Señor has many pieces of advice for editors, including:

• In the digital age, you have to integrate software with hardware
• We cannot pretend to be enslaved still by the demands of one process, printing a newspaper
• Paper vs online is a false dichotomy that has to end
• Newsrooms are in a permanent state of beta
• We need many, many developers, both in house and outsourced. If we don’t have developers in there, it’s very difficult to make things different
• The newsroom should be one digital kitchen, which means author once, publish everywhere: stories should not just be produced for one platform
• Journalist + designer + developer = new holy trinity

Moving on to social media:

• Journalists should spend 10% of their time on social media – it’s not an extraordinary amount of time, but all good media is by definition social
• Remember that social media is not a medium but a platform
• News organisations should not be just retweeting but beginning, advancing and ending the conversations.

Señor highlighted some of the most unusual newsrooms from around the world, starting with Jawa Pos. The Indonesian newspaper has a young, fun newsroom, with a gym, a ping pong table, a music studio and more on site. The concept is similar to Google’s strategy: if staff area happy and having fun, they will come up with good ideas. Members of the public can come also into the newsroom. It is not closed off from the rest of the world.

Le Journal de Montreal is interesting for a very different reason: It is almost empty of journalists. News does not happen in the newsroom, so reporters are out in the field, and are encouraged to file their stories via laptops or mobile phones. When they need to, they can come into the newsroom.

WAN-IFRA is currently hosting the 19th World Editors Forum and 64th World Newspaper Congress in Kiev, Ukraine.