How R&D works with editorial at the WSJ

Valentina Gianera of the London School of Economics spoke with Alyssa Zeisler, research and development chief at The Wall Street Journal, about her job.

Here is an excerpt:

JournalismAI: Alyssa, you are Chief of R&D but also in charge of newsroom tools. How should we understand your role?

Alyssa: It was two unique teams we brought together a few months back. Historically, there was an R&D team as well as an editorial tools team. R&D focused on proof-of-concept projects and computational journalism using emerging technology. The editorial tools team, on the other hand, was responsible for production tools: the charting tools, our live coverage tools, the image cropping and publishing tools, etc. Bringing these teams together was an opportunity to embed the R&D approach into our legacy systems and operations, and at the same time bring in a little bit more product thinking and tooling to R&D. So it really created a pipeline to bring in emerging technology and innovation throughout the newsroom in a more seamless way.

By working hand-in-hand with reporters and journalists, we can understand what they need and articulate their requirements as features on existing tools or even new products. In that sense, we like to think of ourselves as a problem-solving team, with a focus on augmenting our reporting (aka super powering reporters), creating efficiencies and helping the newsroom to reach and engage our audiences.

Read more here.