Recently by Andreas Larsson

Patrick Saliën, Manager at Belgium's Corelio, talked about the search for a working, effective CMS, during the eighth session of the 15th World Editors Forum.

Corelio is the biggest newspaper-publisher in Belgium. When the development of news websites alongside the paper edition started during the 90's, the situation was complelety new and almost improvised. In a few years time, however, the websites became a more serious business.
 
Managers weren't complaining anymore about the websites taking market space from the paper because money was flowing. Instead the journalists were complaining. Publishing a news story on the website had become a hassle since the IT-infrastructure hadn't been updated.
 
The need for a standardized content management system was clear.

Finding the best CMS for Corelio took 1,5 years. The final choice was Polopoly.
It is a flexible and open system that specialises in news sites and is built with a decent architecture prepared for web 2.0. Polopoly took centre position of the news process in Corelio providing paper, website and  mobile distribution.

Saliën mentioned some things that other publishers should consider when changing their CMS: there will undoubtedly be delays, it's a long-term investment, not a short-term and they shouldn't expect perfection; there will be problems and bugs.

In conclusion, be sure of the reasons why you think a new CMS is necessary, how it is supposed to be set to use, be prepared and competent enough to actually work with it and never forget that content is king.

During the seventh session of the 15th World Editors Forum, Raju Narisetti's, Managing Editor at Mint, India, asked the question, "Can ethics sell papers?" using the story of his recently launched paper as the answer.

Mint is a business newspaper which launched in February 2007, in a market that already had five national business papers. How was Mint suppose to survive this competition and establish itself in the market and among the readers? The answer was ethics.

Before the launch of Mint, Mr Narisetti and others working at the newspaper to be, spent six months talking to potential readers. According to their findings, readers noted the lack of credibility and clarity in Indian newspapers as their biggest problems.

So Mr Narisetti and Mint set out to change this by bringing transparency and accessibility to Indian news media. Policies were created, an extensive code of conduct written, all viewable on the website. Mistakes were corrected and analyses of how those were made was published at the end of the year in the paper. Adverts are always clearly depicted as that and nothing else.

So how has Mint managed in a competetive market? In only a year and a half the paper sells 120,000 copies a day. 87% of these are subscriptions. It has become the second biggest business paper in Dehli, Mumbai and Bangalore.

At the sixth session of the 15th World Editors Forum, Edward Greenspon, Editor-in-Chief of Canada's Globe and Mail spoke about the process of changing the design of his paper's weekend edition. The Globe and Mail did this to maintain readers and allow them to raise the price.

As at many papers, the Globe and Mail's weekend edition is its biggest moneymaker. But many weeekend editions are losing readers. The Globe and Mail, on the other hand, has avoided this while even raising the price .

What's the story behind a successful weekend paper?

The story begins with Mr Greenspon being informed of plans to raise the price of the weekend newspaper edition. How could he as an editor justify this to the readers? Only by improving the weekend edtion, he decided. He went about this by creating more feature stories and in-depth reporting, a task that he called, "more pleasure than duty."

Four key principles were implemented. The weekend edition had to be:

- smarter
- more visual
- web-paper integrated
- more accessible

The sections were more defined than earlier versions and all were redesigned. The business section that was lagging the most. To improve this, the system of stock listings was removed and instead replaced by comments and analyses by financial journalists. As a result, the readership of the business section went up 250 %.

Other developments included the introduction of an essay to please intellectual readers. The Globe and Mail also made it possible to comment and debate the weekend's essay afterwards on the website, an aspect of the web-paper integration.

The Focus section combines magazine and interview elements, as well as a lot of science news in response to readers wishes. In turn, science photos are published on the website.

Globe Sports, Globe Life and Style, Globe Travel and local sections for Toronto and British Columbia were redesigned as well in accordance with the four key principles.

Finally all section fronts were distinguished by different colours. Bright and bold colors had a positive impact. All in all, the project has been a succes; the price of the Globe and Mail newspaper weekend edition went up January 1st and the readers have remained.

David Dunkley Gyimah, Senior Lecturer at the University of Westminister, UK, was one of the speakers at the fifth session at the 15th World Editors Forum. The topic of his speech was "Videojournalism-now and what next...integrated multimedia videojournalism?"

Since the birth of the videojournalism newsroom at Channel One in the United Kingdom in 1994 the change has been dramatic. That establishment cost 25 million pounds. The equivalent of the media inventory in that office can now fit in one laptop. Videojournalism has become a very effective and inexpensive way of producing fast visual news.

But what are the key elements of good videojournalism?

One of the most important parts is a clear vision at the newsdesk of what is wanted and expected. Good communication between the editor and the journalist is crucial.

There's a few clear considerations to decide before heading out into the field, for instance the mobility, the robustness and the ergonomics of the equipment. Videojournalism is about being quick and ready to go. It's essential that the camera and other equipment makes this possible. It may perhaps not always be the wisest choice to buy the most expensive camera just for the sake of it.

Another necessity is to invest in a good computer and professional editing software like Adobe Premiere for PC's and Final Cut Studio for macs.

The work of creating news from videojournalism is a process of co-operation between management , journalists and technical support. This cooperation must be perfected because videos are published on news websites, on tech news blogs, in rss-feeds and as video podcasts.

The workflow behind this output is based on ideas before the actual production takes place. According to Dunkley Gyimah, a few of the questions that have to be asked during this procedure are; What sort of content?, What is the style of the reporter?, Are VJ's suppose to fill other articles?, How long should the video be? Where and how does the production take place? Finally there's the question of output. In what mediaforms should the video be published? Web? TV? Phone? Or all three?

