Building a newsroom technology culture

A guide to hiring, supporting, and empowering the technology competence that journalism needs to survive

A quick note before we begin: This post reflects my own views on newsroom technology leadership, not necessarily those of my employer.

I like to say that journalism treats technology as something that happens to it — like an asteroid. But technology is too important to the future of news for it to be treated passively.

Journalism’s most impactful publishing surfaces have all migrated to the internet: websites, newsletters, aggregators like Apple News, social media platforms, and streaming media. And most crucially, every publisher lives or dies on the web: it’s the platform where articles are shared and discovered, where a publisher makes their first impressions, and where most of their revenue is earned.

Recently, journalism’s existential threats have also been rooted in technology: radical changes in the social media landscape and referrals from search engines have been ongoing for a while, and AI threatens to shift the way people learn about the world towards black-box proprietary systems that are prone to hallucinations, bias, and misinformation. We’re in a period of great platform change.