Small Newsroom Challenges

I chatted with Adam Schweigert, who is the Senior Director of Product and Technology at the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN). INN has by far one of the most comprehensive processes for documentation. Their documents are located here and are also linked to in the resources portion of chapter two.

At INN, their documentation process started two years ago. While INN is a network of newsrooms, the core team who uses the documentation and wrote this guide up is six people. The team started the guide because there wasn't a guide like this that existed before and they wanted to share their knowledge. The team regularly revisits the documentation once a month. When a new person starts or someone leaves the team, they have them read through the documentation and update them. Because most of the team also works remote, these guides are even more helpful in making sure everyone is on the same page. The team also meets every quarter to revisit documentation in person.

Schweigert noted that he'd like to do more documentation days where they have one or two day sprints of just writing documentation on one thing that really needs work. This isn't always a possibility for newsrooms, especially small newsrooms, to set aside some days to do documentation, but he noted that if you create the culture of capturing your knowledge and fostering the idea of good documentation, it can be possible.

In some cases, it can be easier to foster this mentality, since the teams are so small and can really benefit from documentation in some ways more than bigger newsrooms. Bigger newsrooms tend to have a little bit more documentation (for example, how to use the CMS, editing process timeline) because they typically have day-long or half-day trainings for new people. For small newsrooms, these trainings are often just one person teaching another person.

In general, the biggest takeaway from a team like INN is that documentation can be done in a small newsroom and it can be very useful. It can live in a newsroom wiki or a Github repository like INN's does. Schweigert also noted that more newsrooms and teams should share their documentation because there is always a lot we can learn from others' processes. A good way he suggested of getting started with it is thinking of documentation as another product. If you make it a priority and not just an add on thing that would be nice and ideal if everyone did it, it can be very useful in the long run.