Who Owns the Workflow in Your Newsroom?
Hossein Sharif
Here is a game you can play in any newsroom in the world.
Stand right in the middle of it and loudly ask who owns the technology. Someone will raise their hand before you finish the sentence. Ask who owns the roster and the shifts and job descriptions; and someone from HR will raise their hand. Ask who owns the content. You see journalists and storytellers raising their hand.
Now ask who owns the workflow; and watch the room go quiet.
We have done this in newsrooms on five continents, with broadcasters that between them reach hundreds of millions of viewers. The silence is always the same. Because in years of engagements with some of the world's biggest media organizations, we have never once walked into a broadcaster that has a dedicated workflow unit. Not a single one. The discipline simply does not exist as an organizational function.
And this is where we come in!
Workflow is the operating system of your organization. It is not the MAM. It is not the NRCS. It is not the stories you tell. It is the glue between all three and what sticks everything together.
And I bet you a cup of coffee in your organization nobody owns that glue.
Our Collective Chronic Dementia
This is why it has always seemed to me that our industry suffers from chronic dementia. That no other industry so routinely, so pathologically, forgets why it exists. Broadcasters confuse the machines for the work. The rundown for the story. Their habits for their desires. And because nobody is responsible for the connective tissue between systems, people, and stories, the confusion compounds with every technology cycle.
This is how you end up with a newsroom that has bought three MAMs in ten years and still has journalists manually retyping information between screens. This is how you end up with a breakfast show running four versions of the same rundown simultaneously.
This is not a technology problem and believe me, you cannot procure your way out of it.
Workflow is the real operating system of your organization; It predates your current MAM and It will outlast your next one.
And if nobody is accountable for it, it will silently absorb every transformation you attempt and return your organization to its previous shape within eighteen months of go-live. We have watched it happen; repeatedly.
Finally Some Good News…
The good news is that it is entirely fixable: but only if you treat it as a discipline, not an afterthought.
This is why before we leave a client, we make sure they have a newly built Workflow Unit. We help with writing up job descriptions, with establishing their authority and ensuring they sit on the right spot in the org chart. There are people working in broadcast today whose job title reads Workflow Designer because we advocated for it.
Because the official maintenance and enforcement of workflow is not a nice-to-have. It is the difference between a transformation that sticks and one that quietly unravels while everyone congratulates themselves on a successful go-live.
As If Pictures is a workflow design and change management firm working with broadcasters across five continents.