The Evolving Newsroom

I'd heard about this but hadn't followed up. So, via Jeff Jarvis, who wins headline of the week award for:

Throw Another Sub on the Barbie

The Telegraph of London is outsourcing production of some of its sections to Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.

At my New Business Models for News Summit, Telegraph digital head Edward Roussel rephrased my admonition and told the room to do what you do best and outsource the rest. Guess they mean it.

The work will go to Pagemasters, a company owned by the Australian Associated Press (co-owned by Fairfax and Murdoch’s News Corp), which said it has received inquiries from publishers around the world. I’ll bet. I’m surprised that American newspaper chains haven’t consolidated nearly all their production; there’s no reason it can’t be centralized. As the Herald reports, it makes even more sense to do it in Australia because salaries are lower and the work there can be done on the cheaper day shift. All we’d have to do is teach them that sport is plural and footballs aren’t round.

UPDATE: Edward Roussel confirms in the comments:

Jeff - I can confirm that we are outsourcing the production work for newspaper weekend supplements to Australia - and thereby saving quite a bit of money.

The copy goes to Australia once it has been approved by an editor in London. To Rob Mark’s point, the printing takes place in the UK. We have outsourced that too. Arch-rival News International takes care of our printing.

Both the outsourcing of production and printing has allowed us to reduce costs and raise standards: NI has state-of-the-art color printing presses and we are happy with the standard of work that’s being done in Australia.

Reducing the cost of manufacturing and distribution is an imperative for any newspaper group that is determined to remain profitable, as we are. This is a great time to be shopping around the world for value-for-money partners.

The principle holds true on the digital side. ITN creates our video content, providing quality and value that we would struggle to generate internally; Brightcove handles our video distribution; Google powers our search; Escenic provides our web publishing tool; we use software developers in Bulgaria and India.

Newspaper-web companies should focus internal resource on what they do best: creating premium editorial content.

This is a useful read for any journalist coming to terms with writing for the web and why that means understanding keywords and search engine optimisation.

It was written by Shane Richmond, Communities Editor for telegraph.co.uk, for the British Journalism Review.

I've pulled a few key chunks out of it but the whole thing is well worth reading.

The “Gotcha” headline on a Sun front-page splash about the sinking of the General Belgrano is one of the most famous, or infamous depending on your taste, in the history of British journalism. Yet no web producer with any experience would consider a headline like that today. The reason is search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO has been around almost as long as search engines themselves, but journalists were quite late to cotton on. It didn’t really reach newsrooms until a couple of years ago.

The concept is simple. It’s about ensuring that your content is found by the millions of people every day who use search engines as their first filter for news and those who don’t search at all but trust an automated aggregator, such as Google News, to filter stories for them. These people are essentially asking a computer to tell them the news. If you want your story to be read, you’d better make sure the computer knows what you’re writing about.

To do that you need to ensure your article contains certain keywords. That means not only the words that someone types into a search engine but also the keywords that the search engine knows are commonly associated with the search term. So if someone types “credit crunch” into a search engine, the computer knows that an article about the credit crunch often contains other words, such as financial crisis, bail out or bailout, banks, recession and so on.

...

Let’s go back to May 4, 1982 and that “Gotcha” headline. The sub-head read: “Our lads sink gunboat and hole cruiser.” Below that, the story began: “The Navy had the Argies on their knees last night after a devastating double punch.” Alongside was a graphic showing a British soldier and the words “Battle for the Islands”. All of this works perfectly for its audience and its medium, but it wouldn’t be likely to figure highly in search results. Imagine for a moment that the Falklands conflict was happening today.What would you type into a search engine to find the latest news about it? Well, “Falklands” certainly, or perhaps “Falkland Islands”. You wouldn’t search for “the Islands”, which is used in the Sun copy. You’d be more likely to search for “Argentina” than “Argies” and “British Navy” or “Royal Navy” would get more relevant results than“The Navy”.

...

Just as clever headlines, delayed drops and other journalistic tricks evolved to suit the medium, so we will learn new ways to take advantage of the opportunities SEO provides to reach a vast audience. Hopefully it should be clear by now that there’s nothing to debate when it comes to SEO. If you want your story to be found, you have to adopt these techniques. There’s no room for argument. But the debate frequently mutates into something else and unleashes a host of other concerns.

