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Part 1 discussed how the planned changes at The New York Times and International Herald Tribune will help the NYT's continuous news offerings, and how these changes could affect the organization and interaction between both newsrooms.

Part 2 examines how The New York Times intends to:
- Further compete against the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal internationally, and ways in which newspapers can reinforce their international reach.
- Use the strength of its online brand while safeguarding the IHT's popular print brand name.

The Weblog spoke to Jim Roberts, Digital Editor at The New York Times, and Martin Gottlieb, who was appointed to the newly created position of Editor, Global Edition.

How newspapers can become international brands, the NYT joins the race

Until now, the Times hasn't specifically catered to overseas advertisers and readers.

"We need to be agile," said IHT publisher Stephen Dunbar-Johnson, "to compete much more aggressively, nose to nose, with The Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and anybody else who is competing for our readers and advertisers."

No doubt that the Times actually borrowed the continuous news outpost idea from the aforementioned competitors, which have been relying on their foreign bureaus to provide round the clock coverage.

The staff memo reaffirmed the NYT's "ambitious plans to expand in the region (Asia), particularly in India." In June, the IHT announced a partnership with the India-based Deccan Chronicle to print the Tribune's world business section in the Financial Chronicle.

With the rise of digital publishing, many news organizations are seeking to grow a previously inaccessible international readership by:

- launching a print edition abroad: several papers have rolled out editions away from home this past year, such as the FT's recently launched Middle East edition in Abu Dhabi, WSJ's partnership with business paper Mint in India, the Daily Mail's partnership with India Today to publish the Mail Today, or The Times of London's Polish edition.

- investing in an online international section: In Germany, referential weekly Der Spiegel launched an English-language International edition on its website in 2004. Five fulltime staffers are dedicated to translating Der Spiegel's content and rewriting it with an international perspective, as well as doing their own international-minded original reporting (the full case study is featured in Trends in Newsrooms 2008). The Guardian adopted a different approach, by launching a separate, foreign-based, US website, Guardian America. The Guardian is reportedly considering similar ventures in other regions.

- simply reinforcing their focus on international news in their regular coverage: the Daily Telegraph's website in the UK, which was neck to neck with the Guardian in terms of traffic in April, claims nearly two thirds of its visitors are from overseas. A well-indexed website helps to brings in a significant number of 'light' international users through search engines.

Merging "co-branded" websites but not print: a branding issue

The NYT's approach is a combination of the first two strategies: the print IHT now serves as The Times' 'global edition' (see picture), while maintaining its trademark brand name. With the proposed online merger, the NYT could also follow the second route, by hosting an international edition online, without having to extensively change its workflows (see Part 1).

The rationale to merge the websites is clearly explained in the memo: according to WebTrends, NYT's website boasts a strong international audience and 58 million global users, compared to iht.com's seven million.

"The global landscape for online news is highly competitive, making scale, speed and resources essential to success. Therefore we have determined that the best future online for the IHT and the NYT globally is through a joint international presence," said the memo.

However, the memo doesn't explicitly say why this won't be the case in print:

"The IHT should become the international print edition of the NYT, whether it is formally branded that way or not."

The main issue at stake is one of branding. "In print, there have been at least a couple of studies that show that among Tribune newspaper readers there is a great identification with the brand, that the brand means something to readers," said Gottlieb.

"More than the name, what accompanies the name, an international perspective, a sense of calling the best stories from The Times and augmenting them with unique reporting," was a combination that many readers liked.

As news organizations seek to grow their international reach, this consideration probably holds true for many that have established a reputable brand name on a local or national scale. However strong the brand name, its association with a particular place or country can potentially play against that news outlet on the international scene.

Source: New York Times - Media Bistro - Jim Roberts, Digital Editor The New York Times - Martin Gottlieb, Editor, Global Edition

The Washington Post is exploring the possibility of creating a parallel, semi-autonomous political site that would feature politics articles and multimedia, the Washington City Paper (WCP) reported.

The Post is seeking to make an innovative site that is different from the current one, according to a memo from the Post's Bill Hamilton and Rajiv Chandrasekaran, WCP reported.

According to Hamilton and Chandrasekaran, the outline of the new site includes news and analysis, more photography, exclusive and higher-quality videos, focus on good political enterprise stories interactive features.

