Unsurprisingly, they all said they were. Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com, said his unit was profitable, but added it didn’t have an 800-person journalist staff to support. But he said he was hopeful, because his advertising team told him the website could support far more video adverts than it was presently doing.

Chrystia Freeland, US editor of the Financial Times, agreed, saying the outlook for online journalism was promising, because video adverts brought in much more revenues, and advertisers, particularly in the US, were now asking sites to provide them with video streaming options.

 

Another audience member asked the team to what extent the online news unit was separate from the print unit in their organizations.

 

Jim Brady of the Washingtonpost.com said that his unit was actually physically separate from the print team, in fact, it was in a whole other county! He said: “It does hurt us, because we can’t soak up the atmosphere of the print newsroom.”

 

Esten Saether, Editor of New Media, Dagbladet, Norway, said a strong working relationship with the print culture was essential: “Stay together. The two units need each other.”

 

Chrystia Freeland said the two teams were strongly integrated at the FT, to the extent that she couldn’t say who was a print journalist and who an online journalist.

 

She said it was important to have “powerful web champions” in your organization, because at the moment, “the newspaper unit tends to have a greater gravitational pull”. She gave the example of Martin Wolf, chief economics correspondent of the FT, who had really taken part in FT.com. and who was able to command other journalists to do work for it.

 

She said she believed the FT was taking FT.com more and more into account. For example, the FT’s morning news meeting begins with a look at what stories are the most clicked on the website, and this informs print editorial decisions. The FT team, for example, discovered online readers were particularly interested in gold, so they gave gold stories more prominence.

 

Finally, an audience member asked Esten Saether how expensive it had been for Dagbladet to develop gaming options. He said it wasn’t that expensive.

More news from the 59th World Newspaper Congress 

And our video blog with Robb Montgomery and Visual Editors