Results matching “newspaper of the future”

Following on from Part 1 of our interview with the Editor-in-Chief of the Christian Science Monitor, John Yemma - where we looked at why the CSM is pursing a digital future and how it prepared its readership base - we now look at what is happening inside the CSM itself. Yemma and his team are restructuring the newsroom, its mindset and the technology powering it. This is the cutting edge of news distribution, and Yemma talks us through how it is preparing itself for uncharted territory.

Restructuring the newsroom - rebuilding the engine

The next big step for this revolutionary new "newspaper" model was in the newsroom itself. How does a traditional daily newspaper restructure its newsroom team to prepare itself for the uncharted digital waters ahead? Yemma is overwhelming positive about undertaking the task of remodelling the newsroom, saying, "We essentially get to sit here and take our car engine apart and put it back together. It was an automobile engine that was built for the print world and now we get to take it apart and rebuild it for the web-first world. That is a tremendously exciting prospect because that means instead of having to serve the print master, which has its own production schedule and arbitrary deadline, we free ourselves, and we are therefore able to be much more immediate and relevant online."

Currently the CSM has one staff orientated to producing the print CSM and a small online staff who repurpose the print content for the online edition. Yemma tells the Weblog that the team is organising itself into a "three pronged operation" with a common editorial model - under the editor, managing editor and includes the national, international and photo editors, and foreign and domestic correspondents, made up of about 70 to 80 people - feeding two smaller divisions. These two smaller divisions are the weekly print desk and the website desk, in each case they will have a small production staff. This differentiation between the magazine and the web is vital, "as print has its own needs to produce a good and valuable product" so it needs a minimal but dedicated staff. In the same way, the web has to have a focused staff to keep the site running and up to date. Yemma reports they will have about 10 people each devoted to the web and weekly. For the weekly this involves a team that will build a coherent weekly magazine - working on articles that will need to have a longer shelf life - and the overall look and feel. Similarly the website staffers will have a dedicated team of technical producers who will work on the entry page to optimise it for web traffic.

Yemma says that it has not been necessary to radically change the shape and layout of the newsroom to push through this change as the common editorial pool will be driving content and this remain largely intact. There will likely be some moving of desks to put the weekly staff together and so forth, but nothing radically different.

New technology to aid the change - democratising the web

The CSM is introducing new content management systems to facilitate this move, a print CMS and a new web CMS. This new system will allow the common editorial pool to directly feed both operations and allow the editorial staff to have much more influence over the website. CSM are using K4 CMS for the print edition and is currently closing the deal for a new CMS for the web edition. The new web system according to Yemma will, "democratises the whole operation of the web so non-technical assignment editors with the common editorial pool can update the website directly." Therefore, the majority of the content will feed from the editorial pool but the focused web team will work on the homepage itself.

Retraining for the digital future

This new business model will not only result in a rebuilding of the newsroom, but a rebuilding of staffers. The CSM has already trained its team for multi-media publications and now it is undertaking a programme for its new future. The team are being trained for the new CMS platforms; however, the new system does not require extensive training, as it is a very user-friendly system. CSM is continually training staffers for the web, as "the future is the web. Everybody knows that."  On the weekly, the assignment editors will have to rethink content to make it move "evergreen" and thus hold up for much longer on the shop shelf, and the content will have to be prepared multiple weeks in advance. The CSM is an analytical newspaper so it is already somewhat prepared for this new style of content, but Yemma says, "it is more rethinking than retraining, a magazine mindset is different to a daily mindset."

Managing staffers through uncertain times

It is exciting times at the CSM, but how do you manage staff through these uncertain times. Yemma says, "Be as open as possible about what you are doing. While things are still being developed and you don't want staff to prematurely publicise, you must be careful about you say, as anything you say in a newsroom can get outside of the newsroom. In fact, I would be disappointed if it didn't; being good gossips is part of their job. I would sometimes say things like "If theoretically we were going to have a weekly and no more daily....", the team would laugh, but I can't really say it as I do not want it to show up on a blog or something. I also tried to give them all the information. I tell you, it is much easier to remember your story when you are honest than when you make things up!"

