What is Agile Journalism?

Our site exists with a clear mission to help CIOs and CTOs who are focused on IT—defined as the business use of technology—to be more effective in their jobs and help their operations perform better.

CITO Research is attempting to define and perfect an idea we call Agile Journalism. Agile Journalism is a way that CITO Research intends to develop and use to better connect with its audience of CITOs and to better serve their needs. Agile Journalism is an aspiration we have for combining what we have learned about our Communication by Design methodology with what we have learned about the following subjects:

• Innovation and Agile software development
• Lean manufacturing processes (see In Pursuit of the Perfect Plant)
• Wikis (see Wikis for Dummies)
• Mashups (see Mashup Corporations)
• Social media (see Mesh Collaboration)

Assumptions of Traditional Journalism

Agile Journalism breaks several assumptions that have ruled the way journalism has worked up until now.

First, let’s review some of those assumptions, which are still practiced even in this time of new media and social collaboration:

• Most stories are the product of one individual. Sometimes, that individual acts as a reporter and gathers information from a variety of sources, but the story is that individual’s product. The journalist has an editor that consults and approves the story, but there are relatively few people involved in writing the story.
• The conception and direction of each individual story is decided and approved by a small group of people, either the editor of the publication or the individual reporter.
• The audience for whom the story is being written is rarely involved in determining what articles would be of interest. That opportunity – often overlooked – could involve evaluating the list of articles under review, or being given the opportunity to suggest ideas.
• Once an article is written, it is generally an entity unto itself. It is rarely part of an organized stream of thought that is pursuing a goal.
• Context is defined only in the vaguest of terms.
• The standards by which the articles are judged are not clear.
• There is very little follow-up, after an article is completed, to improve it or to respond to and engage with the interested readers systematically. There is little incentive to respond to a conventional article.

The Promise of Agile Journalism

Agile journalism changes many of these assumptions. Nonfiction publishing, as it is practiced today, does not engage people nearly as much as it could. The power of social media to involve many more people in an organized way is being squandered. The ability to involve more people with direct knowledge of the subject in innovation is also being missed.

Our critique of social media is that there is often no framework for collaboration. It is very spontaneous and emergent, but often there is no long-term goal. A journalistic process can be seen as a process of innovation and knowledge capture. The innovation is to understand and get insights to into what research needs to be done to benefit a certain population of people pursuing a certain purpose.

Much of social media seems unimportant, even trivial, to people; it is seen as consisting of many small groups of people assembling for volatile purposes for a short amount of time. Our goal at CITO Research is to engage in social media for a clearly defined purpose, and to engage as much as possible with people who are relevant to that purpose, so that we can offer that to our readers is to capture knowledge so we can then offer that to our readers as a valuable service. In doing so, we hope to attract an audience that will help us earn a living and support further research.

Our Concept of Agile Journalism

Part of the mission of CITO Research is to help bring journalism into a new state that takes advantage of all of the changes that have taken place in technology and in collaborative work practices, and to foster a new type of journalism to better serve its intended audience through more cooperation.

In order to explain this fully we need to cover a variety of ground that touches on software development methods—where the name ‘Agile’ comes from—the use and misuse of the term and practices of crowd sourcing, an explanation of phenomena like Wikipedia and the division of labor that Evolved Media has developed in its communication by design methodology, and the lessons that can be learned from practices developed in newsrooms over many decades.

The point is that Agile journalism is a way that CITO Research intends to develop and use to better connect with its audience of CITOs and to better serve their needs.

At the same time, Agile journalism also has benefits for the sponsors of CITOResearch.com. We believe that any model of journalism is not complete unless the funding mechanisms are also integrated with the philosophy of how content is created.

Relevance of Agile to Journalism

The first thing to understand about Agile Journalism is the word “Agile,” which comes from software development. The word Agile in software development refers to a critique of the traditional way that engineering projects where defined. That term was then transferred to software, without thinking too much about whether it was appropriate.

Waterfall Development

The traditional software design methodology was called “waterfall” development. Waterfall development got its name from the cascading series of steps that led from initial envisioning of a project to its implementation:

1. A description of the requirements that were supposed to be solved in the development project,
2. Methods for validating those requirements would be developed.
3. Development of a design based on those requirements.
4. Implementation of the design.
5. Testing
6. Launch

It has been shown repeatedly that this method, when applied to software development projects, ended up creating software that was not wanted by the people that it eventually intended to serve. The entire Agile software development movement is a reaction to failure of this waterfall methodology.

