Recently by Jean Yves Chainon

Guardian News and Media (GNM) officially announced today that it will integrate its print and online platforms for News, Business and Sport journalism once it moves into its new premises at Kings Place, London, at the end of the year.

Journalists from those sections will work for the company's three platforms (The Observer, daily Guardian and guardian.co.uk) and will produce text, audio and video.

As gathered during the World Editors Forum study tour in the UK and during our talks with head of editorial development Neil McIntosh, the Guardian's integration was planned collaboratively in the newsroom, as opposed to a top-down model.

Said Alan Rusbridger, Editor of the Guardian and Editor-in-Chief of GNM:

"Our model for integrated working has been designed through a long period of collaboration and consultation. More than two dozen editors from across the three platforms have worked together to design the ways in which they want to collaborate in the future.  It's very important that desk editors themselves have taken the lead: the last thing we wanted to do was impose a model from above.

As has often been the case for other cases of newsroom integration (Fairfax in Australia, the Daily Telegraph in the UK, The New York Times in the US and many more), the Guardian's move to a new building - and thus to rethink its newsroom design - coincides with the formal integration process.

"The move to a new building is the obvious moment to re-arrange the way we work in a way which more closely reflects the patterns of how people read and react to news," said Rusbridger.

Also discussed with McIntosh, the newsroom will redesign will include 'pods', which will group specialists around specific topics. For example, on the International News desk, pods will group reporters by time zones and regions.

The good news is that the Guardian's integration isn't synonymous with layoffs (the company had previously said this could happen) - at least for the time being.

"We've done this without any reduction in headcount.  It is important that news organisations retain quality and trust while being at the forefront of the digital revolution," he added.

Source: Guardian press release

The Editors Weblog will be away on for the holiday on Thursday May 8. We'll be back on Friday.

There has been a lot of coverage of the results of the Newsroom Barometer, including Reuters' own take on the findings.

You can now view the results to more questions regarding areas of investment according to editors, as well as what they view as the biggest threats to their newspapers, by reading Part 6.

If you haven't taken a look at the main findings (namely editors' massive acceptation of the integrated newsroom model, as well as about half of them believing news will be free in the future and that online will be the most common platform for news), you can read more below:

Read Part 1: Presentation - main results, the integrated newsroom will be the norm
Read Part 2: Multimedia, multi-skilled and integrated
Read Part 3: The future of the press
Read Part 4: Who participated in the survey?
Read Part 5: Comments by John Zogby and WEF President George Brock
Read Part 6: Threats to newspapers, areas of investment, more results

There has been a lot of coverage of the results of the Newsroom Barometer, including Reuters' own take on the findings.

If you haven't taken a look at the main findings (namely editors' massive acceptation of the integrated newsroom model, as well as about half of them believing news will be free in the future and that online will be the most common platform for news), you can read more below:

Read Part 1: Presentation - main results, the integrated newsroom will be the norm
Read Part 2: Multimedia, multi-skilled and integrated
Read Part 3: The future of the press
Read Part 4: Who participated in the survey?
Read Part 5: Comments by John Zogby and WEF President George Brock
Read Part 6: Threats to newspapers, areas of investment, more results


But here are a few more results that may have gone under the radar.

If provided resources to invest in editorial quality, what would you do first within the newsroom?

Across all categories, the responses illustrated two clear concerns for editors, which superceded all others: their staff needs to be attuned to new media (36% of the respondents would first train their staff in new media), and they need more journalists to produce quality coverage (30%, up from 22% last year). As more newsrooms face layoffs and tight budgets, editors are increasingly seeking to safeguard one of the main conditions to quality journalism: a team of qualified journalists.

For editors from newspapers whose number of journalists had decreased, their main priority was to recruit more journalists, at 50%, while also recognizing the necessity of new media training, at 31%. Even among newspapers whose staff had increased, 26% of editors wished to recruit more journalists (36% new media training).

This clearly shows that, in the view of editors, cutting staff and journalistic resources is not a solution - to the contrary - to resolve financial concerns a newspaper may have.

Overall, what do you view as the two greatest threats to the future of your newspaper?

57% of respondents saw the biggest threat to the future of newspapers coming from declining readership among young people. One of the greatest challenges faced by newspapers today is structural, linked to a change in habits among readers, as they become consumers of alternative forms of media.
Tied to this, a good share of respondents (37%) saw the Internet and digital media as a threat. This was closely followed by lack of editorial innovation (36%) and lack of investment (29%), which are also inter-related.

The results showed a split between perception of threats as being external, due to contextual evolutions of the market (young readership decline, digital media) and internal, due to lack of newspaper innovation - or the financial means to innovate.

Now looking specifically to your newspaper's editorial independence in the future, what do you view as the principal threat?

