The Evolving Newsroom

Reportr.net caught up with my former colleague Chris Lloyd, assistant managing editor of Telegraph Media Group, at the Online Journalism Symposium in Austin, Texas. He talked about the challenges the group faced in integrating its newsroom, including structural and cultural changes. Worth a listen if you haven't heard much about the process of integration before.

I came across this journalism.co.uk report quoting Telegraph Media Group's digital chief Ed Roussel and thought it was worth a re-run.

Roussel was talking at the DNA2008 conference about the role of editors in the Telegraph's integrated newsroom and how they go about commissioning and publishing stories online.

The Telegraph was an early adopter of web-first publishing - where stories go online before they are readied for the paper - and redesigned its newsroom to bring web and print operations together and integrate the story commissioning and publishing process.

Roussel described the online story management guidelines thus:

• When news breaks send out immediate alerts: SMS, email, desktop

• After 10 minutes get 150 words on the website and solicit reader help with images/video or other accounts

• Within an hour update story to 450 words and add additional images and video

• Then look to commission analysis and opinion pieces, develop a topic page with multiple angles and multimedia

"This integrated news environment only works if you have got very strong leadership and you have strong people as heads of departments, running key departments, sports, business, news and the picture desk, but for a big story you want to have a story owner, and that person needs to be really, really good," Roussel said.

"They are essentially fulfilling three tasks, one is that they are constantly planning the story. We have something called the grid where owners enter their plan for the story, and they are constantly revising that plan, constantly talking to key people involved in it.

"Secondly, they are commissioning the stories, and they are being really specific, they are entering on the grid: Edward Roussel to file 300 words by 12.15pm, so that goes in the grid and my job, my contractual obligation, is to produce that content.

"Thirdly, they are monitoring it, making sure that the content that has been commissioned is published on time and equally looking at the competition so if there are any great ideas we can make sure we are stealing those ideas, making them our own and making them better."

"It's been interesting to hear over the last few days about the web being all about breaking news and the newspaper being about analysis, we don't agree with that.

"We think the future of successful websites is that we need to have everything, the first word and the final word. And that means analysis…we want to have the best people reporting directly for the website.

"It's about serving the customer, not serving the newspaper."

There I was yesterday, banging on in a lecture to journalism students about sub-editing. Specifically, about the importance of checking facts and figures in stories and getting names, dates and places right. Small mistakes can have a disproportionately large effect on a reader's trust in a news organisation, said I.

And what did I see on the front page of the Herald this morning? A story about the Vatican's revamp of the seven deadly sins attributed to a reporter called Michael Moore. But it wasn't by Michael at all, but by Malcolm Moore, the Telegraph's Rome-based correspondent.

Deary me.

More interesting was the fact that the paper carried a different version of the story than nzherald.co.nz, which went for a Reuters version by Philip Pullella.

Irish Times has begun integrating its print newsroom with website Ireland.com. It is aiming for a 24-hour newsroom.

Link: Editor & Publisher

Knowing that I worked on a major newsroom integration project at the Telegraph in London, it will come as no surprise that I think integrating web and print is a good idea.

I was reading a Jeff Jarvis post about it and liked the way he put it:

"At the end of the day...we know this: Every journalist needs every tool to gather and tell every story how best it should be told. Every reader/listener/viewer/user should be able to get the news however, whenever, and wherever he or she wants. News operations won’t be able to afford the inefficiency of separate staffs all putting out the same news. And that’s why I think consolidation is inevitable."

I agree. More than that, news companies need to see themselves as news providers, not as newspapers or news websites. They need to get their content out to as many audiences as they can, in as many formats as they can, if they are to remain relevant. If you are publishing to mutiple formats, the logical way to go about it is to create the content in a neutral format and then modify it as required for each platform. Write into a neutral text editor, then mark it up for mobile, web and print as required. Writing for one format, then having to parse it to another is invariably a fag and terribly inefficient.

Jeff raises another good point in his post:

"One could consolidate too much and, in the words of one of my students, turn every journalist into an eight-armed monster — and do a halfassed job in any medium."

Yep, that's a danger, in the medium term anyway. But it needn't be so. The following points are worth making again and again. Yes, you must modernise your newsroom. Yes, you must tell stories in different formats where appropriate. Yes, you must move faster than you used to if you are to give your mobile and online audiences what they want. But no, it does not mean that every journalist has to file audio, video, text and timelines for every story every day. It means they need to talk to their editors about the best formats for telling this story on this day. It means the editors must make decisions about the best use of newsroom resources (reporters' time, equipment, studio time etc), and about the stories they think are relevant and interesting to their readers.

News judgement and resource management don't disappear in an integrated newsroom. They are central to it.