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In the run-up to the 16th World Editors Forum being held in Hyderabad, India March 22-25, 2009, the Editors Weblog is running a special series entitled "Doing More with Less." The series highlights major trends that editors-in-chief are using to steer their newsrooms through the difficult economic climate. The second of the series studies newsroom integration at the Finnish business weekday paper, Kauppalehti, which, unable to move into a new building like the Guardian, is working with the limitations of its current office space.

In a country where newspaper penetration ranks third in the world, and where newspapers' share of mass media turnover remains high (31 per cent), Finland's leading weekday business paper Kauppalehti can have confidence in its print product's continued success. Its outlook became even more positive at the end of 2007 when its competitor Taloussanomat ceased print production and went online only. Kauppalehti, owned by the Alma Media Group also offers extensive online services at Kauppalehti.fi, including both free and paid content, and the company broadcasts economic television news on MTV3, the most popular single channel in Finland.

Integration at Kauppalehti is key to keeping a competitive edge in the fast-paced world of business news. Although the paper has integrated substantially, barriers remain, primarily because of the physical layout of the newsroom and limited space. The Editors Weblog spoke to editors-in-chief Hannu Leinonen and Eero Tuomisto and financial news editor Janne Poysti about how far integration has come and how successful it has been.

Kauppalehti first created a joint news desk when it moved offices in 2002. News editors from all platforms now sit together, on a long "super desk" in the newsroom, close to the TV studio. However, the architecture of the building has prevented the creation of one large multimedia centre: the main newsroom is L-shaped and there is not a lot of open space, with "mainly-print" journalists sitting on a different floor. Janne Poysti pointed out that there are greater communication problems between editors and reporters for print services than for online or television.  Eero Tuomisto remarked "I think this sort of integrated newsroom should be round, a big round building with the news desk in the middle, but unfortunately we don't have that." He hopes to move towards this ideal in the future, and explained that Alma Media is considering relocating all its operations into one building within the next few years.

The architecture of Kauppalehti's building has prevented the creation of one large multimedia centre

WHAT IT MEANS IN PRACTICE

The space issue aside, operations have been integrated and streamlined to a significant degree.  A key element is the two joint meetings per day, attended by all news editors and editors-in-chief, to decide which news items will be on which channels and in what order. "In that sense the decision making is very centralised," commented Hannu Leinonen.  The fact that the editors all sit together, "within yelling distance", has been crucial for the success of integration, he explained. Janne Poysti remarked that "journalists work quite closely in Kauppalehti", with television reporters sending their reports to online and print, and vice versa.

Staff have been taught to be flexible, and many people can move between different medias. Leinonen explained that "by rotating people within the organisation we have been able to enhance people's skills so that more people can do multimedia now than five years ago." Tuomisto stressed the importance of good internal marketing, "how you sell the idea to your employees." There was some resistance to changes, but Poysti was confident that "nowadays, everything is going pretty smoothly." Some reporters will write a piece for television and follow it with a longer, more in depth article for the next day's paper.

A crucial part of the integration philosophy at Kauppalehti, however, is that not everybody has to be multi-channel. Tuomisto clarified that "our experience is that every single journalist has to have a home base and be attached to some channel." Editors are also still allocated to a specific platform as "you can't be responsible for everything," Tuomisto explained.

Leinonen explained that "by rotating people within the organisation we have been able to enhance people's skills so that more people can do multimedia now than five years ago." 

The markets team, however, is one area of the newsroom that is fully integrated. The group sit by the main news desk and produce a breaking news feed that is sold, as the services of a news agency might be, and they then supplement this with print and television commentaries.

There is also considerable cooperation between teams in terms of content gathering. Tuomisto explained that it was a waste of resources for three or four Kauppalehti journalists to interview the same source, so now they try to coordinate who does what. Often it will be the television crew who carries out the interview, as is the case when Nokia releases its quarterly results, for example, and then the text reporters can use the resulting audio.

NEXT STEP: IMPROVING COMBINED IMPACT

Both editors-in-chief seemed keen to integrate further, but stressed that a fully integrated newsroom would have to wait for a move to new premises. For outlets which cannot afford to make the move to a state of the art multimedia newsroom like those of The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, or Fairfax, integration will always be a more difficult process.

Meanwhile, Kauppalehti is working to improve its publications and their combined impact.  Integration provides ample opportunity to reduce duplication in the final product. "We are redesigning the newspaper so that we don't publish the news that is already on the website," Leinonen explained. The redesigned product is being released this month.  Additional aims are to stop providing newspaper content free on the Web site, and to develop paid online content.  Tuomisto described the way that the organisation is working to create subscription packages that consist of news and some "added value" in the form of specialist knowledge.

According to free-daily.com, Portland, Maine will be the host of new a free daily, the Portland Daily Sun.  The paper will published five days a week and will be in competition with paid-for dailies in the area.  

Once again, the launch of a new free daily seems a bit precarious under the current economic circumstances.  However, although some have predicted the end of free dailies, some feel that becoming free is the future of paid-for dailies.

Source: Free Daily

The Wall Street Journal has launched a three-part video on its website entitled "The End of Wall Street," Media Bistro reports.  This is the WSJ.com's first long-form video series.  

The video explains "how the housing bubble inflated and burst, the rippling effects across the economy and look at what's ahead for the global economy."

