Ideas from the Ifra International Newsroom Summit
Posted by John Burke on April 20, 2007 at 11:42 AM
The 6th annual Ifra International Newsroom Summit held in Paris on April 19 and 20 brought some of the newspaper industry’s top thinkers together to share with the crowd their experiences in the digital age, what works, and what needs to be worked on. Presentations ranged from talks of integrated newsrooms to local coverage as well as studies of changing media consumption by the audience.
Newspapers are no longer the imposers of information
Presenting the speech supposed to be given by his boss, Murdoch MacLennan, Daily Telegraph editor Will Lewis said that newspapers shouldn’t treat new media as an enemy, but embrace it as a friend. It certainly means change, for instance, the fact that traditional publishers are no longer the gatekeepers of information they once were.
In changing, publishers need to remember four key elements in adapting to the digital age:
Training – Journalists and editors must be “re-skilled” for new media production, exactly what they’re doing in the Telegraph newsroom.
Brands – Media companies that succeed are those that will be reliable and trusted. The key to the future is using this reliability to make products more attractive and accessible.
Copyright – The ability to protect our content is under constant attack by search engines; they are seeking to build a business model on the back or our own investment. Traditional publishers need to create strong protection against this (see ACAP, a project headed by the World Association of Newspapers on whose board MacLennan sits).
Regulation – Effective content control is essential on the chaotic and anarchic environment of the Web. Laws need to be rewritten to protect newsrooms, especially libel laws. If they are not loosened, news organizations will not be able to compete with the millions of other content providers (bloggers) out there.
"The only time I read on paper is on airlines"
Henrik Palsson from Ericsson, a provider of mobile phones and infrastructure solutions, had some very interesting stories to tell about how people are consuming news. He himself confessed that in the past five years the amount of news he reads as well as the sources he gets his news from has multiplied significantly. The catch? He reads everything on a screen, be it on a mobile phone or laptop computer.
Why are mobile devices the future of news distribution, not to mention the basis of the communication industry?
1. The mobile world is about me as an individual, including my friends and family
2. It’s about convenience. People don’t want to have a media plan, they want to be able to consume whenever they like
3. It’s about control and flexibility
All organizations that provide products and services need to constantly ask themselves two questions:
1. Are we doing the right thing?
2. Are we doing it in the right way?
There are 2.5 billion mobile phone users in the world. Their devices are constantly with them, they depend on them. For this, it’s obvious that mobile devices will be a major source of news consumption, especially with young people and especially as the technology advances, which it is doing infinitively now.
Local, digital, and mobile
With a circulation of 15,000, the small American local paper The Shelby Star was picked by its parent company, Freedom Communications, to be a lab rat for the rest of the group. That rat has mutated into a local, digital powerhouse focused around seven strategies:
- Go multimedia
- Overhaul the print version
- Serve new customers with targeted products
- Video, interactive packages,
- Audio
- Community interaction
- Mobile
Editor Skip Foster presented his paper’s experiments. For example, working with the Ifra Newsplex team, the paper adopted the idea of a mobile, wi-fi hotspot vehicle in which its reporters ride around in the community, finding stories and posting them immediately to the web, be it in a written article, podcast, blog, vodcast, etc.
Another innovation is the way in which reporters write stories. For breaking news or stories that only need to convey information, they adopted a simple formula: who, what, when, where, and how. Foster said that the paragraph style of writing stories is not dead, but that readers appreciated the quick information laid out in an easy-to-read bullet point format.
What’s more, the community enjoys the interaction that the paper has provided as well as constant contact with the newsroom’s small 19-member staff.
Presenting the speech supposed to be given by his boss, Murdoch MacLennan, Daily Telegraph editor Will Lewis said that newspapers shouldn’t treat new media as an enemy, but embrace it as a friend. It certainly means change, for instance, the fact that traditional publishers are no longer the gatekeepers of information they once were.
In changing, publishers need to remember four key elements in adapting to the digital age:
Training – Journalists and editors must be “re-skilled” for new media production, exactly what they’re doing in the Telegraph newsroom.
Brands – Media companies that succeed are those that will be reliable and trusted. The key to the future is using this reliability to make products more attractive and accessible.
Copyright – The ability to protect our content is under constant attack by search engines; they are seeking to build a business model on the back or our own investment. Traditional publishers need to create strong protection against this (see ACAP, a project headed by the World Association of Newspapers on whose board MacLennan sits).
Regulation – Effective content control is essential on the chaotic and anarchic environment of the Web. Laws need to be rewritten to protect newsrooms, especially libel laws. If they are not loosened, news organizations will not be able to compete with the millions of other content providers (bloggers) out there.
"The only time I read on paper is on airlines"
Henrik Palsson from Ericsson, a provider of mobile phones and infrastructure solutions, had some very interesting stories to tell about how people are consuming news. He himself confessed that in the past five years the amount of news he reads as well as the sources he gets his news from has multiplied significantly. The catch? He reads everything on a screen, be it on a mobile phone or laptop computer.
Why are mobile devices the future of news distribution, not to mention the basis of the communication industry?
1. The mobile world is about me as an individual, including my friends and family
2. It’s about convenience. People don’t want to have a media plan, they want to be able to consume whenever they like
3. It’s about control and flexibility
All organizations that provide products and services need to constantly ask themselves two questions:
1. Are we doing the right thing?
2. Are we doing it in the right way?
There are 2.5 billion mobile phone users in the world. Their devices are constantly with them, they depend on them. For this, it’s obvious that mobile devices will be a major source of news consumption, especially with young people and especially as the technology advances, which it is doing infinitively now.
Local, digital, and mobile
With a circulation of 15,000, the small American local paper The Shelby Star was picked by its parent company, Freedom Communications, to be a lab rat for the rest of the group. That rat has mutated into a local, digital powerhouse focused around seven strategies:
- Go multimedia
- Overhaul the print version
- Serve new customers with targeted products
- Video, interactive packages,
- Audio
- Community interaction
- Mobile
Editor Skip Foster presented his paper’s experiments. For example, working with the Ifra Newsplex team, the paper adopted the idea of a mobile, wi-fi hotspot vehicle in which its reporters ride around in the community, finding stories and posting them immediately to the web, be it in a written article, podcast, blog, vodcast, etc.
Another innovation is the way in which reporters write stories. For breaking news or stories that only need to convey information, they adopted a simple formula: who, what, when, where, and how. Foster said that the paragraph style of writing stories is not dead, but that readers appreciated the quick information laid out in an easy-to-read bullet point format.
What’s more, the community enjoys the interaction that the paper has provided as well as constant contact with the newsroom’s small 19-member staff.
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Wonderful change, I have 25 years experience in design papers, and this new Observer is really Great!!!, beautiful colors and for sure they have to impact in new readers and young readers, I like so much!!!
Garcia-Media do a great job!!!