Knight Lab: Media’s Digital Silos Must End

A Q&A with Miranda Mulligan, the new head of the Knight News Innovation Lab.

She says that publishers serious about real digital innovation — and ultimately real digital revenue — need to break it out of out of a silo, bringing programmers, journalists, designers, marketers and salespeople all into the same conversation. Launched with a $4.2 million dollar grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the lab is a collaborative effort between Northwestern’s Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Medill School of Journalism. It puts faculty and graduate engineering students side by side with their journalist counterparts, resulting in an ever-growing set of digital tools geared at improving the process of reporting, story presentation and distribution. Think of it as James Bond’s Q for the digital newsroom.