Once we know what people are searching for should we write stories to meet that demand? Will search engines end up dictating our news agenda as well as the way we format our stories? If we write stories simply to chase traffic, where do we find the resources to write the specialist stories, the ones that are important to our core readers but not massively popular?

All those concerns are legitimate, but they are not questions about SEO and shouldn’t be interpreted as such. They are editorial questions. If an editor wants to devote resources to writing stories based on topics people are searching for, they now have the data that will permit them to do so. Giving readers what they want is a sensible strategy, even though the overall mix of stories within a publication has to be balanced. Different editors will make different choices, but they are editorial choices, not SEO choices.

Telegraph.co.uk has partnered with Wesabe (a site that got a positive mention in Nat Torkington's 'Privacy and the Cloud' presentation I pointed to earlier) on a co-branded site that lets users manage their money online.

Here's one of the Telegraph's personal finance reporters giving it a spin, and here's the announcement from Wesabe.

More from the web-to-print syndication files. Breakingviews.com, a financial analysis website set up by former FT journalism Hugo Dixon, has done a deal to supply branded content to both Telegraph Media Group and the New York Times.

This is a Guardian report on the deal:

The long-term deal struck by TMG will allow the group to publish analysis on financial events on Telegraph.co.uk and in the print edition of the Daily Telegraph, augmenting its existing business coverage.

Breakingviews.com's deal with the NYT will lead allows it to carry a branded opinion column that will appear in all weekday editions of the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune from September 23. These columns will also appear online at NYTimes.com/business and IHT.com.

"The breakingviews.com column is a perfect complement to both our leading news coverage of finance and business and our roster of award-winning columnists," said the New York Times business editor, Lawrence Ingrassia.

The move by TMG to carry analysis from the financial analysis website follows the departure of four journalists over the summer, and the arrival of a new media editor, on the integrated business desk. This integrated operation oversees the production of business news across Telegraph.co.uk, the Daily Telegraph and its sister Sunday paper.

"At such a difficult, but fascinating time in global markets, the Telegraph newspaper and online readers will be able to benefit from breakingviews.com's insights," said the TMG editor-in-chief, Will Lewis.

Breakingviews founder Hugo Dixon spent 13 years at the Financial Times, during the last five of which he headed its Lex business column, before setting up the website in 1999.

The financial analysis website has syndication deals with other leading newspapers including Le Monde in France, Spain's El Pais and Italy's La Stampa.

I've been meaning to point to this for a while. It's a post from Justin Williams, workflow guru and assistant editor at Telegraph Media Group in the UK.

He talks about the decline of the role of sub-editors, or rather an evolutionary blurring of the lines between what a sub, a news editor, commissioning editor and web editor does.

"If I was a reporter now and an old hand sidled up to me and suggested that I might like to retrain as a sub, I’d run a mile. And as for joining one of the nationals’ subbing schemes for graduate trainees … fugeddaboutit."

And he makes some recommendations for how working and would-be sub-editors can start updating their skill sets. Here's a few....

1. Accept that your job is not a long-term or even a medium-term proposition. You’ll find that acceptance of reality is an enormously liberating thing.
2. If subs start being co-opted onto the newsdesk to work with the editors, hassle and cajole whoever does your rotas to be given the same chance. If this is happening, it won’t be an experiment, merely the start of a process which will see the two roles - news editor and sub - become one and the same.
3. Learn to use your company’s content management system (CMS). Do this in your own time if you’re not offered formal training. Come in a couple of hours early for a week. It’s a blast.
4. Learn about search engine optimisation (SEO). Become an expert on it. Constantly check the most popular section on Google News to see what’s playing well. Use Wordtracker to find the most-searched-for terms and tell the reporters and the desk when they’re getting it wrong.
5. Sign up to Digg, Reddit and six or seven of the other aggregators and start seeding your website’s content. Build networks of friends on the aggregators. Make sure you seed plenty of other stufff, too - you’ll find that other seeders will ignore you if you only propagate one site’s content.

This is worth a read. It gives a good insight into current thinking at the Telegraph, one of the more pioneering media groups in the area of web-first publishing and newsroom integration, and raises plenty of grounds for discussion.

