How to Deal with these Processes on a Medium Team

Of the medium newsrooms I spoke to, it was surprising that only six had some sort of process for on-boarding and off-boarding, even if it wasn't formalized. The biggest challenge the reporters said was getting their editors to sign off on letting them make time to write up documentation. For editors, the issue wasn't so much time, but worrying about teams repeating the same things over and over again by writing separate documentation.

The solution? Having a newsroom wiki with all the documentation for on-boarding and off-boarding. It's a central place for everyone's documentation. If the editors focus on writing up the CMS docs and other common newsroom-wide documentation, the individual notes for teams can be added later. A lot of the bigger issues on the teams that I spoke to actually involved the bigger newsroom-wide processes. So if you target these processes first and make documentation really thorough, it can be a motivation for the newsroom to write their own documentation.

Of the teams that had documentation, they were often data/news applications teams. They often had their own documentation for their projects with commented out code on Github. This could be added to the newsroom wiki so people know that it exists and is showcased so other teams can be aware of what other parts of the newsroom are doing. This can help with understanding the work that the data and news applications teams do too, because non-technical people can learn (if they are interested) what the lines of code mean. This can also serve as motivation for the entire newsroom to be more transparent and showing their work so others can learn from them.