This is Part 2 in 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

Also see: “Integration and non-integration are just transitory stages” – exclusive interview with Le Monde’s Bruno Patino

Historical non-integration
Print-online bonds, not integration: journalist exchange program
Day-to-day editorial collaboration: mano-a-mano
Non-integration as a choice: keeping journalists’ specializations
Lemonde.fr is not the paper on the Web

Historical non-integration

The website was initially conceived as an entirely independent venture in 1995, dubbed Le Monde interactif. Under early managements, there were little or no efforts to promote exchanges between the print and online teams. A few years ago, the paper showed interest in fully incorporating the online division, but these talks were squashed. So Le Monde interactif has remained an autonomous affiliate of Le Monde and consequently Lagardère (owner at 34%), and both teams work in separate buildings.
 
This partly explains why to this day, “there is no explicit integration strategy,” says Delcambre, editor of Lemonde.fr. Le Monde and LeMonde.fr are two different media, with different cultures, different journalistic practices and different audiences (without implying that they shouldn’t collaborate).

Starting in 2007 though, winds of change blew across Le Monde, which sought to develop the much-needed ties. A print journalist, Le Coeur volunteered to join Le Monde interactif and become one of two coordinators between print and online (one on each ‘side), judging it “aberrational that there weren’t more relations” between the branches. In a caricatural way he says, in reference to a French folk song, “on one side there were the young ‘expletive’, on the other there were the old ‘expletive’.”

Le Monde's print offices are substantially more prominent than its building for its online operations, located a fifteen-minute walk away.

Print-online bonds, not integration: journalist exchange program

As was the case for Le Figaro, the bottom line and essential issue is not whether Le Monde’s print and online operations are integrated, but to what extent staffers collaborate with their sister medium.

For about a month, Le Coeur discovered and observed the work of the online team. Then came the time when he started participating in online activities, writing articles for Lemonde.fr, producing sound bits, “dipping his fingers in the muck.”

In March 2007, Le Monde decided on implementing a cross-platform journalist exchange program, which officially began in May. Two journalists from the print team are sent for a week at a time to observe, work, and simply learn about editorial processes on the online side. The involvement and active work of these journalists is entirely based on their own initiative – there are no rewards for being a good student, no punishment for being a bad one. One staffer from lemonde.fr’ 30 or so journalists migrates to the print offices.

About 25 print journalists had gone through the exchange in October. At that rate, it could take some time to go through Le Monde’s 250 print journalists. But so far the program is limited to editorial heads and section leaders of the paper. Only in 2008 will Le Monde engage in a much broader training program, mostly in-house partly outsourced, to instill digital literacy and online journalism skills into all of its journalists.

The goal of the exchange program is that a share of these section editors will begin serving as relay points between print and online. As far as changing mindsets and relationships, the project has thus far been welcomed by staffers from both departments – an openness that might not have been just a few years ago. “The relational fluidity has been spectacular,” Delcambre says. But “by no means should you think it’s an easy task,” says another Le Monde exec. Notwithstanding of age, sex or hierarchy, some journalists still don’t understand the specificities and necessities of the other medium.

The project is starting to deliver some operational results, according to Delcambre.  Some ‘online students’ call the Web team if they have an exclusive story that should be published Web-first, or have a story that could be further developed with multimedia approaches.

During the 2007 presidential campaign, active collaboration between print and online started to emerge. Print journalists were invited to participate and organize online chats. They were also encouraged to record audio podcasts when attending meetings and events (the argument on the print side being that other forms of work would be too time-consuming for journalists busy writing articles).

For the Rugby World Cup, print journalists started a rugby blog. In preparation for the 2007 Tour de France, Le Coeur initiated a multimedia project involving both online and print journalists – whom he knew from working in the print edition.

Many print journalists are still unaware of the workings of Le Monde interactif (and vice versa), but there clearly is neither a sense of urgency nor an identified necessity to integrate print and online. As Delcambre explains, the approach is hands-on. The precondition to any talks of integration is this immersion process, which will take time. There is neither a fixed timeline nor the desire to merge staffs at any given point. “Our priority is this cultural exchange.”

“I have a hard time believing in a (newsroom) model,” he says, mentioning that the plethora of newsroom approaches has yielded extremely varied results. “We don’t believe in the fixing of a given model on our own editorial reality.”

So far “it’s the site that asks” first most of the time, concedes Le Coeur. The exchanges still seem somewhat unilateral: Lemonde.fr is generally the one to offer multimedia leads to print journalists. Print content regularly makes its way to the website, but work from online journalists still seldom makes it into the paper. Things can change though. Things are changing.

Day-to-day editorial collaboration: mano-a-mano, print-online coordinators

“There’s not a methodology yet, it’s more of intuition,” says Le Coeur, about collaboration between print and online in daily editorial tasks. “The chain of command is informal.”

In the morning, Le Coeur has gotten used to going through the print edition (Le Monde is an afternoon paper) and picking a few stories to publish “Web-first” (like Le Figaro, web-first publishing of print stories is still uncommon and depends on the time sensitivity of a piece of news). The decision to publish Web-first generally results more from Le Coeur’s initiative, or that of journalists who call up Le Monde interactif, than it does from editorial overhead.