Perceived threats to editorial independence ranged relatively closely from 13% who listed 'other' concerns, to 23% who thought the biggest pressure would come from advertisers, through 19% who listed political pressure and 20% shareholder pressure (20%). Still, a combined 42% perceived the main threat as being related to newspapers' financial dependence, whether on shareholders and advertisers.

Where newspapers were heavily capitalized in the stock market, such as in Western Europe and North America, shareholder pressure was strong, 35% and 23% respectively, but political pressure didn't pose any threat - 3% for both.

Inversely, in many other regions, financial pressures were less important, but lack of press freedom led many editors to fear political pressure.

Do you think that in the future opinion and analysis pages will:

The results were stable compared to 2006. Two thirds (67%) of the respondents believed opinion and analysis pages would increase: many foresaw the upcoming evolution of newspaper content, which will be less about factual news and more about analysis and commentary.

An astonishingly small number of respondents from North America (50%) believed analysis and opinion would increase, compared to 76% for Western Europe (and 78% Eastern). This large difference underlines a divergence in editors' perception of the function their newspapers will have in the future, whether these increasingly focus on constant breaking news or instead turn to more analytical, magazine-type content. These results also reflect worries by American editors about having the proper resources to increase their opinion and analytical content.


If you would like more information about the Newsroom Barometer, don't hesitate to contact us. And let's not forget that the bright revelation of Barometer, as was the case last year, was that 84% of newspaper editors are optimistic about their newspaper's future, despite frequent doom and gloom reports...

In an internal and confidential memo, Financial Times managing editor Dan Bogler (see our Future of journalism interview with him) admitted that female journalists were paid less than men in equivalent jobs.

In the memo, he said "the bald statistics show that women are paid less than men for equivalent jobs at the FT."

However, he also defended this based on the fact the duration of employment was much shorter for women.

"This does not take into account the fact that, on average, our female staff have shorter service records than their male colleagues, which explains the difference," he wrote.

According to an FT spokesman, the difference in pay is less than 10%, but members of the National Union of Journalists claim the FT's own salary survey found a 11% pay difference.

The leaked memo comes in the middle of a management-employee crisis at the FT over staff wages.

Source: Guardian

You can now watch some videos from the 9th Journalism Leaders Forum, organized by the UCLAN journalism school in the UK on April 29th.

Speakers included Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired Magazine and author of The Long Tail. Among journalism commentators present were journalism.co.uk news editor Oliver Luft, journalism blogger Andy Dickinson, editors from Trinity Mirror and academics.

Full unedited video can be found here. You can also view a video by journalist Joanna Geary here.

Source: Journalism Leaders Forum

In this short interview with Gianni Valenti, deputy editor of Gazzetta dello Sport, the world's largest 'sports' newspaper and leading daily in Italy, he explains how the paper has balanced its focus on sports with coverage of the protests against China and the Olympic Games in general.

Should sports sections concentrate on the actual events, and leave the rest to the politics desk? Can they really get away without putting sports into context?

As a newspaper focused on sports, Gazzetta dello Sport evidently has vested interest in the upcoming Olympic Games. How have you balanced coverage of sports and of the protests?

Gazzetta dello Sport isn't only a sports newspaper anymore. It's a sports newspaper that includes a general news section. The paper naturally is in favor of the Olympic Games, but it has dedicated entire news pages to the events that took place in Paris when the Olympic torch went through.

For the last six months, many pages have gone to coverage of social, political and environmental issues in China. In preparation for the future, a team of reporters will be dedicated to covering social issues. But the Gazzetta will not make a distinction between sports and social issues and reporters from both desks will collaborate.

Was the Gazzetta's coverage of the protests factual or did the newspaper take a stance?

The paper has special correspondents covering the International Olympic Committee and China. Its coverage remained factual on those aspects and the exactions in Tibet. Regarding the Olympic Torch, the Gazzetta took position, to an extent, arguing that the torch should pursue its route throughout the world. In practice, the Gazzetta did 'equidistant journalism' about the protests, recapping both the pros and cons.

After the events in Paris and London, there was lots of debate online. The Gazzetta created forums to host these discussions, but it didn't advocate a particular political stance for Italy - this was at the time of general elections in Italy.

However, now that the government is in place, and when a real debate will be engaged about whether Berlusconi should go to the Olympic Games or boycott them, then the newspaper will take a side - which is yet to be determined. But I predict that most political leaders will end up going.

How substantial will be Gazzetta Dello Sport's coverage of the Olympic Games?

We will have 23 journalists who will travel there. It will be the biggest coverage the paper has ever given to the Olympic Games, and it will involve collaboration between both print and online.

Source: Gianni Valenti, deputy editor Gazzetta dello Sport

From May 5-9, New York Times assistant managing editor Susan Edgerley is answering questions from readers May 5-9 on nytimes.com, explaining how the paper is reinventing itself and integrating its newsroom.

Edgerley admitted that at this point the Times' website couldn't possibly fund the 1,275 staffers of the newsroom.

