This is the second in a three-part series on one of this year's main newspaper trends: the integration of newsrooms. We'll study how three major newspaper companies around the world are implementing their own versions of the integrated newsroom - Telegraph Media group in the UK, Fairfax Media in Australia, and Gannett Co. in the US.

The Sydney Morning Herald is a major Australian broadsheet newspaper published in Sydney, Australia. The Age is a broadsheet daily newspaper published in Melbourne, Australia. Both belong to Fairfax Media. The online versions of the newspaper have established a kind of ‘brand extension’ by being younger and cheekier than the print product. There is currently an integrated news-desk (i.e. print and online work together) but they are waiting until their office move in Sydney at the end of the year for their fully integrated newsroom.  

Van Niekerk tells Editors Weblog that the transition to the integrated news-desk worked relatively smoothly. “Online we focused on the top 3, 4,5 stories each day so it was only touching a few journalists each day. Some people really enjoy it – particularly those covering court rooms and police rounds. Most of it is local news and they don’t get a good run in the paper anymore so it was good for their work to be published online.”

When talking about the design for the new newsroom at the Sydney Morning Herald, he says “we have taken an enormous amount of inspiration from The Telegraph. We’re incredibly impressed.” They also spent some time with IFRA to look at other possibilities for their ‘newsroom of the future’.

Below is Mike van Nierkerk’s journal from one particularly heavy news day in Australia and how they made the most out of it thanks to the integrated news-desk.


A day in the life at the Sydney Morning Herald Integrated Newsdesk

AT 2.52pm on August 15, the website of The Sydney Morning Herald broke the news that Australian prime minister John Howard would allow a conscience vote on a stem-cell research Bill.

The story was filed, ahead of any other media, by the paper’s political correspondent Phillip Coorey. Less than an hour earlier, David Braithwaite, a reporter working exclusively for www.smh.com.au, wrote a story for the site that police were frantically hunting a knifeman who was randomly attacking strangers in Sydney’s south-west.

Then all hell broke loose. Around 4pm the first major thunderstorm of winter dumped so much hail on the city it looked as if it had been snowing. Within minutes, Braithwaite’s colleague Jano Gibson had an update on the impact of the storm and a forecast from the weather bureau.

What made that story even more remarkable is that it was accompanied by a series of photographs – and one video – taken by readers who sent them via sms directly to the website.

The era of the 24x7, multiple-media, interactive newsroom is close to reality at the Herald and its sister newspaper in Melbourne, The Age. On that same day in August, visitors to smh.com.au could watch a video of the newspaper’s film critic Garry Maddox reviewing “Flight 93” or join in a constantly-updated discussion on whether Kevin Muscat would lead the Socceroos to victory against Kuwait that night.

Further down the page, online technology reporter Louisa Hearn had filed a story that Dell was recalling 4 million laptop computer batteries – based on a press release issued hours after she questioned company CEO Michael Dell in Sydney the previous day about the high rate of Dell laptops bursting into flame. That in turn was based on a story she gathered from user experiences posted to a blog updated by online technology editor Stephen Hutcheon.

There is a great deal of energy and excitement in The Sydney Morning Herald online newsroom these days. Young reporters such as Braithwaite, Gibson and Dylan Welch, who are beginning their “newspaper” careers working for a website, vie with each other to break stories that news editor Richard Woolveridge – a one-time “Young Journalist of the Year” in Britain and now a seasoned professional – deems worthy of pushing up to the top of the page.

At the same time, the paper’s print reporters call in or stop by to offer tip-offs, a quick few paragraphs or complete stories that they can break on the web almost a day ahead of the next print edition. This is the Integrated News Desk in action, combining the work of print and online reporters on the newspapers’ websites.

The IND was formally launched at the two newspapers in March this year, following discussions between senior editorial management and the house committees, a six-month trial in mid-2005 and negotiations leading up to the new Enterprise Bargaining Agreement, which enshrined the IND as part of the duties of journalist for the two mastheads.

Reporting staff had been concerned that the pressure to file for the web would conflict with their work for the print edition and put unreasonable demands on their time. The trial showed this not to be the case. Some reporters, especially those working in rounds such as courts and police, found filing to the web gave them more chance of a good run for stories that could end up as a brief in print.

Others, mindful of Age crime reporter John Sylvester’s major Australian journalism Award for a multimedia feature on the Melbourne gangland killings (also nominated for an EPpy Award), see in online the opportunity to learn new skills at a time when the news business is going through epochal change. Reporters in their 50s, who started out on typewriters and carbon paper, are now filing from the road on mobile phones and PDAs.

But there are echoes of the past in the brave new world. Older reporters who worked on now-defunct afternoon newspapers remember the rolling deadlines and filing in takes. And the old skills of shoe-leather reporting still count mightily in the new world of “Web2.0”.

As the storm abated on the afternoon of August 15, reader Gabriel Urbinaga sent in a digital image that was literally electrifying – a bolt of lighting snaking out of the clouds into Sydney’s Freshwater Bay. The picture was so good, the print edition ran it in next day’s edition. Looking at the picture again in the paper, Gibson realised the bolt of lightning was grounding itself on the tip of a yacht’s mast – so he rang Scott Finsten, dock master of the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia.

Finsten went to investigate and found a yacht with a damaged mast, which he then photographed and emailed to Gibson. Talking to boating and insurance experts, Gibson then had a new story about the number of yachts struck by lighting in Sydney Harbour each year.

In Australia, Fairfax Media, parent company of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, has been a leader in reengineering the newsroom to create journalism that meets the needs of new audiences on new platforms. If a new generation of young, affluent news consumers expects to be informed when they want, where they want, print, online, mobile or video, at any time of day and night, then we have to be there for them at all times, there is no alternative.

‘A day in the life at the Sydney Morning Herald Integrated Newsdesk’ was written by Mike van Niekerk, Online Editor-in-Chief, Fairfax Media