UK Tour: tips from the Telegraph

Posted by Jean Yves Chainon on December 5, 2007 at 1:15 AM

We’re currently on a study tour in the UK, visiting some of the most innovative newsrooms with a group of 25 editors, focusing on themes of integration and journalist training. Here’s a glimpse and just a few practical tips gathered this morning at the Daily Telegraph.

One of the displays on the video wall shows the online stories that received the most hits.

About integration and training programs:

- if you are able to run a pilot program to experiment with integration plans, it’s essential that it be realistically set up and fully equipped
- the Telegraph chose to pull out all of its journalists and staffers for one-week at a time (by groups of 25), a period most news organizations generally think is too long. But this is one of the only ways to get participants to focus on the training and give them time to embrace it, instead of having them remain obsessed with their regular daily jobs.

About newsroom design:

- investing in two computer screens per staffer enables multitasking and quickly becomes essential in the work of journalists.
- It’s good to have large desks with a slightly elevated L-shaped edge: this gives staffers a small sense of privacy in the open floor newsroom, and also enables to hide all the wiring (on the other hand, the Telegraph’s ones are actually slightly too high, which doesn’t ease communication from one computer to the next – see picture).

You can also read this previous piece about newsroom design, including examples from the Daily Telegraph.

Simply purchasing two screens per staffer helps journalists for nearly all of their work. This is one of the desks where the back edge was actually lowered.

We’ll be back with more snapshots of the tour this week. And of course there will be plenty more to come about lessons gathered during the tour starting next week on.

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