This document discusses research into how digital tools are transforming newspaper newsrooms. It explores how reporters and editors are adjusting to new technologies and the changing nature of their work. The research examined how physical newsroom spaces are evolving and how culture and social patterns are changing as skills and roles adapt to the digital environment. It also identifies some strategies that were found to help with this transition, such as connecting technology to journalists' values, giving online editors more authority, and recognizing how the process and expectations of news work are being altered.

1. News Work, News Space in
the Transforming Digital
Newsroom
Sue Robinson
The University of Wisconsin-Madison
April 2009
CONVERGENCE CRISES

2. Reporter 1: I guess we’re getting
laptops. I feel like I need one …
But I also feel like we’re being
co-opted into the 24-7 world,
man. It never ends.
Reporter 2: I am too old for this
shit. I can’t wait until I retire.

3. Research Questions
1) Values, considerations, assumptions
influencing physical virtual transition
2) How are digital tools affecting news
performance?
3) How has the newsroom’s culture changed?
4) What works? Are changes in ‘real world’
creating hoped-for digital transformations?

4. Newspaper Culture Lingers: Even among
staffs directed to go completely virtual
Mobile, cyber-newsroom: Inhospitable to
old-world reporters
Changed Social Patterns: According to
digital skills
 Technology = Replacing journalism
“[The digital camera] makes you feel a
little more small time, like you’re writing
for some little weekly.”
Findings

5. What Works

6. Combining Staffs, Changing Physical Space
“What? It’s ‘let’s paint the walls and
move stuff around’? Please. How is that going
to help anyone?”
BUT
Being able to see online editors had “put them
in the front of my mind, whereas before I
never really thought about them because I
could not see them from where I was
sitting.”

7. Connecting Technology to Journalists’ Values
Better Stories (multiple drafts of a story)
More Sources and Scoops
Larger Audiences:
“As reporters began to realize that they
now had a national and international
audience, they warmed up to web.”
**** Hire trainer to guide them from physical
world to virtual one

8. Giving Authority to Online Editors
Visual Presence (as in meetings)
Organizational Leadership
Delegation Authority (assigning
stories)
“I’m not sure if [Online Editor] can tell me
I have to post. Can he? I already have one
boss.”

9. Building in Physical Reminders of Journalism
Prioritize Stories
Perpetuate Bylines/Photos/Emails
Archive, Aggregate News Work
Create Journalist Sub-Brands
It was so buried, I felt, what is the
point? Sometimes it seems that we lose
our soul.”

10. Recognizing Altered News Work
Journalism as a Process (An
Unfinished Story, but also:
Journalistic Opportunities)
Omnipresent Work, Cross Platform
Work
Management Expectations