Bring me your broken dreams

Jan 27, 2017

Read the full interview at Digiday

I spoke to Lucinda Southern, a reporter at Digiday, for an interview about my first year as Special Projects Editor at the Financial Times.

In particular, we talked about how my projects tend to be experiments that don’t necessarily lead to a permanent product.

So what are they for? They’re to help reporters pursue their dreams. If reporters used trello boards, for example, they might have a column for stories with an imminent deadline, a column for stories they’re researching, etc.

But what most people don’t know is that the reporter will almost also certainly have what I call ‘a column of broken dreams’ — stories they’ve always want to do but don’t really fit anywhere, so it’s hard for the reporter to find anyone to help them with it.

Those stories may be hard to pull off, but they’re often the more innovative and exciting stories to do.

So in short, my job is about empowering editors and reporters to do better ‘deep’ journalism.

In 2017, I hope to keep doing that by inspiring others to push the boundaries of digital storytelling, by helping make project planning routine at the FT, and by deepening collaboration between the newsroom and other parts of the FT.

The full Digiday interview can be found here

I’m also going to be talking more about what I do at the Newsrewired digital journalism conference in London on February 8