Last week I followed Lauren’s tweets about the Seattle Times’ move to a new building. It was fun to see the photos of packed up boxes and a newsroom in-flux. Watching all this over Twitter made me realize the opportunity something like this gives a news organization to open their newsroom up.
There are a lot of interesting questions that come up from a 24/7 operation like a metro daily moving to a new building. Here are just a few I thought of:
- Who is responsible for tracking breaking stories while moving? What type of plans did the Times have in place if a critical story were to break while they moved?
- In what ways does the production cycle of a news story change when a good part of the newsroom is packing and moving? What challenges is the Times having to work around in the move?
- How could the workflow changes for efficiency made during the move be applied to the everyday process?
- What were the goals for moving to a new building? Is the Times using it as an opportunity to re-think some of the ways they’re organized?
Times like this make me wish newsrooms had someone responsible for writing about what goes on behind the scenes. If you want your community to feel like a part of what you do then opening up information like this would be a great move, I think.