Timeline and Overview of Process

I sent out the survey on April 22, 2016. I closed the survey on September 12, 2016. As of October 31, I’ve heard from 221 newsrooms and 247 unique individuals. A total of 289 people filled out the survey, which contained nine main questions and four “if-then” follow-up questions. I conducted 101 interviews with individuals who filled out the survey. Thirty of them were over Skype or over the phone. The other 71 were email.

At the beginning of the survey, I sent it to two of the Slack groups that I'm a part of: Journalists of Color & News Nerdery. Then I sent emails to my mentors and friends to have them pass the survey along. I also sent it directly to about 35 newsrooms and then posted it on Twitter and Facebook. I also talked about it on the OpenNews community calls on Thursdays.

In July, I talked to Elite Truong from Poynter about the research I was doing and she wrote up a piece on my initial findings.

SRCCON session

At the end of July, I facilitated a session at SRCCON, the conference that OpenNews puts on. Some of this appears in my learnings writeup here. The session was titled "The good and bad of newsroom on-boarding processes and how can we make them better" and all notes from the session are here.

There were roughly 12 people in the room.

Here's the breakdown:

• Data reporters: 3
• Editors: 2
• Director: 2
• Beat reporters: 1
• Software engineer: 1
• News apps developers: 1
• Designer: 1
• Project Managers:1

Here are the questions I posed in the session:

• What was useful in your newsrooms on-boarding and off-boarding processes?
• What are the problem areas for these processes in newsrooms?
• What do you wish was better in your on-boarding/off-boarding?
• What’s the worst/best experience with on-boarding you’ve had?
• What would your ideal on-boarding/off-boarding include?

What were the results of the discussion:

The issues:

• it’s really difficult to know how to write something so that someone else can read it later and understand it
• how to deal with time constraints people have with writing documentation

Both were key points made in the session which also came up in the survey responses. Many people pointed to these as the reason why even if documentation is written, it's just really hard to make sure that everyone on the team can understand it.

The solutions: There should be a person or people who reads through the documents that a person writes and when they’re done reading through the documentation they should add their comments and changes to the documents.

It's helpful to have a buddy system for documentation. So, if you write documentation have a buddy read through it and give you feedback. Likewise, if they have documentation, you should read through it and give them your edits.

In the first few weeks in the job, one can shadow other peoples’ jobs in the newsroom to understand their job, which can help with general understanding. Documentation should be done regularly, so there isn't scrambling in the last minute. It can also be helpful to have documentation days where the sole focus is on creating really good documentation.

Please note both of these lists/suggestions are incorporated into the bigger on-boarding and off-boarding lists I've shared, but these are just the ones that came up in the session.

Some key things to document:

• installation guide & wiki: including but not limited to: tools, websites to bookmark, glossary of terms to know, guide to common data sets that are used, projects previously worked on & expectations of the job
• project path: timeline, who are the key people in the process/order of this process
• styleguide
• newsroom organization chart (& include photos and what people do and not just their titles, which may not actually describe their job) & a map of the newsroom
• rolodex of newsroom contacts & any notes on when they are good to contact, other quirks
• FOI status: what data you have, clean version, messy version, key contacts, follow-ups

Off-boarding suggestions:

• checklists: can include removing people from accounts (such as Facebook, Twitter), handing off email, Google Docs hand-off
• newsroom exit interview with team: what went wrong, what went well, etc. & a time to answer any questions about what anyone in the newsroom wonders about your job (similar to office hours)

Reflections

A good point which was brought up in the session was general documentation and use cases. In the session, people mentioned those who go on a leave from the newsroom either for sabbatical or maternity leave. It’s important to also think about keeping a checklist so that these people are in loop with the newsroom and leaving the proper contact information for these folks.

Overall, the session went really well and gave me a good feel for how people actually feel about these processes (besides those who filled out my survey).

Next steps with survey and research

Throughout the summer and early fall, I conducted interviews (some on the phone and Skype). The rest was mostly through email since I'm currently located in Berlin on Central European Standard Time, so chatting with people in the United States required me to interview folks at night or on the weekend. I sent emails to people who filled out the survey and were okay with further questioning.

I did not ask respondents to fill in the dates in which they were in a newsroom. I did have a question about prior or current newsrooms, but I think it would have been helpful to have the dates of the times that people were in newsrooms. This is why there are more individual responses because some individuals filled the survey out for multiple newsrooms. When I emailed people for further questions, I asked them what was the timeframe they were in the newsroom for. For the purpose of this research, I am not including those dates, because the general issues that newsrooms experienced 60 years ago with documentation are still there today.