Yemma reports that he worked with the University of Southern California and the Knight Media Digital Centre, and they performed an anonymous survey of staff. As a result, the staff were able to freely express their opinions about the changes without fear of it damaging their career. The team at USC and Knight compiled all the results and gave this to management, so they could see exactly how their staff were feeling. Yemma reports that the feedback was, "appropriately sceptical, but not overly. Again, I would be disappointed in journalists if they weren't sceptical. I would not expect everyone to be completely on board, but they appear to be largely on board."

Yemma says that that the combination of the town hall meetings, sitting down and talking with the different departments, and the anonymous survey are all necessary when managing a team through change.

Staff sackings

Yemma admits that, like many US newspapers, the CSM will be forced to let staff go. Yemma expects to reduce staffing levels by between 10% and 15%, which translates to 10 to 15 people.

Yemma told the Weblog that the staff cuts will take place in summer of next year and the time between now and then Yemma is publicising these staff cuts to the team so that hopefully levels may be reduced organically with people naturally looking for other jobs on hearing this news. Yemma admits that this will only get them part of the way there with the economy being what it is currently. Yemma is also working closely with the Human Resources department and they plan to offer a redundancy package, outplacement assistance and counselling.

The future

Looking at the radical change that the CSM is pursuing, one cannot help but feel that this type of radical restructuring is exactly the type of thinking what will pull the news industry out of its current slump. The media needs newspapers like the CSM to pursue these new strategies, as the industry has evolved very little in the past 100 years and it needs to start taking some radical risks to ready itself for a radically different future. Whether this model will prove successful, time and the market will only tell; but it is undoubtedly a brave and exciting undertaking.
 

The 100-year old Pulitzer prize winning Christian Science Monitor has bravely announced that it is ending its daily print format and going fully digital: it will now only print a weekly "magazine" edition. The Editors Weblog caught up with the Editor-in-Chief of the Christian Science Monitor, John Yemma, and we discussed the thinking behind this move and how on earth a nationally distributed newspaper completely restructures itself for a digital future.

This story has been broken down into two parts. Part 1 focuses on why the CSM took this step and its initial steps down this path. Part 2 looks at the nuts and bolts: restructuring the newsroom, retraining, and managing staff through change.

The CSM's decision has sparked the inevitable debate about whether this is the beginning of the end for daily printed newspapers, a debate which will run and run in the years to come. However, the peculiar nature of the CSM's subsidised business model, its relatively small print distribution run and international readership base, make it difficult to draw any firm conclusions on industry trends from this move. Nevertheless, many in the industry will be watching closely to see how the CSM manages this move and whether it proves successful or not. If the CSM is successful, then this may lead to other newspapers pursuing this business model, but these papers will have to have a distinctive and loyal readership like the CSM if they have any hope of being successful.

Why the move away from print?

Yemma (left) states that there are two main reasons behind the CSM's controversial decision to move away from the daily print model. Firstly, the CSM's publishers, "saw the writing on the wall, they knew that the Internet user patterns and reader preferences and so forth were changing the business model of print. Print was becoming increasingly untenable, especially for the Monitor, which has an international audience. We just don't have enough reach with our print product, but we have great reach with our web product. That's not uncommon in the world of publishing right now to come to that conclusion, but for the Monitor we were able to make the change a little faster, because the Christian Science church wanted to move away from subsidising the Monitor within about three to five years."

The CSM is subsidised by the Christian Science church, with the church contributing approximately 50% ($13 million) of the newspapers revenue.  The newspaper itself makes about $12.5 million in terms of print advertising, circulation, web revenue and syndication. Therefore, the publishers of the CSM felt that, secondly, this level of subsidisation could not continue forever, so the team decided to look at the newspapers various options.

How the move to digital began - where to begin?

