The concept of the “newsroom” is one that conjures images of huddles of desks bustling with reporters, editors and producers working to cover the day’s events in real-time, surrounded by TV screens flashing breaking updates and the latest analytics. 

With the start of social distancing policies as a response to the COVID-19 crisis, newsrooms have quickly had to reconfigure as distributed, digital spaces. We are going to be working within distributed frameworks for a significant amount of time, far beyond the immediate crisis and disruption the start of this outbreak has caused. Our industry needs to prepare for the long haul now because our survival has never been more under threat while at the same time we have never been needed more. There are immense challenges to the business of news but as our audiences continue to rely on us to meet their needs we must be able to serve them and to do that we have to return to full functionality with a world that has been turned upside down.

It’s likely that this shift will not end with the end of COVID-19, and it is our hope that with this playbook newsrooms can better imagine how to harness some of the benefits of distributed work and avoid some of the common pitfalls. 

Many newsrooms are already applying some of the practices and technologies we’re recommending here, and have already found effective ways of distributed working - this guide is intended as a holistic resource that can offer some new ideas and strategies, based on our experience of managing large-scale collaborative journalism efforts. We also know that with fast change and unprecedented disruption, long term strategic thinking is a luxury. The experts in newsroom innovation who have contributed to the playbook have tried to do some of this thinking for you while you are doing incredibly important work.

We believe it’s important to think of the current shift not as one to “remote work” - which conjures images of the lonely lighthouse keeper - but rather to “distributed teams” - where a sense of unity and common purpose is retained, and some of the collegial spirit and human care of physical spaces is translated to a digital world.

The authors of this guide all have specific expertise and proven track records in preparing the industry for what comes next and we hope that you find our suggestions timely and actionable.

As innovative solutions to new challenges emerge, we will update this playbook with case studies, new technologies, and new strategies for working effectively as a distributed team. We’ll also take on board your suggestions for additional areas this needs to cover in order to help newsrooms operate sustainably in the long term.

Thank you to the Google News Initiative for supporting this work.