Productivity game in news organisation
When I was web editing the students’ union’s newspaper at university last year, I introduced a point-based system to measure writers productivity.
The said newspaper, in my opinion, was lacking in quality content. One factor, I speculated, was because it didn’t reward good writers. In fact, all contributors are unpaid except the chief editor who was in a paid position by virtue of being the union’s communications officer. (It’s complicated.)
The idea was pretty simple, to create a productivity game that works as an incentive scheme for writers to write quality stories.
A story gains one point every time it is read on the newspaper’s website. The system was complex enough not to count page views by the author or editors and multiple page views. The point also weighed in – although not significantly – the number of times the story has been shared on Facebook and Twitter as well as the number of comments posted by readers.
Writers accumulate points from stories that they have written.
At the end of the academic year, based on the points collected by all writers, we created league tables to rank the most productive writers for each section and for the entire newspaper. I found the ranking quite interesting. The top-ranked writers were mainly editors with the exception of a small few regular contributors.
It dawned upon me that the newspaper I was working at was a very much top-down organisation. I observed that editors tend to keep interesting stories – which readers would most likely be interested in – to themselves (everyone is self-interested, which is understandable). The point-based productivity game would work well had the there been less rigid organisational structure where small teams work on projects (or stories).
In a top-down organisation a lot of decision making centered at the top. This kind of structure, I observed, does not promote innovation at the subordinate level (eg writers did not seek out to find good story leads on their own). Hence, the top management were left with discovery and exploration to themselves (in our case, journalistic sourcing mainly left to editors). Of course, 10 brains (of relatively the same intelligence level) are better than just only one of those brains. Having more people sourcing story leads would result more potentially good stories.
(The productivity game also failed partly because it did not account the length of time a contributor had been writing for the newspaper. Some writers started contributing regularly to the newspaper in the middle of the academic year. The editors, on the other hand, had started churning out stories in the summer before the academic year.)
Ideally, the newspaper could be organised into loosely-organised small teams comprising of writers, photographers, videographers, illustrators and designers (yes, they are journalists, too). Each team would have their own beat eg university governance, union affairs, student societies, academic issues, campus facilities, ball sports, indoor sports, etc. A team member could be part of other teams (ie has more than one beat).
Teams would find their own story leads or could be given one by relevant section editor. For example, the university governance team would keep track of what the university management were up to and ball sports team would follow and report on football, rugby and netball matches. Having teams finding their own story relieve the editors from the burden of sourcing stories. Instead, they could just focus on managing resources (aha, editors are managers!). They would decide which stories to be given more space in the newspaper, when they were due and such.
So now when we put the productivity game in the picture it gets even more interesting. Teams would be competing against one another to find better story and to get editor’s attention. When journalists of different disciplines get together and collaborate, the result could not be anything less than great.
Collecting badges (like Foursquare) is so in right now and journalists might enjoy it, too.
Of course, having small teams working on their own beat is only suitable for reporting but not commentary or criticisms. Comment and review writers are better off working independently than in a team.
All it takes is a visionary leader, one who asks the right question.
