Newsrooms (re)discover the magic of project management

If you want to see a journalist recoil and slowly back away from you, start talking about Gantt charts, RACI responsibility matrices and project post-mortem meetings. But they can’t run forever. As newsrooms face increasing pressure to develop new ways of working, and to adapt to changing audience behaviors, many more reporters and editors will find themselves in 2024 taking on the role of de facto project manager.

As more news organizations adopt product thinking by giving consideration to audiences and their needs, and as new roles such as data scientists, social media producers, and audience engagement specialists are introduced to newsrooms, core project management skills of planning, coordination and communication will become the difference between success and failure.

The need for better project management is not new. Newsrooms have grappled with standalone projects for a long time — just consider the putting together of Pulitzer-worthy reporting packages — but the state and sophistication of project management in newsrooms hasn’t meaningfully advanced over past decades. How many of us have been in situations where too many cooks paralyzed decision-making, or when a solid concept morphed into something incoherent as everyone chipped in with their pet ideas?  (To what cost?)

This is partly down to journalists’ ingrained faith in “winging it” by responding to situations when they happen, which makes them inclined to see project planning as a burden and a waste of time, and partly it’s because traditionally, newsrooms worked like a factory: A newspaper would come together as long as everyone did their specialized part well. This allowed us to produce a particular form of journalism at speed and at scale, but doesn’t make us very adaptable or innovative. The skills needed for project management are not the same as those needed for reporting and editing, but in an industry with shrinking staffing budgets, it’s tough to convince anyone to hire a full-time professional project manager.

What we need, therefore, is not capital P and capital M “Project Managers,” but the ability to equip reporters and editors with the basic precepts of project management so they can better define goals, foster clearer communication, and capture learnings for next time. These will serve reporters and editors who find themselves suddenly conscripted into being temporary project managers.

At stake is not just the ability to successfully execute a new initiative or an ambitious journalism package. At its core, project management strengthens an organization’s capacity to learn and to grow — and a lack of it can mean chaos and an inability to learn from our mistakes. Strong project management makes newsrooms more adaptable and more able to survive industry turmoil.

With all the upheavals, changes and opportunities we expect to see next year, 2024 might just be a good year for news leaders to rediscover what project management can do for their newsrooms, with or without Project Managers.