Slack is one of the great 'accidental' success stories of the newsroom. So much so that it is likely that parts of your newsroom are using it even if you don't about it.

That stealth success is appropriate for a tool (the"Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge") which came into existence as a by-product of a team working on creating a game. The game is long gone, the collaboration tool goes from strength to strength. Marian Semm explains why.

Marian Semm is a true publishing technologist with a background as a newspaper editor, as well as working with IBM, before becoming a business consultant. 

His first encounter with Slack failed to impress him, but he began to notice that the software was being used by increasing numbers of publishers but often in 'stealth mode' whereby the product had become an essential part of of just one department, or a handful of users, without an official roll-out.

“What I suspect is that some 30 or 40 per cent of newspapers in Germany are using some kind of chat service and by my sampling in most cases it's Slack”, he notes.

"Slack is a chat service on steroids. It connects people but can do much more – for example it can be used as a directory with the ability to connect people with people as well as people with the machinery, both internal and external so you can very easily map it to your workflows.”

Marian Semm will be at Editorial Days 17 to explain what he calls "the beauty and the breadth of Slack" as an element of newsroom planning.