The Editors Weblog spoke to Mike van Niekerk, Fairfax’s online editor-in-chief, and Phil McLean, group executive editor.

The Jasjam: innovative, but only one part of the ‘Newsroom of the future’

The i-Mate JasJam enables reporters to file stories wirelessly while on the go. It’s an all-inclusive device that captures still pictures, video and audio, and can be used to rapidly file content to the editorial team in the office.

But both Fairfax editors also admit that the Jasjam is still far from fulfilling all requirements.  “It does a lot of things, not all of them perfectly,” says van Niekerk and it certainly “will be superceded within the next 12 months,” says McLean.

As newspapers and Fairfax increasingly rely on multimedia tools, are ‘specialized’ journalists not going to disappear? What will happen to photojournalists if ground reporters can – and are required to – essentially do the work for them?

“It was never intended to replace staff,” says van Niekerk. “If you want a terrific image, you still need a photographer.” In fact, all photographers will be equipped with the devices, to be used as a connection tool (pictures can be uploaded within a minute, compared to half an hour with other mobiles).

(In the long run though, this could lead to a reduction in staff, simply because more and more news content will be captured on the spot and won’t require the presence of several specialists. If not a reduction in staff, then surely a transformation: perhaps there will be more video and photo editors in the newsroom, editing average-quality footage as it is filed by unspecialized reporters?)

Contrarily to what The Australian News announced, not all journalists will be equipped with Jasjams. At this stage, only journalists involved with breaking news will receive the devices. That’s about a dozen reporters at The Sydney Morning Herald and another few at The Age. A pool of about 70-80 Jasjams (almost a quarter of the Herald’s journalistic staff) will be made available for specific assignments.  Staff at the Brisbane Times, an online-only venture launched in March, have also been equipped with the Jasjam for the past few months.

So Fairfax’s Jasjams aren’t ‘revolutionary’, although they are certainly innovative.  Their real added value is in helping reporters capture more breaking news and making this news available to the public immediately, in a variety of formats. Simply providing these devices to reporters helps them think in platform-agnostic terms.

“This is just another part of our multi-platform strategy,” says van Niekerk. “We don’t quite understand how this will work in the long term” but “this will be very important for what we call our newsroom of the future,” says van Niekerk.

Training journalists to the ‘Newsroom of the future’

The ‘Newsroom of the Future?’

Five weeks ago, The Sydney Morning Herald started its two-day training program for all staff, required to follow a ‘Convergent Journalism Course.’ The course is “probably a better form of training” than the Daily Telegraph’s own elaborate program, says McLean, after visiting the paper. To the extent that the Telegraph started from ground zero, whereas Fairfax’s program is adapted to an already integrated infrastructure, he adds.

Consequently, neither van Niekerk nor McLean went into great detail about Fairfax’s well-guarded training sessions but here are some of their main characteristics:

- The training is done in-house, with the help of a few outside facilitators. Each two-day session groups about 15 to 20 reporters. The overall program will span across 5 months.

- The first part of the session introduces the reasons and the background for change, with an overview of main benchmarks and market trends. The end goal is to convince journalists that “the business you’re now in is a fully integrated digital media operation,” says McLean.

- The second part of the training is more practical. Journalists study new storytelling processes though audio and video slideshows. They discover new ways to build stories and think in multimedia terms.

- As part of the exercise, the journalists are sent home in the evening with a Jasjam and an assignment, and must be able to file in a multimedia story the next morning.

- McLean insists on the fact that “75% of the entire equation is getting people to think differently” (think in an ‘Adapt or Die’ paradigm, van Niekerk might say). As has been voiced before, newsroom integration and adaptation to new media are fully dependent on changing a newsroom’s culture and mindsets. Therefore much of the training, instead of teaching journalists specific tricks, “tries to recalibrate the way people think about journalism,” says McLean.

- Training all journalists in multimedia doesn’t mean they’ll lose their specialization. It does mean reporters have extra possibilities when they gather content. “We don’t expect everybody to practice it (multimedia), but everybody must think” in those terms.

- “All (Fairfax) reporters will eventually get full multimedia training,” says van Niekerk, although the timeline for other Fairfax publications evidently isn’t final. The training program also serves as an evaluation of staff’s own willingness, competence, and talent in multimedia reporting. About 40-50 of the “best multimedia talents” will be harvested for further training, says McLean.

- A lot of the training is geared to help staff adapt to the new premises of the Sydney Morning Herald, which it will move into within six weeks. The ‘Newsroom of the future’ is modeled on an open-floor plan, complete with a centralized hub and print and online teams working side by side. A self-assessed “old-fashioned” journalist, McLean says the setup will be all about communication, verbal communication especially thanks to the design.

Eventually, reporters will file in their story, in a variety of media. Editors sitting at the central hub will instantly receive it in the queue, and then dispatch it to the medium they deem appropriate. A few minutes later, the story will be online, complete with still pictures. Fifteen minutes later, the text will be updated with new information and a briefly edited video will complement coverage.

That will be the Newsroom of the Future.

(Stay tuned for more from van Niekerk and McLean once the Herald moves into its new premises.)

Source: Mike van Niekerk, online editor Fairfax – Phil McLean, group executive editor Fairfax – Journalism.co.uk – The Australian News – illustrations of the homepage of the Brisbane Times and the i-Mate Jasjam