"But NYTimes.com is growing -- in readers and revenue -- at a much, much faster clip than the print paper. Is it our future? You bet."

Can the New York Times really claim it is 'reinventing' itself?

Yes, said Edgerley. "Journalists who used to worry about one deadline a day now have a deadline every minute. They are telling stories not only through words and pictures but also through audio and video and interactive maps and graphics."

Faced with news consumers' changing habits, the NYT's coverage - as for other newspapers - has arguably evolved. "Two years ago, we might have been hesitant to break a scoop on the Web," said Edgerley, "Now we put the story out there and figure out how to advance it for the next day's paper."

Considering the Web is the future for the NYT, one reader asked whether earning a print journalism degree was a waste of time. No, according to Edgerley. The art of storytelling remains.

But "I would be surprised if you don't find yourself picking up all different kinds of Web skills over the arc of your career, and that's good, too."

Source: New York Times

In the past, there has been much debate as to whether bloggers could be considered journalists and what the distinction meant. Regardless of the possible answers, in today's context, blog editorial practices have influenced those of traditional news media online - whether it's writing styles, tones or formats.

"Blog pioneers, those 'non-journalists', have revolutionized our approach to news," writes Benoit Raphaël, who blogs and is editor-in-chief of LePost, an experimental UGC venture launched by Le Monde interactif. Many of aspects described below are currently being tested at LePost.

Here's his list of 10 things that bloggers did that fundamentally changed media's approach:

- Conversation: there are now few newspaper sites that haven't opened their articles to comments and conversation. "A story, nowadays, is not only the journalist's article but the article + the feedback from readers," write Raphaël.
- Perfectible news: as a consequence of conversation, online articles are now constant works in progress. There are pros and cons though. Among the negatives, journalists can be tempted to publish improperly checked content.
- Buzz: born with blogs, all online journalists must now be aware of online buzz.
- News without a hierarchy or anti-chronological news: an increasing number of sites such as 20minutes and Le Figaro are now including news feeds, which list news items as they come in, in reverse chronological order. But nearly all traditional media sites continue to set a hierarchy to their news.
- Indexation: because of the structure of blogs, bloggers had to be good at search engine optimization when writing headlines and such, in order to make their content visible. These concerns now also affect journalists. Although "this doesn't mean that journalists must only write to be referenced," write Raphaël.
- Trampoline news: not all news articles need to be long-winded, or on the contrary, be held within a limited amount of space. With blog news, postings can be lengthy and complex, but also simply link back to external content.
- Aggregation: many blogs don't produce original content - they simply refer and point to existing content. Simply look at the Huffington Post, which has been built around aggregation.
- Lists: it's an extremely simple and efficient editorial format that is widespread in the blogosphere...
- Layered writing: thanks to hyperlinks, but also infographics, videos and more, articles can be written to be seemingly shorter, but they actually point to more in-depth layers of related content.
- A new tone: the tone of conversation.

There are certainly other fundamental ways in which bloggers may have changed traditional media coverage online. But few online journalists would still deny that blogs haven't influenced - improved - their own journalistic practices on the Web.

Source: Demain tous journalistes (link in French)

"With Twitter though, one senior reporter using a standard mobile phone can keep an entire section of our site instantly updated with the very latest breaking news," said Christian Dunn, digital editor of the Evening Leader in the UK.

Although they may have smaller budgets, "This means that regional newspapers, like the Evening Leader, can finally break news just as fast as the big boys - even Sky and the BBC."

After using Twitter to cover soccer games, the Evening Leader reported on the local election results by 'Twittering' from the region's counts.

Senior reporter Mike Youds reported from the Flintshire count throughout the night of May 1, filing in his reports using his mobile phone.

Online readers could follow news about the election by visiting the Evening Leader's Twitter profile page, or by going through a specially designed page on the Evening Leader's website that had the Twitter feed embedded in it.

According to Deputy editor Martin Wright, the website's efficient use of Twitter also helped to improve the print paper production.

"It was great for everyone in the newsroom to know that they'd been the first in the area to break the results and allowed us to concentrate on strong reaction and colour pieces in the next day's newspaper."

It has been a little over a year that Twitter was first hailed as a potential breakthrough for online journalism. It now seems that some newspapers, including the Evening Leader, are beginning to harness its power.

Source: holdthefrontpage.co.uk through IFRA Executive News Service

The results to the 2008 Newsroom Barometer, organized by the World Editors Forum and Reuters, and conducted by Zogby International, were released today. Read all about the main findings below. More results will be published gradually.

Read Part 1: Presentation - main results, the integrated newsroom will be the norm
Read Part 2: Multimedia, multi-skilled and integrated
Read Part 3: The future of the press
Read Part 4: Who participated in the survey?
Read Part 5: Comments by John Zogby and WEF President George Brock