Agile Journalism Insight #1: The Iterative Ebb and Tide is superior to the Linear Waterfall

Agile software methodology contains many different ideas, but the central idea that’s appropriate to journalism is the insight that it pays huge dividends to be very suspicious of the accuracy of your requirements. In a sense Agile development methodology asserts that requirements-gathering is a losing proposition, and the best you can do is sort of get an idea of what people want. Because of the plasticity of software, it’s quite easy to do another version and make changes to it. This ease of adjustment suggests that a different methodology could be used that would help confirm those requirements, rather than just assume that you have them right.

Agile development’s proposition is that, instead of just building a complete solution based on requirements, why not build the smallest possible piece of the development project that can be useful, put that solution into the hands of the end users you’re intending to serve, and then have those end users use that software and tell you whether it does what they want?

It turns out that in this process of iterative development, a conversation develops, in which the users and developers come to understand one another better, and the solution gradually moves toward its eventual completion—and when it is completed over a series of iterations the actual solution does serve the needs of the end users.

The first insight of Agile Journalism is that much of the way content is created in the current world, even with the massive amount of collaborative technology and social media interaction we have, still takes place using the waterfall method.

In traditional reporting, the waterfall method is typically employed, and it is typically inside the mind of one reporter. This explains why, in many cases, the voices that are present on the Internet are the voices of those people who also know how to write, not the people who have the most knowledge to share.
Agile Journalism attempts to imitate Agile software development by validating its requirements with its end user population.

Agile Journalism Insight #2: Involve the audience to validate Information

In traditional newsrooms from the print era, there is a relationship, in which the editors and reporters interact and decide what stories they should write. These stories are arrived at in a variety of different ways, but it’s common for an editor to have a file, in which he or she keeps story ideas. The reporter will have another file, or the newsroom will have various other types of files that contain story budgets, or editorial budgets. These editorial budgets are lists of ideas that are discussed and informally reviewed, and eventually, as reporting continues, or as topical events occur, those ideas become riper, and eventually stories are written.

Agile Journalism considers this approach to be just another example of the requirements process of the waterfall methodology going awry. Agile Journalism also states that the story budget itself should be visible to the intended audience. By so doing, the intended audience can then comment on the adequacy of those story ideas and express their interest in them. In this way, the editors and reporters are not just left to their own judgment, which, like the judgment of people in waterfall methodologies, may be wrong, or may be right – it’s the interaction that is important.

At CITO Research, we choose to expose our story budget through what we call problem statements, lists of ideas for research. The research usually is of some substantial nature. When a story idea is so small and we feel confident enough about it that we think it will be useful to our audience, we write the story.

Agile Journalism Insight #3: Balance Virtuosity and Collaboration

The third insight of Agile Journalism lies in the interplay between the coherent design and collaborative work. At Evolved Media, we believe in striking a balance between virtuosity and collaboration. We believe many efforts in crowdsourcing are misunderstood as efforts in mass collaboration. There are only a very few crowdsourcing efforts that are actually efforts in mass collaboration, and even then, the work product of those efforts are generally created by individual virtuosos.

Let’s start with Wikipedia as an example. Most of the articles in Wikipedia were not created by a group of people. They were created by an individual. It’s true that many of the articles in Wikipedia are created by and or credited to organizations, but most of the articles were the product of one person.
Crowdsourcing is sometimes portrayed in the popular press as a phenomenon in which a crowd of people accomplishes something. In fact, this is almost never the case.

Here is another example. In the Netflix collaborative filtering algorithm competition, for example, the million-dollar prize was used to attract various teams of people. Those teams of people worked together in very small groups or as individuals to create the algorithm that would win the prize. In the end, several different teams that were not in the lead came together and added all their insights into one solution that then won the prize. While the idea of a crowd in this is case is definitely operative, in that a very large number of people found out were aware of this effort, the actual creative work was conducted by individuals who were quite talented.
At CITO Research, our paradigm most closely resembles the “broadcast search” coined by Karim R. Lakhani of the Harvard Business School. In many cases, crowdsourcing is a bit of a misnomer.

InnoCentive, an open innovation foundation, is commonly labeled as “crowdsourcing.” InnoCentive actually follows a broadcast search paradigm, not necessarily crowd-sourcing. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an on-demand freelance developer worksite, or the LiveOps flexible call-center workforce are also examples of crowdsourcing, but these are not as applicable to journalism, especially when it comes to writing journalism about a complicated subject that requires a high degree of expertise, both in writing and in subject matter.