For Mr Dunkley Gyimah one very important thing that must not be forgotten is that the journalistic quality usually isn't the problem. " It's the paradigm shift of thinking visually," he said, emphasizing the quality of the visuals.

At the fourth session of the 15th World Editors Forum the question of how online editors view user participation in making news was partly answered thanks to a study. Two persons working on this study, called "Guarding open gates:How online editors view user participation in making news", were Steve Paulussen, Senior Researcher at Gent University, Belgium, and Jane B. Singer, Professor at the University of Central Lancashire, UK.

The study was based on analyzing five different news and publishing stages; the first stage being access and observation; second being selection or filtering; third being processing and editing; fourth being distribution and finally the fifth and last stage is that of interpretation.

For the study, editors of 15 newspaper online versions were interviewed. Perhaps the most obvious finding was that user participation tends to take place at the fifth and last stage, interpretation. The newsstory is already written, produced and published before the reader has a say, which usually happens through commenting and giving feedback below the article in a special comment field. The editors of all 15 online newspapers felt this was something necessary and positive.

What is worth pointing out about this kind of participation is that most comments posted did not revolve around hyper-local news but rather "big" news like the war in Iraq, the American election, the Israel-Palestine conflict etc.

As for the first stage, access and observation, editors believe users can contribute as a source, but not actually much more than before. They also thought that most of the news sent by users were "small news", stories from the margins.

The second stage, selection and filtering is the most controversial and journalistically territorial in a sense. From an editor and journalist's view, gatekeeping is still extremely important. It's definitely not the job of the user. Mr Paulussen quoted one of the editors as having said "Gatekeeping has become a dirty word, but it's still our job".

There was mixed answers about the third stage, processing and editing. Some websites like Le Figaro and El País have let users participate in this stage quite alot. El País lets readers publish their blogs and photos on their website and Le Figaro created a special site during the French municipality election where readers could discuss and rate their mayors.
Other websites have not embraced this to the same extent .

Users participating in distribution was quite common and not deemed as negative. Readers can use recommendation tools to rate or tag articles. This could be shown internally on the news site or externally on sites as digg.com.

"The mobile news revolution and its impact on the newsroom". That was the topic for the speech of Paul Cheesbrough, Chief Information Officer at the Telegraph Media Group, United Kingdom, at the third session of the 15th World Editors Forum.

Trying to coordinate and strengthen the use of mobile technology at The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and thetelegraph.com, Mr Cheesbrough talked about the experiences and the approach of the newsgroup to the mobile future. There are three different angles.

1. "Distribution opportunity" - For a long time, mobile technology has been costly and difficult. But lately there has been a positive change. To a large extent, producers of mobile devices have  started to embed a common browser in the device. This is a big leap forward making it much easier for media to publish and users to read and view. Since screen sizes on mobile devices still are quite small, most viewers use it to read headlines, follow sport results etc. This makes it quite simple and basic but promises much potential. With the development of new devices and mobile high speed broadband becoming more widespread and cheaper there's more use of and demand for video and audio news posts.

2. "Revenue prospect" Since the mobile technology still is fairly new to the public it hasn't yet become attractive for the ad-market. Neither does it have such a strong position among consumers of news, so there are big possibilities of having pay for-services. However, the current situation will surely change. The constant growth and development of mobile technology in many ways means more users in the consumer market.

3. "News gathering news channel" The use of different mobile devices, whether be it an iphone, a tablet pc, mobile internet genie etc. makes journalistic work easier and more effective. Journalists can report, publish and update a news story at any time, from anywhere. This can be published as text, video or a podcast. There's also the possibility for the public to contribute. Today, users are able to send pictures from the scene of a news story with their mobile phone. They can send text messages and comment on articles. They can blog as part of the website platform, etc. However, the growth of this phenomenon has issues that needs to be worked on. Most obvious is the issue of moderation. This applies mostly to controversial news, but publishers must not ignore more general news. Mr. Cheesbrough belives that moderation will a more important aspect of newsrooms over time.

Lastly, Cheesbrough encouraged the audience not to look at mobiles as simply mobile phones. In five to ten years, mobile technology will have evolved to something much more, giving both journalists and public more possibilities.

Jim Roberts, Editor of Digital News at New York Times, USA, spoke about innovations in his newsroom at the second session of the 15th World Editors Forum, part of the 61st World Newspaper Congress.

The integration of print and the New York Times' website has gone far. According to Mr Roberts it's "much more integrated than less at New York Times." Mr Roberts himself came from a background as a journalist at the printed paper and moved onto the website, a situation not uncommon at NY Times.

At an early stage the website was merely a new platform, a way to reach more readers. From about 2003 and on the potential of an integrated newsdesk was truly realised. In the words of Mr Roberts; "A story can be so much richer with multimedia." The adding of blogs, video, audio and illustrated graphics gives news a whole other dimension. Continuous news is another major positive part of the website. The possibility to update, especially foreign news, from minute to minute is changing the entire way news works and how it reaches its readers. What must be emphasized though is that the introduction and growth of website news must not cause a decline of quality when it comes to the presentation of the news story; "Fast is good, but fast with quality is better". At the New York Times, this has been the policy, but recruiting qualified staff is quite difficult. Current journalists have had to learn to also manage the web.

Finding and hiring web journalists in a competetive market is one of the challenges ahead. Discovering and learning what actually works, video, audio etc., is another challenge. Finding what works leads the relationship with readers and users. One thing that has been difficult, according to Roberts, is creating and being the center of a social network. But this will allow the paper to receive immediate feedback from readers who can comment on the good and bad of the Times' coverage. Through this, the paper would be able to "re-direct alot of energy back to the printed paper", said Roberts.