Julie Posetti is head of digital editorial capability at Fairfax, a large Australasian media organisation with titles and brands ranging from 180 years old mastheads such as the Sydney Morning Herald to new, start-up-like verticals.
Fairfax introduced a Learning Hub a little over a year ago, to build a space for knowledge-sharing, and newsrooms have started experimenting more with different storytelling styles as part of projects supported by Posetti in her role.
Journalism.co.uk spoke to Posetti about her role and the new projects from Fairfax, including a podcast series called Phoebe's Fall, in a recent podcast.
Read some of her answers to Journalism.co.uk's questions below to find out more about her role at the organisation, and listen to the podcast for more details about the projects.
What does your job title mean in practice?
"It's a really interesting title. It's not one that I picked, but it's interesting because I think the objective behind it was really fresh and purposeful. The objective was to create a position that sat at the intersection of digital strategy, learning and knowledge-sharing, and newsroom transformation and there's not too many people in this space where all of those critical issues of our times intersect and one element supports another.
"If you're trying to drive change, you need to be focused on what the strategy is. You need also to be thinking about ways to build capability to affect new storytelling methods if we're talking strictly about newsrooms, and you need to be mindful of what the implications of changing practice are within newsrooms.
"So it's a product of ongoing change within the organisation but also a recognition that learning and knowledge-sharing have to be pivotal to those processes. The job is about trying to bring those things together, to bridge those different parts of strategic remit and also ensure that we have newsrooms that are capable of digital storytelling, not just now but at every stage of digital redefinition, while maintaining commitment to print mastheads, so there is a lot going on."
You promote project-based learning, how does it work?
"I came from a journalistic background – I worked with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for the bulk of my early career, then I became a journalism academic, a professor teaching journalism at universities, and then decided that I wanted to dive back into the industry full time after spending a period at the World Editors Forum, having that privileged global helicopter view of what's going on in newsrooms.
"So when I came to Fairfax and realised the breadth of the job that I had accepted and the real challenges that are very familiar to people in newsrooms around the world within legacy media organisations, after a period of researching what people needed, what they wanted, what was going to be helpful, and what culturally would not work, I came back to the idea that what we needed to do was to adopt projects.
"Projects that would involve learning new skills, that were experimental, and were also targeted at building new audiences, as a way of trying to drive change but build capability in a way that journalists would find empowering, not a classroom setting.
"The first one that we adopted was a project that was underway during an election campaign involving a collaborative approach to audiences identifying their political leanings. That involved collaboration with a Dutch university, an Australian university, product and UX teams, graphics teams, as well as with the journalists working in the National Political Reporting Centre, which is attached to the Federal Parliament in Canberra.
"I got involved as someone who was able to bridge the worlds of journalism and academia."
What can you find on the Learning Hub?
"The Fairfax Learning Hub is an intranet, so it's an internal website that looks like any other kind of curated content site that includes stories about experimentation across editorial, product, technology, sales. It is a way of sharing ideas internally but also trying to bring in external ideas through stories about the way international organisations are experimenting for example.
"It also hosts actual courses. Moodle, which is a learning system, is used to house interactive online courses. The idea for it is to become a one stop shop where people go to get access to resources and new ideas and to share their own experiments."
How do you get people to go to it?
"It has worked exceptionally well with the regional and community titles, and I think one of the reasons is that they were desperate for a way to connect really physically dislocated mastheads. So they integrated the Learning Hub into their workflows. They require their journalists, on a roster, to create content for the Learning Hub, to participate in groups in the process of learning, doing formal courses.
"It was resource-heavy to develop, but I think it serves a really important purpose. One of the other things that we did was to develop an internal newsletter called Movable Type, which promotes content, along with courses and upcoming events."
How well-resourced do you feel, how open is the organisation to giving you what you need to do your job?
"I won't deny, it's tough. We built a team, we've since lost a couple of team members due to downsizing because of financial realities, so I'm finding that I and my small team have to be as responsive to change and restructuring as the newsrooms that we're trying to assist are.
"I think the fact that we have a Learning Hub and the chief executive seems to be invested in continuing with the Learning Hub is really important because it does demonstrate a commitment to knowledge-sharing and learning at the core of any media business currently.
"Especially being physically isolated at the bottom of the world, we need to be able to be connected and agile in response to trends. The metropolitan newsrooms, they still tend to work within titles and not be necessarily as collaborative with the regional titles as might be desired, and the business is going through changes as well, so where those different business units coexist and how they work together is also evolving.
"It's going to be a work in progress, ongoing, and I think that's the same for newsrooms."
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