Two years ago the CSM convened a task force to look at the possibility of dropping its daily print edition. The newspaper worked at it from all angles; from prototyping to financial analysis, and working with a consultant (newspaper consultant Chris Urban), marketing group (Kadence Associates - who organised focus groups and surveys), and a PR company (Shift Communications - who handled assisted the company in communicating this move). A former editor of the Christian Science Monitor, John Hughes, and newspaper consultant, Chris Urban, headed up this task force.

Surveying the core readership base - will they buy it?

Given the nature of the CSM and its relatively small daily print run, international appeal as a Christian newspaper and its worldwide reputation, the reasoning behind this move - no matter the financial calculations and industry trends - is sound. However, if the core CSM readership did not largely support the change, then all bets would be off. The CSM surveyed its core loyal readership base, taking sample groups to sound out their response. Yemma states that the CSM was most concerned with converting this core group as quickly as possible to reading the newspaper in a new way. Its focus groups revealed that 50% welcomed the idea of decreasing the frequency of the CSM and that of the 50% who were "on the fence" only half of these wanted to preserve it as it is now.

Once the decision to drop the daily print edition was announced, the CSM had a customer service team field all calls and emails about the decision from readers, which Yemma receives a daily report on. The accumulative report of this over the past few weeks is consistently running at just 14% negative. 35% are asking questions about this new model will work, such as price and so forth, with the rest being positive. Yemma feels the CSM has got a, "pretty good response. We expected worse."

Yemma is clear that the most important thing for them to find out is how many people will convert from buying the daily newspaper to the weekly magazine. This will not be known until the new format is marketed in the spring, and they begin selling the weekly in April. The CSM's marketing estimate is that they can covert about 80% of the people currently buying the daily to take up the weekly model. On this, Yemma says, "that is the best we can do at the moment without having perfect knowledge of the future."

Communicating with your reader

On the CSM website currently there is a web cast featuring John Yemma and the Managing Publishing, John Wells. Here they talk over the various changes and why they have come about for their reader. The site also has an in depth editorial on the changes ahead for the venerated newspaper.

"The Web is not just a paperless publishing medium, it is a totally new way of telling stories"

The move to a web focused future will, "unshackle the newsroom from print."  Yemma says "We will get to see what we can do online in a way that we have never been able to do before. I really believe that journalism in is the infancy of story telling online and that online story telling is about interactivity. I expect us to look more at intelligently moderated user generated content, crowd sourcing, and expanding the reach of CSM journalism.  We can look more at speaking to our readers, and asking them to send us their images and stories of the events hitting the headlines, and thus expand our eyes and ears. There is a non-linear way of telling stories on the web that I think has to be developed by journalists who want their stories to be told in the most appropriate way for the medium."

Yemma goes on to say, "The Web is not just a paperless publishing medium: it is a totally new way of telling stories. We can really start using the web for what it is really all about, which is this three dimensional medium getting information and providing it at whatever level you can convey it."

Part 2 - In our next article on the CSM, the Weblog talks to Yemma about reorganising the team and the newsroom for a weekly magazine and web future, retraining, and staff cuts.

The Sunday Nation of Thailand has adopted a new narrower format of 12 inches.  In addition the newspaper launched a new glossy Sunday magazine entitled Ace.

According to Leroy Sylk, the design director of The Nation, the weekday edition of paper will probably convert to the narrower format sometime in the near future.  

The narrower format allows the paper to cut costs and be more reader friendly.


Source: Garcia Media

Unlike those he decries as "misguided cynics," global media mogul Rupert Murdoch believes that newspapers will reach "new heights" in the 21st century.

Although the print newspaper is going to face changes, "it will always be around," Murdoch said, in one version or another.

Upon receiving plans outlining coping with fewer staff, a union meeting of subeditors at Express Newspapers convenened to discuss their future.

The new system by Express titles, designed to "increase effectiveness and contribute to the required cost savings," would have reporters writing copy "to fit" before being checked by "rewriters."

