The final presentation at ISOJ looked at a key issue in journalism: the digital transformation of legacy organisations.
The study (PDF) into three-year project into how NPR is changing from a broadcast network to a multimedia company was outlined by Patricia Riley, University of Southern California. They are two years into this project, so this is an initial assessment of what has happened to date.
One of the challenges for the transformation was that little content was created as text. Initially, the web-first mentality was an impossible concept for people, said Riley.
The aim for NPR was to translate the cultural understanding of “NPR-NESS” and translate it to a digital platform.
The first training sessions took seven weeks and tried to teach journalists to do everything. But they discovered it was very hard to teach everyone to do everything at a sufficiently high quality.
The new training was focused on teaching journalists to “think multimedia” and to consider how to engage the user.
Engaging the community became part of everybody’s job, said Riley.
NPR discovered there was no end state – this was a process. They also found that internal cultural change was very difficult.
Riley said that the more distinct the journalistic identity, the more being entrepreneurial and focused on the user is a challenge.
She urged news organisations to engage with their community and see them as a resource.
PDF