Every now and again you read something and think 'about time'. This (via PaidContent) is one of those things:

"After Mail Online’s about-turn, GMG’s GuardianAmerica.com launch and Times Online’s WSJ.com link-up, now the UK’s number-two online paper Telegraph.co.uk has decided to make money from the majority of its users that come from outside its native UK, giving AdGent 007 a license to sell its overseas ad inventory to international advertisers, NMA reports. Some 12.4 million of its 18.4 million users come from overseas, according to May’s ABCe, the majority of them from the US. Despite the big numbers, the majority of page views still come from at home."

Having a significant percentage of overseas readers can be a bit tricky for publishers - local advertisers don't like the idea of their precious ad being wasted on far-away eyeballs.

So it's good to see publishers figure out how to turn the problem into an opportunity - using geo-targeting and global agencies to sell ads in more than one market.

My former colleague at the Telegraph in London, communities editor Shane Richmond, writes a surprisingly restrained blog post noting that the Telegraph overtook the mighty Guardian in the April ABCe audience figures.

This is truly an achievement, given how far behind the Telegraph was lagging just a couple of years ago when we began a change programme to revitalise the website with the help of newsroom staff who were previously tied solely to the group's newspapers.

Shane wrote:

"There's not much in it, so the lead may well change hands several times in the coming months, not only between us and the Guardian but perhaps also between us and the relaunched Mail. However, the field has changed and it will be that way for some time to come.

"Telegraph.co.uk's unique users increased by almost 10 per cent between March and April, and 153 per cent year-on-year, to 18,646,112. The Guardian dropped almost one per cent to 18,546,017 and slightly behind both of us are the Mail on 18,039,943.

"The credit crunch, the US election and the climax of the football season all helped to broaden our audience last month.

"However, the real achievement is to have closed the gap that existed this time last year. In the ABCe figures for April 2007, the Guardian were almost eight million unique users ahead of us, with 15.17 million uniques compared to our 7.35 million, and just over six million uniques ahead of Times Online, who were then in second place with 8.9 million."

On the other hand, here's what the Guardian had to say:

"The web measurement standards for the UK's national newspaper websites are to be reviewed after rival publishers questioned Telegraph.co.uk's dramatic recent traffic growth, adding 6.3 million unique users in two months.

"This meteoric unique-user growth culminated in Telegraph.co.uk overtaking guardian.co.uk as the UK's most popular national newspaper website in figures for April released today by the web traffic measurement body ABCe.

"Prompted by concerns raised by rival newspaper groups the Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards, which advises ABCe on its measurement methods, has today agreed to a review of the tools and standards that publishers use to record web traffic."

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.

Shane Richmond (the Telegraph's Communities Editor) does a good job revisiting the issue of what 'finished' looks like in the fast-paced world of digital publishing.

In print, a story wasn't published until it was 'finished': written, edited, edited again, sub-edited, sub-edited again, proofread and so on. Only then did we hit 'send' and hand it over to the printers - at around 9.30pm, the deadline for the first edition of a daily newspaper.

But, as Shane points out, it wasn't so much that the story was 'finished', more that it was "as good as it could be" at the time the print deadline rolled around.

"The years of habit, the mere notion of a final edition, have created the illusion that news stories can at some point be considered finished," he says.

"All we ever do when we publish a newspaper is run out of time. Given more time there would always be more to add to a story, more angles to pursue and newer stories to find space for. We can never be completely correct, only as correct as possible in the time available. We check as much as we can but we still get it wrong sometimes, all of us.

"The internet removes the time barrier. Without it, we never stop, and still we're never completely right. But everything can be changed. Publish what you know now; learn more, add more. It's never finished and it's never completely right."

Worth a read. As ever.

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."

Interestingly, Roussel said telegraph.co.uk looked well beyond breaking news.

"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."

The Guardian has a Google map showing the locations of its staff around the world. To be fair, it's probably one of few papers with enough foreign-based staff to warrant using a world map. But still, it's a nice idea and would work just as well with a national or regional map.

My Telegraph is doing something similar, asking its members to show where they are on a world map, and then there's Twittervision which shows tweets as they happen from around the world and is surprisingly enjoyable to watch.

