Different jobs require different levels and forms of collaboration. Maybe collaboration between journalists can and should take a different form than Slack. That doesn't seem very surprising to me.
For devs, it is just too much noise to have any reasonable conversation: maybe because writing emails ensures that writer/sender thinks more about what to write in email. Or because we try to check email only twice a day (so that we are focusing on actual development).
We tried using for checkins and build statuses but web page seems a better way.
Just way too distracting.. but maybe we are missing the use case.
Nailed it.
That's the thing I'd like to have in our chat - a way to mark a message as "not urgent" (or vice-versa), so that it doesn't interrupt their work. Usually I just end up emailing them, but that just adds a bunch of friction to both sides, and even then some of my colleagues are expected to reply to emails with little delay, since they handle client support.
On IRC one can configure the client to alert the users only when the message matches certain terms, but we use Hangouts :|