Collaboration among reporters, photographers, editors and producers has always been an important part of news gathering. Stories are discovered and improved when journalists work together. Interactive tools can make this collaboration easier, faster and richer, just like they do for conversation between journalists and their audience. Yet, internal applications of interactive technology seem to get less attention. They’re certainly talked about less, and, in the news organizations I’ve worked for at least, they were utilized less as well.

That’s changing at one of my former employers. The Journal Register Company, which made industry headlines recently for its ambitious Ben Franklin Project, in which it produced 18 newspapers and websites using almost exclusively free online tools, last month launched an in-house innovation incubator it calls the ideaLab.

Fifteen employees from various publications and departments are each receiving a smart phone, iPad and netbook; 10 hours of their work week to play with them; and a $500 monthly stipend to reimburse them for the personal time they’ll inevitably spend testing the tools. The just-as-cool-part is they’re trading notes on blogs and social media for all 15 ideaLab members, their non-ideaLab colleagues and anyone else on the Web to see, enabling all parties to feed off each other’s ideas. An ideaLab indeed.

The more journalists can open up their work to the outside world the better. They routinely demand transparency from others. It behooves them to practice what they preach, especially when modern technology makes it so easy. To me, though, one of the most exciting parts of the ideaLab is the extent that it makes good on two over-promised, under-delivered business platitudes:

• Companies say their employees are their most valuable resources, yet, when faced with a challenge, especially of the technological variety, they often turn to outside consultants. The ideaLab empowers employees to solve their own problems by giving them the respect and resources they deserve.

• Companies say their various departments and offices comprise a single corporate family, yet employees on separate floors, let alone separate buildings, can "work together" for years without learning each other’s names. With the ideaLab, reporters, editors, salespersons, marketers and managers from New England, the Midwest and Upstate New York are pursuing solutions together rather than in isolation.

While not every news organization can afford to buy gadgets for 15 of its employees, every company can afford the tools JRC employees are using to share their discoveries. They're free.

Here are some other ways news companies can put interactive technology to work internally:

• Maintain an in-house blog with tutorials on new media hardware, software and techniques.

• Talk shop — and, yes, even gripe — on private social networks like Yammer.

• Move lists of story ideas from text files on individual hard drives to shared Google Docs documents or spreadsheets.

• Develop a “virtual newsroom” smart phone app. It might include: Contact information for key colleagues and sources, one-touch submission of photos and video, addresses of common destinations, breaking news checklists, electronic release forms, links to open government laws, a dynamic map showing the location of co-workers out in the field.

• Publish in-house editorial and social media style guides as moderated wikis.

• Upload everyone's interview notes into a secure internal database.

• Crowdsource headline writing via a custom desktop widget.

What would you add to this list? How is your organization using interactive media internally?

Image by abejo.