influence change and make an impression strong enough to give them the courage to hand you the reigns. Once you have the reigns you are either going to crash and burn or you are going to make a huge difference in the way news is delivered from now to the future.
To everyone in the mozNewsLab, it has been an awesome month of talks and collaboration. I wish the best for all of you.
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