According to the WCP, the idea is similar to that proposed two years ago by the Post's former political writers John Harris and Jim VandeHei, who left to start the Politico.

When the Politico site was being launched, Albritton Communication purchased URLs related to the Politico, including Postpolics.com.

Months later, the Post Co. found that out and after claims of identity theft and some negotiation, it paid about $20,000 to secure the domain name.

Source: Washington City Paper

At the Future of Journalism conference Jeff Jarvis, journalism professor at City University New York, MediaGuardian contributor and BuzzMachine blogger, offered 10 questions news outlets should be asking themselves and the Guardian in particular. Here's a selection:

1 - "Who are we?"
History is "full of companies that had failed to answer this question and lost their way", said Jarvis.

He discussed how AOL could have become what Facebook is today if they hadn't been sidetracked into thinking they were a "content company." Likewise, Yahoo could have become what Google is, if it had embraced the fact that it was "really an advertising company."

In his opinion, the Guardian is "increasingly a 'community' company" but future growth could stem from thinking of the paper as a "platform" or "network". News organizations should try to "collaborate and mobilise" effectively, perhaps by including audience reports of news events. 

3 - Are we generous?

This may be done by "sharing technology, supporting people with the Guardian ad network" and "allowing people to be stars in the outside world", reported the Guardian.
 
5 - Are we findable?

News websites should be findable and should include "distributed content, content that is open for developers to build applications (or widgets), content that is findable on social media, and content that can be consumed on mobile."

Newspaper websites should act like platforms, sharing "knowledge and promotion and traffic and advertising and branding" Jarvis said.

Other questions for newspapers to ask themselves include:

"Are we inventing new narratives?"
"Are we in data layers?"
"Are we having fun yet?"
"Are we agile?"

Source: Guardian Online

See Also:
@Future of Journalism: the benefits of Twitter
@Future of Journalism: reporting celebrity news

On one hand, there's a 2007 report entitled "Hamlet's Blackberry: Why Paper Is Eternal," written by William Powers, media critic for the National Journal. For Powers, all this talk about readers' migration to digital formats isn't taking into account the millennial virtues of "the most successful communications innovation of the last 2000 years."

On the other hand, there's yesterday's editorial in The Guardian, a major news outlet that still heavily relies on the strengths - revenues - of print, that assesses that readers "are starting to migrate in earnest to electronic reading devices, and the interesting thing is that early adopters are surprised at what an agreeable experience it is."

Will we live to see a paperless world? Most unlikely. Are we slowly moving in the general direction of a less-paper world? Definitely - although the demand for paper and newsprint is constantly rising.

Some of the pros and cons for both formats are straightforward: paper is more tangible, more engrained in our habits, and it is still typically easier to manipulate and browse. e-paper is expensive but can be cheaper in the long run, friendlier to the environment, lighter, can network with other devices and carry animated graphics.

According to Powers though, "many of paper's affordances are rooted in its limitations - its physicality, the fact that it can only be in one place, etc." Citing a study by A. Sellen and R. Harper, Powers contends that paper has four 'affordances' that supposedly can't be matched by digital platforms: tangibility, spatial flexibility, tailorability and manipulability.

Traditional paper's overall ease-of-use is undeniable, as it remains and will remain the cheapest and most practical information medium in many regions in the world, for many years to come.

But a quick look at Sony's foray into e-paper (this was more than a year ago!) would tend to show that digital platforms already can - and will - yield some very impressive results, even in the four aforementioned 'affordances'. The developments brought by the i-Phone's touch screen also show how much the public is increasingly embracing the tactile attributes of digital readers.

A paperless world may still be inconceivable to us who've grown thinking through paper. As Powers notes, paper is not only a container for information, it is also essential in defining our relationship to that information, in the way we treat and interpret it (as are all media). The newspaper doesn't only store; it organizes.

But for future generations, for whom the digital screen could be just as common as its 'dead-tree' counterpart, who's to say they won't criticize the warmth of paper, its opaque texture, the fact that it's so easy to scribble upon, to tear apart - the very attributes we have appreciated for two millennia?

The point here is neither to vindicate e-paper, nor does it mean we're moving into a paperless world. Even less to presumptuously fix a date as to the 'death' of paper and the crowning of its digital successor.

