The times of one newspaper and one deadline are over, said Birgit Donker, editor-in-chief of NRC Handelsblad and NRC Next of the Netherlands.

Addressing participants of the 14th World Editors Forum in Cape Town on the birth of the multi-newspaper newsroom, Donker said her newspaper group was able to adapt to the challenges most newspapers are facing by creating a new publication targeting a new generation of readers, but using the same editorial staff.

“Like practically all newspapers,” said Donker, “NRC Handelsblad was struggling with a stagnating influx of new readers. On top of this, our average reader is older and older”.

“We faced the hard fact that our newspaper was becoming invisible for the highly educated under 35. The structural disadvantages of a late-afternoon newspaper, in essence fully dependent on subscriptions, began weighing more and more heavily. We felt a pressing need to ‘relaunch' the paper”.

They did this in an unusual style by using one group of editorial staff, who every day create two different newspapers with completely different focuses and layout and have done so with considerable success.

“Our challenge was to produce an alternative on the ‘shrinking market of push and shove’ for dailies,” she said. “We had to reach a new group of highly educated readers, who at that moment were reading fewer paid newspapers or none at all”.

“We did not want to change the existing newspaper so present readers would no longer recognise it as theirs. That was why we chose to develop a second newspaper, aimed at an audience used to grazing on increasing numbers of media products,” Donker said.

This new publication has allowed the newspaper and the journalists to be innovative in the way they approach stories and how the stories are presented.

This has also been done with considerable success, and the expectations have been better than expected said Donker.

By Bate Felix, Wits University Journalism