Daniil Kupsin, owner of Russian business radio station Business FM, has announced that he will launch an online business news site, RIA Novosti reported on Thursday. Bfm.ru will be run by Russian Internet journalist Anton Nosik and will have a team of nearly 30 reporters.

The "spoof" version of Wednesday's New York Times had big headlines, the end of the Iraq war and growth for the economy - not to mention it was free - and it is now making big headlines around the world.

The paper, dated July 4, 2009, was not meant as a humorous hoax, the organization behind the prank said, and instead wanted to push progressive politics and remind politicians to keep their campaign promises.

The Daily Nation newspaper is in an advantageous position in the African market in that it is part of the largest media conglomerate in Central and Eastern Africa, the Nation Media Group (NMG). The Nation Media Group not only runs newspapers, but also TV stations, mobile platforms, websites and radio across Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Furthermore, the introduction of three undersea fibre optic cables next year will bring broadband to Kenya and significantly change the market. These advances in technology and the large footprint of this media conglomerate brings with it unique opportunities but also unique problems for the Daily Nation.

The Editors Weblog spoke to Ian Fernandes, head of Nation Media Group's Digital Division about aggregation, integration and its plans to become a major African online news service. Before heading the Digital Division, Fernandes worked for thirteen years in broadcasting and five years in newspapers.

"Tremendous growth" for Kenya?

The Daily Nation currently faces challenges with its online division due to the lack of Internet reliability in Kenya. The introduction of broadband is widely expected to result in significant growth in the online and telecommunications market in Kenya. Richard Bell, the chief executive officer of East Africa Capital Partners, a Nairobi-based venture capital group, said when talking about the broadband introduction to Kenya, "We have bet the farm on the fact that East Africa is going to see tremendous growth... We're looking for Africa's next Google."

Unique advantages and disadvantages

The Nation Media Group is preparing itself for  broadband by integrating its news platforms. From one office in Nairobi the NMG runs five print titles, two radio stations, a television station, and the recently created Digital Division, which Fernandes heads up. The goal of integration is to, "take the content from all these brands and to make that content available on converged platforms, meaning the mobile and online platforms. Whereas other newspapers have had to invest in technology for their online editions, for us it was already existing, so all we had to do is, for example, link a Barack Obama story that we have in our print publication to what our broadcast team has done and 'voila' we have a fully multi-media website. We skipped what a lot of newspapers are actually going through today." Fernandes goes on to say, "We are giving our customers the opportunity to chose how he or she wants to view their media." Therefore, if one looks on the Daily Nation website, one can see content from the online team, but also from the broadcasting and print team within NMG as well.

One big basket of content

NMG recently introduced a new content management system called CoreMedia. With this new system, "if we are looking at the content of three of our newspapers and we see that the top story on the TV station is a piece about Barack Obama then we do not have to go and physically place that story on all of the three editions, it automatically picks it up as they are resident in a common database. We have one big basket into which everyone is throwing their content and then the online editors decide to pick what is relevant for their particular portal and it can be done at the click of a button."

Integration across print, TV and radio

In terms of convergence and integration, this is as far as NMG has gone. In terms of newsgathering, each brand still has its own newsroom, and each newsroom goes out and pursues an event individually. However, with the introduction of the new content management system, NMG is now looking at newsroom convergence. Therefore, instead of sending eight different teams to cover one particular event from each angle be it TV or radio, they are looking to pull them all together and have one multi-media team go and cover an event. This would consist of a reporter, cameraman and photographer reporting the story and then placing it in the CoreMedia "basket" of content. The various brands at NMG can then take that content and repackage it so it is suitable to its relevant market.

Problems of size

This is obviously a far more efficient way for NMG to cover a news event, but NMG faces a specific problem with regard the integration of publishing, ie, publishing to multiple platforms from one piece of software. Due to the sheer size of NMG, they have been unable to find suitable software that can carry all their content and efficiently manage it. Fernandes reports that "there is not any software that exists in the world today that can manage the process, because there are very few organisations like us, who need such a service.  The Times of London's video content is from the Times of London, but on the Daily Nation web edition the video content comes from NTV - the NMG's TV station -, which has its own unique brand. That is where the difference is." Fernandes and his team are examining various technologies on the market and reports "newspapers have software that integrates the ability to manage their online content, and with that newspaper companies are looking at getting video as part of that content, which is something they haven't done before. So the technology is still very much at the development stage whereby they are using video content that is suitable for their website and we need to look at video at a higher quality level."  