A few newspapers have ventured into e-Paper, including business daily Les Echos in France, the Shanghai Daily using Amazon's Kindle, or the NRC Handelsblad in the Netherlands. In May, French telecom firm Orange launched an e-reader that offered access to a range of books and French papers. But these experiments remain just that at this stage - experiments.

Responding to the 2008 Newsroom Barometer, only 7% of editors believed that e-Paper would be the standard news platform in their countries within 10 years (although a combined 18.5% thought it would be either mobiles or e-Paper). Likewise, when we visited the Göteborgs Posten in Sweden a week ago, an arguably innovative and new media-oriented paper, its CEO and editor Peter Hjörne made it clear he had no plans to particularly invest or research e-Paper solutions in the near future - for the next 15 years. This doesn't mean that Hjörne won't be keeping his eyes open for developments, as should any conscientious editor or manager.

But even in the digitally ripe Scandinavian market, consumption and distribution of e-paper on a mass scale remains a distant thought for editors and publishers.

In fact, some of the biggest brakes to the advent of e-Paper may be e-Paper manufacturers and media players themselves, as they battle to try set an industry-wide standard for a reader.

"It would be nice to think that ebooks will avoid the format wars between the likes of Apple and Microsoft that have dogged the development of digital music players, but that seems unlikely," reported the Guardian.

It's impossible, and would certainly be foolish, to set a date for the 'disappearance' of print paper. It will take years before its digital alternative becomes cheap enough for the mass public and really booms. And even then this will be limited to a few select regions.

But most importantly: the emergence of a new technology like e-Paper won't suppress the need for real paper - not for a long time. It's not an either-or situation.

Said the Guardian's editorial: "In the future books will have to welcome a new member to the family with which they will share more similarities than differences."

For the last fifteen months, former journalists from the Journal du Québec have been publishing a rival free paper, in order to protest against the paid-for newspaper's plans for integration and the additional workloads of multimedia journalism.

The paid-for tabloid, Journal du Québec, published by Québecor, has enjoyed a comfortable situation in the sometimes grim North American print market. It has no website, a daily circulation that ranges from 105,000 copies to 200,000 copies, and churns out a few million dollars in yearly profit.

Since last year though, the paper's plans to - finally - build a website and turn its reporters into multimedia journalists (and increasing working hours from 32 to 37.5 with no additional pay) have been the cause of internal upheaval.

In winter 2007, a group of journalists from Journal du Québec prepared to roll out a competing freesheet, dubbed MediaMatinQuébec.

"On the negotiation table, we saw the requests and the attitude of management. We wondered how we could counter this. We couldn't imagine going on strike indefinitely (...) so we had the idea to launch this free daily," said Denis Bolduc, editor of the free paper.
 
In April 2007, two days after the staff of Journal du Québec went on strike and Québecor called for a lock-out, Bolduc and his team launched MediaMatinQuébec.

Against all expectations, the free paper has now strived for 15 months, boasting 40,000 copies in daily circulation.

"In the US, when there was the integration of print and online, there were debates, but never a conflict like this," said Florian Sauvageau, director of the Center of media studies at the University of Laval.

It is "difficult to think that journalists will accept to work more hours and online," he said, but they "must accept that in 10 years newspapers will be online."

According to Agence France-Presse, Québecor's profits have yet to be hindered by the rival free paper. Yet the giant publishing house is reportedly preparing the launch of its own freesheet, to compete against MediaMatinQuébec.

Source : Voilà.fr through IFRA Executive News Service
 

Telegraph Media Group has integrated the news desks of the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph; reporters will also write for their website, Telegraph.co.uk.

"We have a huge pool of talented journalists at TMG," said Ian MacGregor, the Sunday Telegraph editor. "They now have the opportunity to play a part across all three publications, as we combine the force of our news desks to deliver first-rate stories, both for our leading website and distinguished newspaper titles."

Special reporters from the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph will collaborate on breaking news and analysis; however, TMG said both papers would retain separate reporting teams and identities.

Several recent changes at TMG have foreshadowed the merger. Last month the science desks of both papers and the website were combined. In April, new positions were created which cover all titles: Adrian Michaels was appointed to the new post of foreign operations to run TMG's world news output and Iain Martin was also hired as head of comment and community. And just nine months ago, Patience Wheatcroft resigned as editor of the Sunday Telegraph, who according to the Guardian had reputedly "been under pressure to integrate the Sunday title and its reporters with sister paper the Daily Telegraph's seven-day multimedia news operation."