Forecasts for 2009 are, unsurprisingly, relatively pessimistic for traditional media and more positive for new media developments. But not all commentators were as determined as Jeff Nolan that "if 2008 was bad for newspapers, 2009 will be devastating," and many saw hope in the possibility of changes in content and format.  

Peter Wilby wondered in the Guardian whether 2009 might see "a revival for serious journalism" in light of the economic recession. He quotes former Daily Express editor Richard Addis who wrote that "when things go wrong, you look for wisdom."  Wilby does not think that past events have given credence to this view, and suggests that in difficult times, people actually look for "glamour and escapism." 

India's language dailies are "tapping into the mix of sentiment and technology," as the Internet serves a means of "keeping in touch with one's roots" and staying informed as more people spread around the globe.

Internet "penetration" is increasing in rural areas, adding to the base of nearly 50 million users in mostly urban settings, Exchange4Media is reporting.

Newspapers had been launching their online versions as "customary add-ons to their main dailies," Exchange reports, but more papers have started to launch newer verticals as well as sub-domains, enabling them to "have better control over classifieds" and use the online medium effectively and profitably.

James Rainey of the LA Times finds that the conjunction of the decision by Detroit's two daily newspapers to reduce the days of home delivery, and the American Society of Newspaper Editors vote to take "paper" out of its name in April, indicates an embrace of "the shift of many readers and advertisers to the Internet," Rainey notes.

But a shift in newspaper delivery could have more serious implications for the industry as a whole.

How much longer will newspapers be able to actually deliver the news? Rainey wonders, as does the rest of the industry.  The Internet is where many believe the news industry is headed, as evidence by the Christian Science Monitor's decision to go online-only and print a single Sunday edition.  

Detroit's papers argue it's better to alter their delivery system than to "further cut the news staffs."  The move will save millions for the papers, owners said.

But the break from the 400-year-old delivery system, Rainey notes, is the kind of move that there's no going back on.

Taking on Independent columnist Johann Hari, Media Guardian's Roy Greenslade finds that the "newspapers-versus-bloggers argument is entirely false," and that there is a future for the industry with the involvement of citizen journalists.

Hari uses the financial state of the industry, following the bankruptcy of the Tribune Co. and the arrival of the Internet, to form a new paradox: "more people are reading quality newspapers than ever before," he writes, and yet, "newspapers are dying."  The reason for this is, Hari says, because "we don't just want it all, we want it free."

There will be an "aching hole where newsgathering used to be," Hari writes, because the leftover sources of news--online sources, such as bloggers--don't have the resources necessary to "make sense of the world."

Greenslade disputes the "us versus them" attitude that many professional journalists take toward bloggers and other citizen journalists.  The future of journalism, Greenslade writes, lies in "participation" between the professionals and citizens.

Traditional newspaper owners are "clinging desperately to an outmoded model," and journalists are following suit, Greenslade writes.  The future of news organizations will be "very different," but there need not be a "hole" if traditional sources fail.  

"We should be finding ways to fill it," Greenslade concludes, building business models to provide resources for the future.

Source: Media Guardian

Detroit Media Partnership CEO David Hunke has declared that the company is "committed" to publishing two dailies in Detroit, never considering shutting down The Detroit Daily News amidst its current financial situation, according to Editor and Publisher.

The partnership has announced radical changes to the content and distribution of Detroit's two dailies, the News and The Detroit Free Press, foregoing home delivery except for Thursday, Friday and Sunday editions, and printing a one-section newspaper for single-copy sales the rest of the week.

The main criticism of the industry is that it does "little, incremental changes," Hunke said, and the changes will ensure the papers' survival.

Is the recent Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich scandal proof that the newspaper industry still has relevance?    

Blagojevich's efforts to remove editorial members of the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times' David Carr argues, show that the newspaper still has an impact--if a governor is willing to allegedly extort money in return for favorable press, then the paper must be doing something right.  

The scandal, he says, is justification for investigative journalism through a print medium.  A daily paper is a "civic necessity." If a community lacks a proper outlet, or was "too diminished" for full reporting, then what would have been the result in Illinois?

"Who says the modern American newspaper doesn't matter?" Carr asks.

TJ Sullivan.  In his LA Observed column "Native Intelligence," Sullivan argues the opposite point.

"Newspapers don't matter," he writes. "Otherwise people would be reading them."

After the Tribune Company, owned by Sam Zell, filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11 last week, the newspaper industry now sees the hard road ahead as they try and cope with the "structural revolution" taking place.  As Russ Smith puts it, "the demise of the print media industry has been evident for years, but its rapid acceleration in 2008 is still shocking on an emotional level."

Several Times Co. newspapers are worried about what is to come.  According to James Rainey, an LA Times staff writer, "in the ragtag old Los Angeles Times newsroom, emotions run as threadbare as the quarter-century-old carpet."

At a recent meeting in Paris, head of Google News, Josh Cohen, met with the French media as part of an initiative by the French government to seek solutions for the survival of newspapers.

According to Pierre Conte, president of PubliPrint, "for all publishers, in the last few months, something in our relationship with Google has been broken.  Six months ago, we thought we had finally found the right business model, but now, with the current crisis, the change has happened very quickly in our mind with the new Google...You are becoming our worst e