Aggregation site to challenge international players

The Nation Media Group is also readying itself for this new advancement and has built a news aggregator portal called nationafrica.com. nationafrica.com pulls together all the news from across the Nation Media Group's many platforms. Fernandes reports, "Our vision is to be the media of Africa for Africa. It would be wrong to think we could have newspapers and TV stations all over Africa, but online is the perfect platform." The timing of the launch of this site is significant, if nationafrica.com can establish itself quickly enough in the market, it has the potential to become the dominant force in the aggregator arena in Africa. The players in the market who have their strategies in place for when broadband hits Kenya will be at a marked advantage for establishing their brand in the market.

Fernandes reports that they are expecting the site to grow from just being a portal focusing on the Central and East African region - NMG have three newspapers in Tanzania and a newspaper and TV station in Uganda - to beyond its current reach. NMG have correspondents in 18 African countries providing content on a daily basis, it plans to train and equip these same journalists with "not just note books and pens, but cameras and video cameras" and they will be able to load this content directly onto the NMG system. NMG is in a unique position to challenge the other media conglomerates operating in Africa who have bureaus and correspondents all over Africa, such as the BBC. Fernandes states that this portal is vital to Africa as the international broadcasters like the BBC and CNN tend to focus on the "doom and gloom stories about Africa."

The future
 
NMG has undoubtedly been at an advantage with the expansion of online media due to the fact that it is not just a newspaper company, but the fact that it is not a newspaper company creates challenges for the firm in terms of efficiency for its business model. The challenge of streamlining the publication platforms for an organisation of NMG's size is a significant mountain to climb. Technology is rapidly coming on stream that will aid this process, but could it result in the various NMG brands loosing their identity in the drive for efficiency? This is something that NMG will have to consider as the brand's popularity is in no small part due to its ability to tap into the domestic market.

The future looks bright for this media conglomerate and its move to challenge the international players in the market such as the BBC is a bold and brave move that it needed to take to keep NMG at the heart of the Central and Eastern African market.

Part 2 - In tomorrow's article, social media, the Daily Nation and the search for fame, and why the "Who wants to be a millionaire" format failed in Kenya and how NMG adapted it to the mobile market.

Source: AllAfrica.com
 

The media stands accused of failing to foresee the global financial crisis, of a lack of understanding of the issues, and even of having a hand in the problems we now face. The Editors Weblog has been following the debate, beginning with an interview with the Managing Editor of the Financial Times, Daniel Bogler, who highlighted the problem of the media "fanning the flames" of the crisis. Is the media responsible, or are these accusations merely a knee-jerk reaction?

Danny Schechter is a respected investigative journalist and the author of Plunder, a searing indictment of the modern banking system, the role of government in finance, and the greed-is-good mentality. Schechter's book was published one week before the collapse of Lehman Brothers on the 1st of September, and it examines the very problems that were about to unfold. The Editors Weblog spoke to Schechter about the media's failure, the ethics of advertising, responsible journalism, and the cult of the CEO.

Two key failures

Schechter believes that there were two key areas where the media failed. He says that there was little or no examination into the new breed of exotic financial products that caused many of the problems, such as CDO's, and that the media ignored the warnings from community housing organisations of the predatory lending practises in some of America's poorest communities. "This was a big media failure, we were not warned about it" says Schechter. If Schechter's assertion is correct, why did the media fail to fulfil its role? Newspapers, and the media in general, are supposed to be the fourth estate, a watchdog for citizens. Is it a lack of knowledge on the workings of high finance or has the media lost its way and become part of the problem?

