di Julie Posetti
Journalism has become too obsessed with technology-led innovation and must refocus on strategic approaches to storytelling, audience engagement and business development, according to my new report for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
The report, “Time to step away from the ‘bright, shiny things’? Towards a sustainable model of journalism innovation in an era of perpetual change,” is the first research published from the Journalism Innovation Project, which I lead at the University of Oxford. (The Project is funded by the Facebook Journalism Project.)
According to this research, journalism has a focus problem. Unsurprising, you might say, given the convergent crises confronting the news business, including financial desperation that can drive defensive and reactive innovation. This problem was diagnosed as “Shiny Things Syndrome” by U.S. digital-born journalism veteran Kim Bui, who said it “takes away from storytelling, and we risk forgetting who we are. That’s the biggest challenge.”
Bui is one of 39 leading journalism innovators from 17 countries initially participating in this year-long project that seeks to put the “end users” — in this case, journalists and news organizations — at the center of the research process. Together, they represent 27 different news publishers — a mix of legacy and digital-born media. Others voices in the curated roundtable discussions analyzed for the project’s first report include editors and CEOs like Rappler’s Maria Ressa, NewsMavens’ Zuzanna Ziomecka, The Quint’s Ritu Kapur, and Kinzen’s Mark Little; managers from legacy media like The Washington Post’s Greg Barber, Reuters News’ Reg Chua, and The New York Times’ Francesca Donner; and industry leaders–turned–academics like Aron Pilhofer and Raju Narisetti.
Narisetti was perplexed about the failure of journalism to innovate sustainably and strategically and he gave voice to simmering frustration that cut across the discussion groups: “We have such a unique industry and we are so used to change every day, and yet we still cannot seem to innovate our way out of anything.”
Examples of the manifestation of “Shiny Things Syndrome” cited by the participants included fixation with artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), automated reporting (AR), and over-reliance on social platforms for distribution (leading to panic about algorithm tweaks). The cure suggested in the report involves a conscious shift by news publishers from being technology-driven in their innovation efforts, to proactively audience-focused, business-aware and technology-empowered.
The report’s key findings
— There is a clear desire to pull back from the high-speed pursuit of “bright, shiny things” (i.e., the proliferation of new tools and technologies) and to refocus on foundational concepts of journalism innovation, “end user”/audience needs, and core elements of practice, especially within legacy news media contexts.
According to this research, journalism has a focus problem. Unsurprising, you might say, given the convergent crises confronting the news business, including financial desperation that can drive defensive and reactive innovation. This problem was diagnosed as “Shiny Things Syndrome” by U.S. digital-born journalism veteran Kim Bui, who said it “takes away from storytelling, and we risk forgetting who we are. That’s the biggest challenge.”
Bui is one of 39 leading journalism innovators from 17 countries initially participating in this year-long project that seeks to put the “end users” — in this case, journalists and news organizations — at the center of the research process. Together, they represent 27 different news publishers — a mix of legacy and digital-born media. Others voices in the curated roundtable discussions analyzed for the project’s first report include editors and CEOs like Rappler’s Maria Ressa, NewsMavens’ Zuzanna Ziomecka, The Quint’s Ritu Kapur, and Kinzen’s Mark Little; managers from legacy media like The Washington Post’s Greg Barber, Reuters News’ Reg Chua, and The New York Times’ Francesca Donner; and industry leaders–turned–academics like Aron Pilhofer and Raju Narisetti.
Narisetti was perplexed about the failure of journalism to innovate sustainably and strategically and he gave voice to simmering frustration that cut across the discussion groups: “We have such a unique industry and we are so used to change every day, and yet we still cannot seem to innovate our way out of anything.”
Examples of the manifestation of “Shiny Things Syndrome” cited by the participants included fixation with artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), automated reporting (AR), and over-reliance on social platforms for distribution (leading to panic about algorithm tweaks). The cure suggested in the report involves a conscious shift by news publishers from being technology-driven in their innovation efforts, to proactively audience-focused, business-aware and technology-empowered.
The report’s key findings
— There is a clear desire to pull back from the high-speed pursuit of “bright, shiny things” (i.e., the proliferation of new tools and technologies) and to refocus on foundational concepts of journalism innovation, “end user”/audience needs, and core elements of practice, especially within legacy news media contexts.
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