Tuesday August 1st: Project management for newsrooms

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Whether you work at an indie publication or one of the news giants, you’ve likely experienced the frustration of good ideas falling by the wayside, failing to get buy-in, or morphing into something totally unmanageable. These days, editors and journalists are expected to drive projects alongside increasingly complex day jobs, but project management isn’t necessarily a skill many of them have.

The WSJ’s Robin Kwong (who we’ve spoken to before on the podcast) has written a guide bringing together his two decades of experience across some of the world’s most prestigious - and complex - newsrooms. It is more of an ethos than specific rules and processes about managing projects, and he hopes it has something for reporters and editors at publications of all shapes and sizes.

No guide on its own is going to solve broader managerial and structural issues that devalue and prevent planning. But delivering successful projects is a powerful way to start advocating for change.

I’ve never had the antipathy towards Vice that Peter has. That’s probably because I know some of their journalists and media contacts personally, and it’s hard to disentangle the people you know from the place they work (unless it’s The Sun, obviously, if you work for them you should immediately quit). But I think even the most hardcore critic of Vice’s management will be interested to see how this new era for the counterculture digital publisher plays out.

We need to stop pointing out Musk’s hypocrisy as though that will change anything. I’ve seen too many people tweet “well so much for Mr. Free Speech Absolutist 😏” as though that was enough commentary, or as though it would change anything. It isn’t, and it won’t. We need to stop simply flagging the hypocrisy of Musk and his ilk and focus on exploring what the consequences of those decisions will be.

We’ve had experience of this at Media Voices — and if a tiny little B2B media blog is having its content stolen, imagine what’s happening with bigger publishers. Content farming falls in the same box as AI-generated pink slime: it’s cynical manipulation of the digital ad environment, and without some serious action from platforms and regulators, it’s diluting the ecosystem for everyone else.

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