The value of maps as online tools came up in conversation the other day with general agreement that they were over-rated. The maps I've mentioned are pretty straightforward - all you have to do is look at them and maybe click on markers to read some text. But those small, embedded maps, where you have to zoom in and move the map about and wait for it to reload six times before you find what you want, can get annoying pretty quickly.

I was in despair yesterday trying to find a map of Hamilton to print out and stick on the wall so I could orient myself, now that I'm going to be there regularly as part of my work as Editor-in-Residence on the Wintec School of Communication journalism programme. Couldn't find any such thing, only a string of Google maps the size of a tissue. Map sellers rejoice, I'm going to go out and buy one.

I like the idea of geotagging and being able to use a map to find information relevant to where I live, work, whatever. And I really like the idea of news sites being the first place people think to look for information relevant to their area. But as a user, if technology limits mean the map slows me down I'd rather just scan some text and be on my way.

ReadWriteWeb wrote about podcasts recently in response to eMarketer figures showing the US market is expected to rise to 38 million users in the next two years.

There's clearly some passion out there for the format. As ReadWriteWeb put it:

"Podcast content is easy to digest. Most podcasts that are downloaded are usually short and focus on specific topics or genres, making it easy for people to listen to exactly what they are interested in and skip the fluff.

"Also, there is a much greater awareness and much more promotion for podcasting via large online news and media networks such as CNET, New York Times, and well-respected blogs [Ed: see our own ReadWriteTalk for example]. Podcasts have also become part of many people's daily lives thanks to Apple's iPod and iTunes."

All good points. And I, too, like catching up on missed radio programmes and interviews of interest when I'm pottering around online uploading pics, following links and so on.

But I can't listen and work at the same time - conversations distract me from reading and writing, my staple activities, so I have to be sparing with online audio.

And I've never warmed to podcasts as a way of delivering news. Partly for the distraction factor, and partly because I don't do much commuting, which is prime news-ingesting time. When I do commute it's in a car, which doesn't have an mp3 player in it (looking forward to the day) and I don't like driving with my iPod headphones in.

Even when I did commute by train, in London, I was seldom motivated enough to leap out of bed early, power up my laptop, plug in my iPod and download a few podcasts before running for the station. Instead I hit Shuffle and read the paper.

I notice that Stuff and the Herald seem to have avoided podcasts so far, and the Telegraph in London recently dropped its daily audio podcast - a news roundup with beat reporters sharing their thoughts on the main stories of the day - because the interest just wasn't there.

Video, without doubt, is king. But I think specific, well-edited audio interviews and features also have a place on news sites - allowing readers to grab what they're interested in to listen to on the run or while they're moseying around online (or an art gallery, say). It may be that newspapers don't need to manage all these audio features themselves but partner up with radio or specialist suppliers as required.

Any thoughts?

9.30 this morning, NZ time:

News of a big fire in London's Camden Market reaches me on Twitter via a news feed from Netherlands-based BreakingNewsOn. They seemed to be getting information from Sky TV.

By 10am NZ time, the Guardian had a picture and good story up complete with eye witness reports. The Times had a smaller report and was asking readers to send in pictures. The Telegraph and Independent had nothing, nor did the Evening Standard.

By 11am, nzherald.co.nz was running the story and asking New Zealanders living in London to send in pictures. Using a combination of Reuters reports, their own staff and TV coverage,they had a pretty good outline of the story. Stuff.co.nz didn't have anything.

At 11.10am a couple of google searches brought up coverage by BBC, CBC in Canada, AFP, AP TV, Sky, Jerusalem Post (carrying an AP report) and plenty more. Conspiracy theories and other conversations were under way on Yahoo Answers, Neogaff, Suzy's photos and elsewhere.

The BBC, in inimitable style, had a full report, pictures, video of eye witnesses and the scene, links to related sites including the fire service, Camden Council and Camden market, and was asking readers for information, pictures and video. (Shame international viewers have to sit through an insurance ad before the video footage plays, kills the sense of immediacy somewhat).

By 11.45am, Guardian had really fleshed out the story, as had Sky and BBC. Times had added three pictures and NZ Herald one (all agency pics). Telegraph had nothing, Stuff was running Reuters copy and pic, the Independent had PA copy with no picture and the Evening Standard was running a headline on the ticker. TV3 was running APTN copy and video, TVNZ had Reuters copy with no footage.

