The Curious Case of Slack
The chat app of choice in Hong Kong was WhatsApp. Few journalists mentioned using Slack, which is popular in some newsrooms but not a place where sources make themselves available. Slack was only released in August 2013, so it was not surprising that journalists did not use Slack that much during the 2014 protests. This also appears to be a case of uneven, technological adoption: Some Silicon Valley innovations catch on in Asia, such as Facebook, and some, like Twitter, are simply not as popular or significant as a platform for communication. Our interviews highlighted that newsmakers did not use Slack internally, and only some of the news reporters found it useful during the 2014 Hong Kong protests and subsequent political unrest coverage. Slack was used at an institutional level among major news organizations with offices in Hong Kong. Correspondents told us that they were forming their own internal WhatsApp groups to cover all their bases during a breaking news story, since it was so much more efficient than email. We only found one case of reporters in a small-capacity news organization using Slack with the hashtag #Editorial. They would add comments about topics of interest on this hashtag. When there was sufficient information (e.g., URLs, quotes, sources) on a topic in the hashtag channel, they could write up a story based on that information.
Slack was not the preferred application of established, “big-box” news organizations looking to integrate chat apps as an extension of the newsroom. For example, Reuters staff used WhatsApp or WeChat both as a reporting tool and as an internal collaboration tool, similar to Slack. We found that during breaking news events, interviewees at large news organizations would communicate and coordinate with a small group of colleagues covering the story through the most easily available chat apps. Those apps are already integrated into their daily social lives and phone use; for instance, WeChat in mainland China and WhatsApp in Hong Kong. It remains difficult to answer whether Slack has reached a more dominant position within newsroom crisis reporting by now. Slack security concerns were not mentioned in our interviews. However, in our study the app of choice was WhatsApp mainly because this was where most information about the protest circulated, with WeChat (which is dominant in mainland China but less used globally) as a secondary app favored by correspondents based in Beijing and Shanghai, but who reported from Hong Kong.