4. Convergence
Where are newsrooms going?
The News perspective
For the first time since the invention of the printing press the answer to the question "What is a newspaper?" is no longer straight-forward.
Of course a newspaper is news printed on paper - but is that all?
What about a masthead website? Is that something the professionals who produce print editions do on the side?
Are websites journalism 's equivalent of the hobby farm?
Or is a newspaper a relationship? A contract, if you like, between a source of information and an audience that trusts and understand its values, credibility and reputation.
These are the issues newspaper companies are wrestling with under the new industry buzzwords of convergence and integration. At News Limited we, like other publishers, have seen our masthead website traffic surge dramatically in the last 12 months and sites that used to just tick over with a diet of loosely re-packaged stories from the print edition are now centres of creativity, breaking news stories and people pushing their talent into unexplored territory of video, animated cartoons, interactive graphics and gloriously renegade content.
Examples of integration within News Limited newsrooms around the country vary from the individual with reporters themselves taking the lead to the structural with the formation of integration teams at some divisions.
Reporters like Di Butler at The Courier-Mail in Brisbane, Joe Hilderbrand at The Daily Telegraph and Malcolm Farr and Sid Marris for The Telegraph and The Australian respectively in Canberra are examples of print journalists who have taken the initiative in adding video reporting to the suite of skills with spectacular results.
At The Geelong Advertiser editor Peter Judd is experimenting with a home-built "hub and spoke" newsroom layout and at The Daily Telegraph in Sydney five teams have been established to examine aspects of integration ranging from workflows, newsdesk duties, production efficiencies, training and systems and equipment. This project includes having reporters road-test the latest PDAs and laptops.
In my role as Editorial Operations Director, I am also charged with investigating the same issues from a corporate perspective and I am in the process of putting together project teams to guide the move to integration. As others in the newspaper industry have observed key challenges of the integration puzzle is how to move to the new environment without simply adding extra staff and what are the best multi-platform publishing systems
News Limited, like most newspaper companies, has a large group of people publishing printed papers and a small group of people publishing websites.
Integration is when all the creative effort of journalists, photographers, editors and artists is structured to deliver news onto whatever platform needs it now.
This changes fundamentally the answer to the original question, "What is a newspaper?" A newspaper is a source of information. The key is the news. The paper is now just one of the ways that news is delivered to the audience.
In some parts of the industry the catch cry is "Don 't think newspaper, think newsbrand".
For News the starting point for convergence is the question "What does the audience want and when does it want it?" From there we are working towards structuring our work practices, hours of operation, staff positions and responsibilities to meet the audience expectation for news when they want it and how they want it.
This means a fundamental re-examination of everything we do. Organically, throughout the News group, we are at various stages of that process.
Questions such as "When should the editor start work?" to "Where does the website news editor sit?" are being tossed about and argued over along with the issues of managing cultural change, newsroom architecture and the best equipment for reporters, photographers and artists.
All of this represents massive change and a question that has to be asked is "Why bother?" Isn 't it enough to simply bolt a website on to the side and keep things running pretty much like they always have?
Well, no.
The explosion of on-line and mobile news opportunities represents a new adventure for journalism and death by irrelevancy awaits those unwilling to make the journey. The resources newspapers need to deliver all-day-every-day journalism of the quality our mastheads demand can only practically come from changing the way we operate. The "bolt-the-website-on-the-side-and-don't-bother-me-about-it" concept is creatively bankrupt and economically unsustainable.
Journalism is about telling the world about change and now journalism itself is changing. From once a day to all day and from paper to every platform we can think of.
So what 's a newspaper? Anything you want it to be.