Notably, search for 'fire', 'camden' and 'london' on YouTube brought up nothing. Am I missing something? No sign of ugc on any of the news sites yet, all agency footage and eye witness commentary gathered by reporters on the scene.

This is fun. Telegraph.co.uk has come up with an interactive political map of Britain.

Essentially it's a dot-map of Britain, with each dot representing an electorate (as defined by the new boundaries that became effective in June 2007). Click on the dot and you see the candidates for that electorate, voter turnout and data on health, crime and education.

Interested in three or four particular electorates? Stick a pin in them and you can track them more easily. Want to know what would happen if 4% of swing voters in a Tory-vs-Labour race opted for the Tories? Use the Swingometer to find out. Want to see Labour's 20 most vulnerable seats, the Lib Dem's top 25 target seats or the electorates created under the new boundaries? Hit the predefined searches and there they are.

The map took a short while to load for me (no surprise, really, given download speeds etc) and a couple of times it came up blank after I'd clicked through and was trying to come back. But I like it and I expect many tcuk users will too.

The UK's Telegraph is signing on as an OpenId user. OpenID lets you use a single username and password across multiple sites (provided those sites are OpenID participants). Apparently, 61% of us are pretty much doing this anyway, using a single username and password across multiple sites because we can't be faffed keeping track of them all and can't remember them off the tops of our heads. ReadWriteWeb wrote a good post about it last week.

Shane Richmond, Communities Editor, announced the Telegraph move this week on his blog:

"The Telegraph will soon become the first newspaper in the world, and the first British media company, to become an OpenID provider. Readers will be able to begin using the service from the end of February.

"OpenID is a decentralised registration system that will offer enormous benefits to our users. Once you have an OpenID login you can use it at any of the supporting services, including AOL, Orange, Digg and Blogger. Having to remember fewer passwords is clearly a very good thing.

"Yesterday, Yahoo! announced that they will soon begin providing OpenID logins too and the technology is spreading quickly."

The Telegraph in London from time to time invites guests in to respond to questions set by readers. The most recent was BBC director-general Mark Thompson.

Telegraph Communities Editor Shane Richmond blogs about that here, along with the BBC, the licencing fee that part-funds it, and a response to blogger Martin Belam's summary of the Q& A and his thoughts on Mark Thompson 'getting off easy'.

Entertaining blogs and an interesting idea. Haven't been back in NZ long enough to know if anything similar happens on any of the news sites here.

Does it?

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.

The Telegraph is adding seven TV programmes to its existing multimedia offerings.

Digital editor Ed Roussel told the Guardian the investment was part of the group's digital strategy. "The future of news on the web is in the combination of text, video and user-generated content. This development is a major step in that direction."

Telegraph.co.uk's new offerings will include weekly programmes The Gadget Inspectors, Your Money, Their Hands, The Wheel Deal and Real Trips. It already has a daily news roundup - Telegraph TV Now - daily business show and a fashion programme.

As part of a resource reallocation, Telegraph.co.uk stopped its daily news podcast and its Telegraph PM pdf download at the end of the last year, the Guardian said.

Glad to see the pdf gone. It chewed up a heck of a lot of resources for negligible gain.

Shane Richmond at the Telegraph (London) gives hope to those in despair about the lightweight nature of stories that often fill up 'most viewed' and 'most emailed' boxes.

He has a theory about those 'man has sex with bicycyle' stories: while many different kinds of readers might check that story out, they'll then get back to doing what they came to the site for in the first place, whether that was to get sport scores, read opinion pieces or browse news. "In a Venn diagram of readers interests, the most popular stories sit in the centre. They've caught a little bit of everyone's attention but they might not be anyone's most important story."

This from Roy Greenslade. It's a pretty comprehensive wrap of the moves UK newspapers have made and are continuing to make in integration. It's well worth a browse, especially the sections about the Times, Telegraph and Financial Times and the various approaches they are taking.

I notice he mentions that the FT are using Methode, the second reference I've heard that it's a good CMS for integrated web and print production. I'd love to see it, having not yet seen any systems that are truly integrated.