The question every journalist must ask…

All the great innovations of the past, from the factory produced car, to the Apple computer all began by asking a simple question.

And now, in the grip of the digital revolution and the great upheaval in journalism, it is a question journalists must ask themselves if they’re to create some of the much needed innovations which will determine the future of news.

At last week’s Digital Storytelling Conference in London we showed a short film to get people asking this very question. The results, in the Future of News Meetup shortly afterwards, were really interesting.

“What if…?” is a tried and tested Lateral Thinking exercise used by innovators for decades. Asking “What If..?” does some really important things:

• it gets you to highlight the conventions and assumptions which dominate the news industry
• it gets you to wonder what would happen if one or more of those just weren’t true
• it engages your imagination to come up with new ideas
• it guarantees your ideas will be more original and leftfield

If more journalists asked “what if..?“, we’d see more and more new ideas for the future of journalism emerge.  It’s a question we’ll ask every month at the Future of News Meetups in London: if you’d like to join and take part click here to sign up.

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