How four journalists and Publish2 redefined the rules of collaboration. But could it work in London?

It’s 6.30am in London. And it’s snowing. A lot. The Tube and buses are shut. Roads are impassable and cars buried under snowdrifts.

Along the Central Line, running through east London towards leafy Essex, families are waking up, staring in disbelief out the window and turning on the TV news. There will be no school today. No work for thousands, either.

A few Twitterers are already active, as is Jack Sparrow, an early-rising news editor on the local paper. He decides to do a quick online update from home, does a Twitter search for “snow” and joins the chatter. What about ‘#snowlond’ as a hashtag to pull together comments, he tweets? It gets picked up and shared.

With a click in Firefox, Jack links his first published story to Publish2, tagged #snowlond. Publish2 automatically sends it out as a tweet. #snowlond starts to gather pace. By activating a #snowlond search in Twhirl, Jack creates a virtual Twitter newsdesk.

Jenny Wren, a rival newspaper editor, picks up on the Twitter conversation and Tweets Jack with a suggestion. Why not have a Publish2 newsgroup to share content? Anything Jenny’s team link to Publish2 now gets seamlessly shared and tweeted – after all, all the news teams in the area will be making the same transport and emergency service calls.

Within a couple of hours, and without a spoken word being exchanged, journalists from two other competing newspaper publishers in the area are involved, Apart from Jack and Jenny, who met on a course, the four don’t know each other. But rich content is flowing between media websites and Twitterers at home or tweeting by mobile. Photos are starting to come in through Twitter and Flickr.

As the day goes on, the nature of the conversation changes from “now what?” to “sod the recession, let’s build a snowman”.

The mood is picked up by Twitter and reflected by the newspapers’ website reports. Videos of family snowball fights in the street are being shared. The editors have bolted a Publish2 widget onto their sites, building a comprehensive list of captured links and pictures across all the sites. The #snowlond hashtag has evolved to become even more local, taking an ” _ef” suffix fin the case of Epping Forest.

Let’s stop it there. Apart from the tweets, and the true story of London’s famous snowbound Monday, this didn’t happen. But something very similar did … in Washington state on January 7.

The story was heavy rain, causing flood havoc and evacuations. Within hours, four journalists from rival news organisations had pooled resources through Twitter and Publish2. As with Jenny and Jack, there were no spoken conversations and they didn’t all know each other.

There’s a blow-by-blow account of the day on the Publish2 blog, in which Josh Korr comments: “This is the power of collaborative news networks. By forming a network, newsrooms can discover not just a greater volume of news, but a greater volume of relevant, high-quality news than one person, one newsroom, or one wire service could alone.”

It makes compulsive reading – especially the quotes from the journalists themselves. They did us all proud that day.

There is a powerful case for saying the Washington floods showed us the only way forward for journalism, through collaboration. It was also a great showcase for Publish2, Twitter and online conversation.

I also think it demonstrated the coming of age of local media as true public service broadcasters. But most of all, let’s not forget what this was really all about: Journalism. Those four journalists used the power to publish to make a positive difference to the communities they serve. And that’s what makes it a triumph.

So could it have happened in London on January 2, 2009? To make it work, east London’s local journalists would have needed two things – the means and the will. The latter they have in abundance. The former they lack.

When I embarked a year or so ago on the rebuilding of London newsrooms to create flexible, community-facing, multikilled teams of journalists, I thought the biggest challenge would be cultural.

In fact, despite justified fears about quality, journalists were superbly receptive to change. The main barrier to success was expensive, unreliable technology that couldn’t bridge the gaps between print, online, physical location and community voices.

I’ve become a huge convert to open-source, browser based, hosted-where-necessary (but preferably free) communication tools, like Publish2, that add value to the power of journalism, not hold it back.

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As journalists, we’re competitive in that we want a scoop, but it’s nonsense to suggest we don’t want to collaborate. But inter-company collaboration is another kettle of fish. For a smallish island, the UK’s local media boundaries are remarkably well defined, even in London. Head-to-head competition is not the norm and during these turbulent times owners are keener than ever to squeeze every ounce of value out of the unique information they gather. It might be flawed, but that’s the way it is.

More effective collaboration between journalists in the same company would be a start. And that means dumping much of the current thinking on technology. It may then just be a question of time before newsrooms shrink so much (I believe 50 per cent in under two years is realistic) collaboration is the only way to maintain output volumes. There’s only one thing that will make media companies collaborate: money.

Meanwhile, UK journalists should grasp the opportunity. There WILL be a major story next week, next month or next year that will cry out for joined-up (or linked, to quote Publish2) journalism. The tools are there right now. Editors should be setting up the newsgroups, establishing the relationships and riding the learning curve. The experience will pay dividends.

Meanwhile. Here’s two final thoughts: First, the Twitterers who were active on February 2 are still there and were growing at the rate of 752 per cent in 2008, according to Mashable. Second, the group of Washington journalists, who are facing the same cutbacks and uncertainty as the rest of us, proved beyond doubt that journalism will not simply lay down and die.