What if you could build a next-generation newsroom from scratch, without any of the limits of your current operation? One experiment is trying to do just that.
It’s happening at a major university, but this “next newsroom” effort is anything but academic. In fact, the project’s originator, business reporter Chris O’Brien, hopes it can offer a much-needed way forward for a news industry in the ditch.
For O’Brien this project has particular poignancy. Just days ago he returned from a one-year hiatus to the newsroom of the San Jose Mercury News, which has been hemorrhaging staff — from a peak of over 400 a few years back to about 240 today, with another round of unspecified cuts on the way.
The “next newsroom” project is taking place at O’Brien’s alma mater, Duke University. The school is about to build an entirely new central campus, and it wants to include a comprehensive media center. With a $25,000 Knight News Challenge grant, O’Brien will help guide Duke in creating a new-media newsroom for the five-day-a-week student-run campus paper The Chronicle (which he edited back in the day).
Although this model is for a student newsroom, O’Brien figures other small news organizations could benefit as they reshape their own digital-era newsrooms.
What’s next? O’Brien will soon launch a Web site. (A preliminary version is already live.) This will be the focal point for discussion and collaboration to decide what an ideal newsroom should be. It will combine tools such as wikis, forums, chat rooms, blogs and other interactive elements to allow a variety of participants to help craft the plan.
The site will also publish original research on existing converged newsrooms, as well as interviews with new media leaders. O’Brien expects it will ultimately become a resource for other campus media as well as other newsrooms — especially for small local and community newspapers.
In spring 2008 the project will hold a conference on the newsroom of future to attract even more brainpower to the topic and draft the project’s proposal to Duke. By May 2008, O’Brien expects to deliver the final proposal to Duke.
“We’re trying to reimagine [the digital era newsroom] from scratch,” says O’Brien, who senses a note of desperation in the search for radical solutions to save the newspaper industry. “People are looking far more fundamentally at what we do, how we do it and who should be doing it.”
Here’s hoping that O’Brien’s next newsroom project produces some viable solutions. If you’d like to participate, e-mail O’Brien.