Le Monde’s print and online teams use different content management systems. Although Lemonde.fr can access the print CMS (story database), this doesn’t really help communication about upcoming stories. The print Le Monde has no access to the online CMS.

One might think this would lead to redundancies in the journalist’s work (both a print and online journalist gathering the sale information unknowingly). Not at all, says Delcambre. First of all, that’s precisely why Le Coeur was appointed as a coordinator. He keeps the print paper informed of the editorial plans of LeMonde.fr. Reciprocally, the second coordinator, Sylvie Chayette, who works in the offices of Le Monde, keeps the online edition informed of the paper’s projects.

Secondly, even if journalists from both departments were working on the same story, their work would only overlap to a small extent. How so? Explained below in more detail, but all three speakers consider the journalistic work of print and online to be fundamentally different. Hence another argument not to integrate.

Delcambre acknowledges that there’s “a limit in terms of prevision” for breaking news activities, but… hell, cross-department communication may be muddled, Le Monde still manages to publish a referential quality daily and LeMonde.fr is the most-visited French newspaper website.

Non-integration as a choice: keeping journalists’ specializations

Only about 15% of total page views on Lemonde.fr correspond to content from the print paper. But the print articles remain the "backbone" of the site.

Delcambre insisted on the fact that Le Monde’s non-integration was the result of a historical company structure rather than a determined mindset. At the same time though, neither him nor Le Coeur were in favor of a fully integrated model.

“Both platforms need different journalists,” says Delcambre. Print journalists are section-based, and generally have a lot of experience in their particular field. This matches the evolution of the print paper’s role, which tends to be a place for more analytical and in-depth news coverage. “The paper increasingly needs expert pens,” says Delcambre.

The online edition, on the other hand is composed entirely of multimedia journalists, who have a strong “culture of learning” and are trained to master different platforms and storytelling techniques.

Le Monde’s online chats (300-400 users per chat) are one of the best illustration of these specificities and print-online collaboration. Isabelle Mandraud, a seasoned political print journalist, answers reader questions. But a specialized web editor edits and rewrites the chat to make it suitable for the Web.

“We can respect both specificities,” says Le Coeur, adding that “with the current state of things, we could be on the floor below that it wouldn’t change a thing.”

This doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be cross-fertilization though, using the strengths of both types of journalists. A print journalist writing for the Web can profit from the younger and more international audience, or multimedia storytelling techniques, whereas younger online journalists can always use the insight of seasoned print reporters.

Lemonde.fr is not the paper on the Web

“Both platforms are totally complementary,” says Delcambre. 75% of readers of Lemonde.fr don’t read the paper, and vice versa. The website’s audience is much younger on average and internationally based (30% of visitors logging in from outside of France). Only about 15% of the site’s page views correspond to content produced by the print paper.

Although it’s not entirely clear what content makes up for the other 85% (online-only wire stories, blogs, online chats and forums), content produced by Lemonde.fr’s staffers – not by print journalists – is what draws the majority of traffic usage to the site. “The web is increasingly different from the print version,” says a Le Monde exec, just as “the print version is increasingly retrieving what makes its constitutive DNA.”

That said, print articles remain the “backbone” of the Lemonde.fr. Although they don’t seem to amount to much statistically, they support the rest of the structure.

“We now know that the number one draw for audience on the Web is reactivity,” says Delcambre. A quick online wire will draw more readers if it is published quickly, even if it has less background and perspective than a print story, which can be transferred to the Web later on in the day.

The relative prominence of online-only content on Le Monde’s site can partly be explained by the fact that Le Monde is an afternoon paper (could it be considering to move to a morning print edition?). This means that traditionally Le Monde’s online team has had to produce much content on its own in order to satisfy the audience during the morning traffic peaks, at a time when content from the print edition was yet unavailable.

Just as journalists’ roles are different from print to online, the growing differentiation of the print and online editions is another reason not to integrate two media that cater to different audiences, with different content and storytelling capacities, and with a different relation to time sensitivity.

A sixth reason why Le Monde isn’t integrated?

To sum things up, here are some reasons why Le Monde's newsrooms aren't integrated:
- past experiences and history has made it difficult and late to integrate
- collaboration is the key, not blind integration, and this is being built through a journalist exchange program
- a practical approach prevents any light-speed integration; daily coordination using print-online coordinators seems to work out
- print journalists and online journalists have fundamentally different tasks (an argument which is reversed in integrated newsrooms)
- Lemonde.fr and the print Le Monde are two separate editions, with different audiences, storytelling techniques and relationships to time sensitivity

However, there’s another line of thought that can explain why Le Monde hasn’t integrated its newsrooms.

Check out the exclusive interview with Bruno Patino, who gives a prediction of what may really be the new organizational model for the newsroom of the future.

Also see how Le Monde interactif has been experimenting with Le Post, user-generated content and news without a hierarchy.

Source: Alexis Delcambre, editor-in-chief Lemonde.fr – Philippe Le Coeur, journalist and print-online mediator at Lemonde.fr