Can Collaboration Tools Change How Journalists Work?
How the Factpl team moved to Slack, Google Docs, and Stibee, and what collaboration tools changed about newsroom information sharing.
In December 2021, I wrote a piece for Sinmun & Bangsong (Press and Broadcasting) introducing how the Factpl team worked. It was about a year and a half since we had launched the newsletter service.
Journalists are, in a sense, freelancers. Even within a team, everyone investigates their own beat and produces their own stories. Collaboration is unfamiliar outside large-scale investigative projects, and even then it mostly means dividing up the reporting and stitching it together. That structure lets journalists stay deeply focused on their own work — but when you think about the full content pipeline from planning through reporting, production, and distribution, writing good stories alone isn't enough.
Trial and Error 1: Introducing Trello and Slack — and Failing
When I first joined the Factpl team, I pushed for adopting Slack and Trello. It was a combination I'd used well on a team I'd run before, and it had delivered real efficiency gains. But overcoming the inertia of "why learn something new when KakaoTalk works fine" turned out to be harder than expected. We cycled back and forth between Slack, Jandi, and KakaoTalk for a full year.
Trial and Error 2: Moving Online — and Succeeding
The turning point came in January 2021. We were also moving our physical office to Sangam. The team lead declared that we'd move online at the same time. We tried KakaoWork first, but everyone found it uncomfortable — back to Slack. There was about a week of chaos, but because we'd already given it a shot once before, the adjustment was faster.
What we learned: you can't drag people along alone by insisting "this is the best way." Someone has to pull the trigger. Our team lead played that role.
The Factpl Team's Collaboration Stack
Once Slack became the main communication channel, Stibee (newsletter publishing), Google Docs (collaborative writing), Typeform (interactive surveys), and Google Analytics (data metrics) were layered on one by one. It looks complicated, but the skeleton is simple: talk in Slack, write together in Google Docs, exchange comments via Slack notifications. When someone edits a document or leaves a comment, a Slack notification comes through immediately — no need to file a separate status report.
An unexpected benefit of bringing in these tools was how much the typical hierarchy of a newsroom faded. Small talk increased dramatically compared to KakaoTalk. Because we were sharing rather than reporting, ideas didn't get killed — they just naturally flowed forward.
Collaboration Tools Aren't a Magic Fix
Honestly, culture comes before tools. If you introduce collaboration software without changing the vertical culture underneath, you end up doing the same top-down reporting on a new platform. Factpl worked not because of the tools but because there was a shared desire within the team to work horizontally. The tools were just what converted that intention into actual working practice.
Even now, when I cover startups, one of my standard questions is "what collaboration tools do you use?" Less important than which tool — what matters is how information flows through it. That tells you how flat the organization actually runs.
This piece is based on an article contributed to Sinmun & Bangsong in December 2021.