In the editor’s shoes: The Hindustan Times’ walk to integration

 
Background and cultural differences

The Hindustan Times sells 1.4 million copies per day, while its website counts on average 1.6 monthly unique visitors (80 million page views). But online is growing quickly in India, and by 2010, some 127 million Indians are expected to have Internet access. There are about 215 people - 45 online - working in the HT's offices in New Delhi, compared to about 750 at the HT in general.

Despite being born there, Paul feels like he’s rediscovering India.

The editorial process and general newsroom infrastructure at the HT is very different from what Paul experienced in the US. “There are glitches every single day,” he says laughingly (this happens at all newspapers though…). For example, the HT doesn’t have a centralized content management system for its print and online operations, which does little to help coordination between both teams, which are currently being integrated. Yet Paul insists he doesn’t want to change everything, since many of the existing methods seem to work. Although Paul doesn’t explicitly say this, much of the work seems to be ‘do it as it comes’ and ‘do with what you have’ rather than following a precise methodology.

The relationship between journalists and editors also tends to be different. As is elsewhere, the better reporters become department heads and editors. But unlike other organizations, editors continue to write extensively. This helps collaboration with journalists, who view their editors as walking the walk. “At some fundamental level they connect very well with journalists,” says Paul. On the other hand, this doesn’t always help to promote the necessary hierarchy among staff, especially as the role of editors changes with integration.

Newsroom Design…

When Paul arrived at the HT this summer, the newsroom and staff had been through quite some turmoil, ending in the abrupt departure of the former editor-in-chief.

So integrating the print and online teams, while also moving into a new newsroom, within a few months of his arrival, is everything but an easy task. At this point, Paul simply doesn’t know the details about the new premises. He mentions some of the main aspects, which seem to follow the now widely adopted hub-and-spokes model. There will be a central hub, to ease cross-department communication. The copy desks will be grouped instead of being section-based. Of course, “every single department will sit together.”

However ‘obvious’ that may sound nowadays, this wasn’t the case until recently. The online team was both physically and organizationally separate from the print team, and Paul is still in the process of getting both teams to work side by side.

The newsroom will span across a big open-floor, and there will be about a half dozen private meeting rooms. Paul believes the editor should be in the newsroom alongside staff, although he doesn’t intend sitting right in the middle, as does the Daily Telegraph’s Will Lewis.

…and its effects on newsroom relationships

As the HT becomes a 24/7 platform agnostic newsroom and “every single department sits together”, staff will also have to adapt to new roles and relationships.

Journalists will have to learn that “your core competency is gathering content”: gather any available content, don’t worry about the platform, and file it in. Paul hopes this move will also get more journalists on the ground, which could soon be using multimedia devices to file stories wirelessly.

Content is gathered and sent over to the central hub, where the editor selects content from the story and disseminates it to the proper platform (pictures are given to online producers to publish online galleries, the text is sent to the print product story bank).

Thus in the new organization, editors will have to be multi-platform savvy, at least at a basic level, to choose which form of content is most suitable for a story. They also have much leeway to figure out solutions.  Potentially one editor could have a method for his team different from the process in another section “but that doesn’t mean we won’t take the best practice and implement it in the newsroom,” says Pankaj.

Newsroom integration doesn’t imply staff standardization though. There will be no online team but there will be online specialists, and mobile specialists, says Paul.

According to Paul, the integration of the print and online teams, in addition to its advantages for editorial efficiency and productivity, will be mutually beneficial for the journalists.

The print journalists “can learn the ways of the Web,” says Paul. It will be even more helpful for the online journalists, who are typically younger and less experienced. Paul guesses they will become better overall journalists, since in the long run they will get more and better training, and benefit from the print journalists’ writing expertise. They’ll “train them on the fly,” says Paul.

He firmly believes in the virtues of peer-to-peer training. In fact, Paul has been doing some of the training himself so far, for basic multimedia projects. But within a few weeks, two specialized trainers will be come to the newsroom to help journalists acquire multimedia skills.

Because just as in any integrated newsroom, the HT is aiming to increase its multimedia content. Its very first experiment with multimedia, an audio slideshow of a terrorist attack, resulted in the website’s 2nd best traffic ever.

Paul has just set up a basic video studio in the newsroom, using a small room, with a Sony HD handheld camera. That’s how easy it is. Starting this week, one of the HT photographers will begin specializing in video, to become the paper’s first videographer.

The Hindustan Times continues to put out a daily paper, while changing its internal organization and production process. While working on all fronts, Paul is in line with his description of Indian editors, who collaborate with the journalists and continue doing ‘grunt’ work.

“My role is to be a facilitator,” he says.

More from The Hindustan Times once the paper has moved into its new premises (within the next six weeks).

Source: interview with Pankaj Paul, managing editor Hindustan Times