Time is of the essence

French economist, scholar and former adviser to President François Mitterand, Jacques Attali was especially concerned with the question of time. “The only thing that is really scarce in the world,” argued Attali, “is time.” For this reason, he thought that the main way for newspapers to maintain their value in a future of immediate information is to package news in a way that it saves people time. “They need to be able to get the news they care about when they want it,” he said about readers. For this reason, Attali claimed that mobile technology, since it always with users, will become ever more important for news distribution.


For print media, the future is now

You might not expect this coming from the long time CEO of one of the world’s largest traditional advertising agencies, but Maurice Lévy, head of Publicis for 25 years, declared that the future of print media is now. “The time for preparation for the digital revolution is over,” Lévy asserted. He continued saying that most information would be free and noted the inherent conundrum since information is so expensive to produce. But he assured that advertising would pick up the slack. In the future, he envisaged branded content, not the simple banner and tower ads that we see on today’s websites. As more advertises learn of the advantages of being able to track performance online, Internet ad spend will follow its present boom.


Praying for cannibalization

Thomas Trub, the Head of Economic Media Division and President of New Media Committee at the Swiss publisher Ringier presented the group’s economic freesheet, Cash Daily. The paper, launched last September, is complemented by a multimedia website and offers an offline version called livepaper complete with integrated multimedia features and advertising for which 25,000 people have registered. Cash Daily has not had any cannibalizing effects on other Cash products, but Mr. Trub hopes that the livereader, somewhat along the lines of the New York Times/Microsoft joint project, TimesReader, will eventually cannibalize its paper equivalent. In fact, the whole project is geared towards epaper: “In five years, I don’t want to be printing anymore. Once things are electronic, it means free distribution,” reasoned Trub.


The New Newsroom at the FT

Having lost a lot of money in its original attempts to “integrate” its newsroom, The Financial Times’ Managing Editor, Dan Bogler, said that the paper’s New Newsroom was working out well. Last July, the paper officially launched fully integrated staff and systems, fitting ft.com reporters into the print functions and vice versa. The team implemented “storybuilding,” meaning that in the morning, a few paragraphs of breaking news are posted to the paper’s website and followed up on throughout the day, eventually resulting in a complete, analytical piece for the following day’s print version. Heads of sections are now responsible for both print and online content and many journalists have embraced blogs. As for multimedia production, the FT has mostly kept a team apart figuring that writers needed time to write and video journalists should specialize in doing video interviews.

The integration wasn’t all peaches and cream: 50 voluntary redundancies were offered at the start of the project and journalists were almost forced to work three early morning shifts per month. But Bogler said that the paper cut too deep and has since rehired 5 or 6 of the eliminated positions. He also mentioned that the paper has eased off on its early morning demands and that certain journalists have actually volunteered to come in early more often than not, creating an early morning team and providing continuity in the day’s first content.