If you had to invest in editorial quality, what would you do first in the newsroom?

Across all categories, the responses illustrated how necessary modernization has become for the newspaper industry: the answer by 36% of the respondents was to train their staff in new media, loosely followed by more journalist recruits, at 23%.
Smaller papers (circulation <200k), while slightly less focused on new media, still prioritized it 34% of the time. Larger newspapers, with a circulation of 200K+, put even more emphasis on new media, 41%, presumably because digital activities have long been recognized as the fastest-growing assets and the strategic focus for cross-platform multimedia companies.
South and North America were the most focused on new media (47% and 46% respectively). Asia and Western Europe, usually considered as proponents of new media, were surprisingly below average (31% and 35% respectively) – they were concerned with ‘old-fashioned’ solutions, such as retraining journalists in ‘traditional skills’ (Asia) or recruiting more reporters (Western Europe).
 

If you had to invest in editorial quality, what would you do second in the newsroom?

Logically enough, new media was also the most popular answer (27%) for the newsroom’s secondary investment. We consider here ‘recruit more journalists’, 14%, as this was the second most popular answer across questions 14-15 combined, and because it corresponds to a traditional vision of editorial quality, as opposed to new media training. In fact, this shows that many editors still believe that the editorial quality of their newspapers depends on their human resources.
For small (<200k: 15%) and large (200K+: 14%) newspapers alike, one out of six or seven editors would recruit more journalists. Thus, despite the intense emphasis on new media and modernization, newspapers still want to rely on their reporters’ skills to produce a quality newspaper.
Interestingly, while North America primed new media, it was also by far most keen on recruiting more journalists, at 24%. As opposed to the rest of the world, which chose that answer only between 11% and 15% of the time.
 

In the future, what do you view as the principal threat to your newspaper's editorial independence?

Overwhelmingly, the main perceived threat was business-related, as 26% of respondents saw it coming from shareholder pressure and 28% from advertiser pressure (total 54%). Indeed, business and revenue issues have increasingly come in the way of editorial decisions, whether it’s for staff cuts or, in the worst case, content selection. Where newspapers were heavily capitalized in the stock market, such as in Western Europe and North America especially, shareholder pressure was strong, 35% and 46% respectively. Those were also the regions where democracy and press freedom were the most secure, and thus political pressure was barely any threat – 5% and 6% respectively.

For respondents from many other regions of the world, the main threat was still that of political pressure (19%). Respondents from Eastern Europe and Africa showed little concern for shareholder pressure (14% and 21% respectively), but lack of press freedom and corruption led those regions to intensely fear political pressure, at 33% and 42% respectively.
Newspapers’ editorial choices and independence is still very much anchored to the national context in which they evolve. Finally, 9% saw the threat coming from PR firms, a seemingly small figure, yet it underlines the oncoming trend towards PR firms’ ownership of and influence on newspapers.

As newspapers restructure their newsrooms to adapt to competition from new media and an evolving market, editors have fully realized the importance of a multimedia newspaper and having a staff with new media qualifications. This doesn’t mean news executives have forgotten about what makes a newspaper’s main strength: well-rounded journalists. In the future, newspapers will have to increasingly struggle to maintain their editorial independence, as shareholder and advertiser pressure increasingly seek to dictate newspaper content.


For the full Newsroom Barometer results and commentary plus the complete, analytical guide to the monumental transformations taking place in the newspaper industry, please consult the print or PDF version of Trends in Newsrooms 2007 (http://www.trends-in-newsrooms.org/home.php), released 27th March 2007. From free papers to e-papers, citizen journalism to social media and integrated newsrooms to Internet aggregators, it has everything you need to know to direct your paper towards a multimedia future.

Read part 1 – Nobody has killed the newspaper
Read part 2 - How editors view emerging forms of journalism (free papers, citizen journalism, online journalism and more)
Read part 3 – How editors view their newspaper in 10 years
Read part 4 – Newsroom priorities, threats to editorial independence
Read part 5 – Who participated in the Newsroom Barometer?
Read part 6 – Newsroom Barometer: analysis by John Zogby and comment by Jeff Jarvis