Why did the media fail in its early warning role?

Schechter believes that the media failed in its role because of vested interests. He points out that one of the key sources of revenue for newspapers is real estate advertising in weekend supplements and classifieds, as well as advertisements for credit card and refinancing companies. As a result, he argues there is a connection between the real estate and newspaper industry, their future and success are intertwined. Schechter says, "The newspaper industry is the marketing arm of the real estate industry. In some cities you actually had newspapers getting a piece of the action of sales through the ads that they generated. So they were actually part of the corruption of this whole relationship. So of course there was little real scrutiny about what was actually happening in the neighbourhoods where houses were flipping, where people who couldn't afford to buy houses were buying them with bogus mortgages. Newspapers were making money on the sales of these homes."

Schechter argues that after the dot.com bubble burst back in 2000, all the advertisements from these new emerging businesses stopped, so the $3 billion in lost advertising revenue for the media industry had to be found somewhere. Schechter puts forth that credit card companies and refinancing firms stepped into the gap. He points out that the majority of people do not automatically spend money that they don't have, but it was marketed to them through the media in advertising and life-style supplements. Most of the money that the media makes in advertising is in the last quarter in the run up to Christmas, newspapers run articles on the best presents to buy, and so forth, all of it driving a concept of "buy and shop" which "stimulates consumption." Schechter says, "for me, on the consumer front newspaper's are a marketing instrument and on the investment front it's a confidence building instrument. The media was part of this whole sales machine, and it happened at the same time that newspapers were cutting back on investigative reporting, and ironically expanding business news targeted at the business world; not at the general public, not on the economy and how it affects you and me."

Has financial journalism lost its teeth?

Another criticism levelled at business reporters is that they are too close to Wall Street and the City, and have too much respect for the institutions they are supposed to be examining. John Friedman of MarketWatch was at the press conference announcing the Bank of America's acquisition of Merrill Lynch and wrote, "the media were so polite and deferential to the two CEOs; they behaved as if the press conference were a victory lap for the financial services industry." Schechter believes that "business men are seen as heroes" and it's all part of the "cult of masters of the universe"; he cites the endless sycophantic articles about Bill Gates of MicroSoft and Richard Branson of Virgin. He argues that there is a kind of "cultural embedding, as financial journalists cover business, they become part of the scene, they identify with the players, go to the parties, they are increasingly in a world of fewer and fewer people that is cut off from the mainstream of American life." He believes that many financial journalists want to be like these Masters of the Universe that they write about every day.

Schechter also says that there is no real pressure at the top of media organisations to thoroughly investigate these companies. Thee reason being that they would be investigating their advertisers. As a result, there is no impetus behind financial reporting, no push for the truth and the heart of the story, not enough cynicism.

Furthermore, with the advent of multi-platform publishing and shrinking newsrooms, journalists are frequently, "fireman, going from one fire to the next. When you are doing that, there is very little time for reflective analytical reporting."

Where is the counter-narrative?

During an interview recently on the Editors Weblog, the FT's Managing Editor Daniel Bogler said, "It's unfortunate that the financial literacy and understanding of how things work in the City and of basic accounting and so on, is actually very thin in financial journalism." Schechter agrees with Bogler's point saying, "You have people who are not really very well educated covering these issues. Hence they go to a briefing and a company gives them a story, and they don't really have a counter-narrative."

Reviewing his argument, Schechter's assessment of the media is damning indeed; but it is not unilateral. Schechter points out that many newspapers and bloggers are asking the right questions and searching for the truth in this financial crisis. He cites the UK's Telegraph and Guardian newspapers, saying they "have been way ahead. I find the coverage of the British media better, and increasingly much more critical of what is happening."
 
Omission and Commission

Looking back over the rapid collapse of the world's financial markets, and the uncertainty ahead, Schechter says it is, "a financial system failure, a regulatory failure and a media failure. Everyone is willing to talk about the first two, but they are not willing to discuss the last one. We are all in this. It's a media failure of omission and commission."