Navigating in NewsSpace

With an objective to elicit implications for new ways of using IT in "the organizing" of editorial work, the empirical studies reported in the paper investigates: How do newspaper and radio station staff, in their daily organizing of editorial work, know what to do next? The answer to the question is "the news cube," a conceptual model covering three dimensions: time, content and context. A design metaphor The NewsSpace interconnected IT devices to navigate in the interrelated dimensions, is introduced. The news industry has changed dramatically over the last couple of years. New news media have emerged from the conventional ones. News channels have moved from the kitchen tables and living room corners to our desktops and mobile devices. The consumption of news has also changed from being fairly static and often geographically limited to a more dynamic and diverse. As the consumer move between places and situations accompanied with IT doors are opened for exploration of what the news services of the future would be like. Inside the newsrooms, the use of new technologies to exploit these news channels and news services have increased dramatically. Other matters have not changed in the same way: journalists are still confronted with deadlines and conventional media formats. The organizing of editorial work, and the sharing of resources, ideas, and knowledge have not been issues for new ITsupport. Instead the focus has been on building IT for standardized production processes . Editorial work is a highly complex work task, which does not only rely on the unpredictable and seemingly chaotic courses of events in the world, but also the genre, style, etc., of the news provider in question, the organizational resources available, deadlines, and so on. This fosters a work situation where decisions about who is going to what, when, etc., are made on a frequent and continuous basis. The term organizing has been used to 1 Workflow has been identified as one of ten key technologies important for the publishing industry for the next years according to Andrew Tribute, Beyond the Printed Word, The World Electronic Publishing Conference, 1997 and 1998, arranged by IFRA (INCA FIEJ Research Association) and WAN (World Association of Newspapers) capture the frequent and continuous nature of such decisions. News providers have spent much resources on rendering editorial work more efficient. The majority of efforts has been focusing on the product and not so much on the organizing activities. At the same time, if editorial work to a considerable extent is about organizing, which has been documented empirically (Kärreman, 1996), then it would be unfortunate not to explore ways in which it could be improved. This is the rationale for the choice of study object for the research project reported in this paper: the organizing of editorial work. The studies presented here adopts a constructive knowledge interest. Their objective is innovation of new IT use, i.e., to explore, design, and evaluate new ways of using IT in the organizing of editorial work. The research projects on editorial work that have adopted constructive knowledge interests are very few. Two examples are the project by Kensing (1997), which aim to design CSCW support for a Danish radio station and the study by Bellotti and Rogers (1997), which explores the work in US multimedia industries. In this paper, we wish to summarize the observations from empirical investigations conducted in two news sites; a Swedish newspaper and a Swedish public service radio station. The research question asked was: How do newspaper and radio station staff, in their daily organizing of editorial work, know what to do next? We add to the exiting body of research by dealing with a novel class of work, namely journalism, and by offering principles for how IT for this kind of work should be designed. The rest of the paper is structured as follows. The next section introduce a Theoretical background. Section two summarizes The research sites and approach and section three describes the Observations. In section five we describe the Eliciting Implications for New IT use and in the next section we discuss these based on the research question. In section five, we also introduce related work and points out key design questions 1. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND In this section we wish to consider editorial work and organizing complex work in more detail. The objective is to provide a brief theoretical background to the empirical studies.