LeMonde.fr: non-integrated, still the most-visited quality newspaper website in France.

It's not about integration: task-based organization

Patino has witnessed many “religious quarrels” over the past years, whether it was choosing to offer an online ‘Web portal’ or a content-based website, or whether it was opting for a paid-for online subscription model instead of a free ad-supported one (Lemonde.fr decided on a hybrid model). Now the oft-heard debate is whether to integrate the newsroom or not.

First of all, he says, the real – underlying – question shouldn’t be that of integration, but rather how to offer the best editorial product on a variety of platforms.

“In two years the question (of integration or non-integration) will appear obsolete,” he says, because “full integration as much as non-integration are just transitory stages” in the process of reinventing the newsroom.

Patino predicts that in the near future, as little as three years, a new newsroom model and editorial process will emerge from a job-based organization. This distribution of tasks will be the main concern of editors. Some jobs will only be adapted to one platform, others to a multiplicity, while some will be entirely platform-agnostic.

If Le Monde interactif (lemonde.fr) were to move into the print offices now, where would it place the Flash programmer, the audio producer, asks Patino?

The integrated newsroom forgets three axes

As the number of platforms and the differences between each grow, the true issue for newspapers and traditional media will be to offer an editorial product suitable for each. Patino identifies three main differentiation points between platforms – three axes – which in effect should shape the new task-based organization. Each story and platform requires different:

- relations to languages, meaning literacy and storytelling techniques
- relations to the audience, which has different needs depending on the platform, and now also takes part in content production
- relations to time, time sensitivity of medium

But “it seems to me that the industrial and linear organization of content production, as it is implied within fully integrated organizations, is out of date,” says Patino.

In the integrated model, there’s a content-gatherer, the journalist, someone to package it, ie. the production designer, and someone to edit it and choose the appropriate platforms, the editor. According to Patino, this ‘integrated’ process, which supposedly fine-tunes the news machinery, actually distances it from the three aforementioned axes:

- “it poses the question of the differentiation of language belatedly, whereas this is constitutive of the story.”
- it bypasses the interaction with the audience, which is by definition non-linear
- depending on the specific process, the integrated model is bound to have privileged a timeframe, instead of thinking it in terms of the story and medium

“It’s Taylorism,” says Patino. Each blue collar in the news production chain adds a layer of paint to the car. Without realizing that they are – or should be – working on different cars altogether. It’s a model based on 20th century organization, instead of a reinvention of the newsroom for the 21st century.

“So all this change to then eventually reorganize (the newsroom) is a lot of disorder concerning something that should be built up.”

Le Monde in light of this assessment

In Le Monde’s case, the issue of integration thus either comes too late – because the website is no longer simply the print edition reproduced on the Web (see Non-Integrated Newsrooms Part 2), or at the wrong time, because in the near future newsroom organization will be task-based.

There will be no organizational Big-Bang at Le Monde, especially considering that the number of delivery platforms in the future is entirely hypothetical. “We can only be agnostic and have the most flexible organization,” says Patino.

As of now, Patino is still “convinced that there is a set of skills and expertise on one side and on the other.” The print newsroom is section-based, “specialized around expertise and a unique set of skills, story writing,” with typically large angles on news stories. The online newsroom is organized in relation to timeliness and reactivity, around a continuous news desk and the production of “specific objects” – online clips, animations and illustrations.

Le Monde will remain organized this way for the foreseeable future. However, Patino hints at one upcoming development. “The central element of transformation, not upheaval, will be the continuous news desk.”

What newsroom design could this organization entail? Patino isn’t sure, but it would have to be conceived in relation to the three axes. The ambivalence between providing a pole for expertise and a pole for reactivity and breaking news would have to be drawn into the design. An aspect omitted by the integrated – and outdated according to Patino – ‘hub-and-spokes’ design in many integrated newsrooms.

If a newspaper forcefully integrates its print and online teams at the inadequate time, it can run the risk of diluting one team’s specific skills, rather than integrating the strengths of both. Whether it’s by losing the momentum of the online continuous news desk, or burdening veteran print reporters with the creation of multimedia objects, the transformation might simply not be worth the time, cost, and risks.

For more information, take a look at our series on non-integrated newsrooms:
Part 1: Figaro.fr: Non-integrated Newsroom doesn’t mean non-integration
Part 2: Le Monde: 5 reasons why it’s not integrated (to be published next week)

About Bruno Patino

Patino started his career as a Le Monde correspondent in Chile. He became CEO of Le Monde interactif in 2000. In 2005, he co-authored the book La presse sans Gutenberg (The Press without Gutenberg), which analyzed the revolutionizing effects of new media and the Internet on the future of journalism.

He will speak at the 15th World Editors Forum, to be held 1 to 4 June in Göteborg, Sweden, about the following topic: “Are integrated newsrooms really working?”
More info at: http://www.wansweden2008.com/en/Conference/EditorsForum/

Source: Bruno Patino, Vice-President Le Monde group, President Le monde Interactif