Nine tells better stories, faster with Slack.

Nine is Australia’s largest locally owned media company. It publishes some of the country’s most established titles, including The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and The Australian Financial Review, and is home to iconic news and current affairs programs like 9News, Today, A Current Affair, and 60 Minutes.

Keeping up with breaking news in Slack channels.

Work is dynamic, and decisions are made in minutes and sometimes seconds as Nine broadcasts and streams up to 17.5 hours of live television every day.

Slack helps the media company move faster than ever. As Nine’s default work operating system, Slack brings together people, tools, and workflows to coordinate everything from approval of graphics to managing of breaking news.

Initially adopted in 2017 to break down silos and make information easier to find, Slack is now used by publishing, radio, TV, and digital teams plus shared groups like technology and sales.

“Together with Salesforce, Slack has given us a secure, trusted environment where teams can move fast and IT stays in control. It also gives us one workspace that cuts across silos and brings people together to solve problems, instead of drowning in emails,” said Joe McNamara, Director of IT, Nine.

Editorial processes and newsroom operations are no longer a manual, email-driven workflow. Slack has completely changed how the media company works with teams sending 66,000 messages, 7,000 files, and 8,000 emoji reactions every day.

“Slack has become the place where work happens across the newsroom. It gives our teams a shared platform that’s flexible enough to support very different ways of working,” said Josie MacRae, Director of News Transformation and Business Solutions, Nine. “Today moves minute to minute, while 60 Minutes might focus on a single story for weeks. Each team has built Slack into their workflow in a way that fits—whether that’s spinning up a channel for every story or working from a central show space.”

When a new story breaks and a Slack channel is spun up, everyone jumps in to share updates, footage, scripts and notes—including producers, reporters, the digital desk, and presenters. Presenters can be live, ad-libbing, and reading from Slack. The channel becomes their source of truth, since the information has already been vetted by the newsroom.

Slack Lists and workflows streamline daily tasks like graphic requests and approvals, which were previously managed via email. A Slack workflow collects requests through a form and sends them straight onto a list where everyone can track what’s been requested and where it’s up to. Once a graphic is approved, producers can review and clip it directly in Slack without chasing down files or starting over.

Slack also fosters collaboration across international teams, supporting real-time and asynchronous communication between the 9News headquarters in Australia and teams in the US and UK bureaus. Overseas reporters, for example, start their day by checking Slack for updates, conversations, and shared files from overnight. Every update, conversation, and decision is right there and in context, enabling teams to stay aligned across time zones without the need for multiple calls or handovers.

"Partnering with Salesforce, Slack has really allowed us to improve our collaboration and the speed of our storytelling to every single platform we need to reach,” said MacRae, Director of News Transformation and Business Solutions, Nine.

Outside of its editorial teams, Nine uses Slack to manage internal business operations. For example, the publishing division’s marketing team has replaced ad-hoc emails with the #marketing-news channel, which is used to share what’s being said about the company’s brands. There are also channels dedicated to tracking statistics on which campaigns are driving subscriber growth.

The publishing division also integrated its content management system with Slack, allowing team members to seamlessly share data and find information on published content. This gives employees more visibility on what’s being published across the company’s many platforms and how that content is performing.

Should a publishing issue come up, the division has a dedicated service channel for editorial teams called #ed-tools. Here, team members can post problems they’re having with internal tools or the CMS, or ask questions about how to do something.

Dozens of apps are integrated into Slack, so staff can stay in one place and get the context, tools, and updates they need to keep work moving. Using security controls in Slack, the technology team has built a workflow to auto-approve apps it trusts and push all others to a human for review.

In a single month, teams access up to 57 different applications and 76 custom integrations and use 274 workflows, all inside Slack. And 71% of staff use at least one of these features, reinforcing Slack’s role as Nine’s default work operating system. With an average of two seconds saved for application toggles and up to a minute saved for each email, the time savings are significant.

The division’s custom slash commands and integrations include:

@incident-monster: Reports new incidents and helps the team manage them

/transcribe: Allows journalists to quickly request transcriptions for audio files right from Slack

/dashboards: Brings up a library of available dashboards so employees can access data and insights on content performance

/roster: Provides a list of the engineers and technical team members on call for any given service

Slack accelerates productivity and decision-making

Bringing teams, data and processes together on Slack has fostered faster communication across teams, while also empowering employees to collaborate more often. And with work organised neatly into channels, managers can keep an eye on multiple conversations and jump in whenever necessary, versus being copied on hundreds of emails that might or might not require their attention.

The increased visibility helps teams move more quickly, stay aligned, and make more informed decisions, whether it’s editorial, engineering or customer support.

Nine has also extended this way of working to its partners with more than 250 businesses now collaborating with the company through Slack Connect.

The media company continues to evolve how it works, leveraging Slack and Salesforce which provides a unified platform to support scale and meaningful transformation. Nine is also working to bring AI into the business where it makes sense. Its key principle for AI use is “we start and end with humans” and it is focusing on applications that can make business more efficient and content easier to produce and distribute.

“Slack connects our people with the systems and context that drive the business forward, and it’s helping us get ready for what’s next, especially as AI opens up new ways of working,” said Sanaz Bassiri, Head of Change and Transformation, Nine.