CoPress

Post edited 4:33 pm – March 16, 2009 by jiconoclast

I'm going to tackle the newsroom part of this equation. Speficially, I want to know the value of having a physical office space?

I argue that telecommuting can replace newsrooms.

In an era of limited resources, what do you value more, content producers (and thus people who ultimately make you money) or physical buildings? I'd layoff the building long before I'd layoff of 40 percent of my newsroom. With collaborative tools like Google Docs, wikis, BaseCamp, Google Sites, GMAIL, Skype, IM, etc, etc, etc, we don't need to meet in person to collaborate.

In fact, I find that organizations that require you to show up everyday for 8+ hours, aren't utilizing Web-based collabrative tools. If they were, they wouldn't require you to show up every day. But they're not, and instead they are scheduling endless meetings and dropping by your desk to tell you stuff that they should be writing down somewhere.

And without a physical newsroom, what is there to tie us to the past? What is there to tie us to print? Nothing.

A virtual newsroom would really signal a shift to a Web-first model.

Even if you want to keep a physical office space, if you didn't require employees to come in every day, you wouldn't need anywhere near the same amount of space. Do away with desks and offices and give every employee a laptop. Then, if you do require people to come into the newsroom every now and then, the newsroom would be centered around collaboration and creativity.

I wrote much more in my blog post, but this should help you get the gist.