Reportr.net interviewed Chris Lloyd, assistant managing editor of Telegraph Media Group, about the integration process in April.

Integrating newsrooms has been a growing trend since 2005, when The New York Times merged print and web news desks.

Source: Guardian.co.uk

Investing money in a system change does not always turn out a success. Pieter Sijpersma, Editor in Chief, Dagblad van het Noorden talked at the 15th Worl Editors Forum about how introduing CCI Newsgate actually slowed the workflow down.

When Dagblad van het Noorden decided to integrate their newsroom and getting a new content managing system they made a list of demands. They wanted a system that was robust, that was truly a multimedia system, user friendlyand flexible. After looking at the options, considering things as the cost och reliability of the supplier the choice was made to invest in CCI Newsgate.

This was nine months ago and what they're dealing with now at the Dagblad van het Noorden is a newsroom under duress. The experience sudden stops and restarts, bugs popping up that are killed but still keep reappearing. They've made no profit in efficiency and even suffer from loss of reporting capacity.

So what went wrong? Well, even though Pieter Sijpersma consider CCI Newsgate to be a trulu slick system there is a possibility that it was launched too early. At the paper they suddenly felt that everything was sluggishing. You made just a simple click and suddenly found yourself sitting and staring at an egg watch for several minutes. It could also have been the staff that really wasn't ready even though they had thoroughly discussed the upcoming change.

Pieter Sijpersma said that maybe they

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.

After a tour of The New York Times this week, blogger Robert Scoble discussed some interesting additions at the Grey Lady.

Gadgets coming out of the Research and Development department included:

-a prototype newspaper rack that could print out a customized version of the paper

-a thin book reader following a discussion of metadata being collected by the Times. Scoble writes, "They have these gadgets so they can develop new ways of delivering content to those devices."

-a display featuring the results of NYT's new partnership with Google Earth

He reports that The Times' new archive initiative, the Time Machine, which debuted late February in beta, will be released soon. Scoble also learned that a Mac version of the Times Reader will be available in the next few days.

Source: Scobleizer through Journerdism 

More and more newspapers in the UK are attempting to produce live, blog-style coverage. Following the Liverpool Daily Post's blog coverage of its editorial processes, the Lancashire Evening Post streamed live video yesterday, for a feature story on the state of the UK's pub industry.

Featured prominently on the home page, the Post featured live video interviews with customers of The Black Horse pub in Friargate.

The newspaper used technology from live streaming service Qik and shot video footage on an N95 Nokia mobile phone.

Readers were able to submit questions live and add their comments.

For this experiment, three staffers were sent to the pub, including digital editor Martin Hamer, a features writer who produced a story for the print paper, and a journalist who oversaw the camera work.

In the newsroom, a moderator monitored posts and comments by users.

"If this goes well, we can show the rest of the industry that there is potential for live video in the near future," said Hamer.

"With a handful of people over a two hour period, we can produce something that is exciting, dynamic and innovative, but at the same time of great interest to the public."

Until now, newspaper digital editors have remained divided as to the future of live streamed video.

Source: journalism.co.uk

The Editors Weblog is running a series of exclusive interviews about the future of journalism with top editors at leading newspapers around the world. Here is the latest installment with  Emily Bell, Editor-in-Chief of guardian.co.uk in the UK.

View all the interviews in this series here. (including The New York Times, Financial Times, Fairfax Media...)


Questions: "News, journalism, newspapers: same past, different futures?"

- How long do you think you will define your company as a newspaper company or a print company?

We're not doing that already. We changed our names last year from Guardian Newspapers Limited to Guardian News and Media, so we're moving away from defining ourselves as a newspaper company.
But we are still news. We are news-oriented, we are a news media company.

- At this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, a panel of futurists claimed that print newspapers wouldn't exist by 2014. To what extent do you agree with this?

I 100% disagree with that statement. 2014 is so close, of course there will still be print newspapers; it is ridiculous to suggest that. Will there be fewer print newspapers in 2014 in certain parts of Western Europe, the US, etc? Yes, most definitely.

But clearly the futurists in Davos haven't looked at newspaper markets in emerging economies like India, etc. where print products are proliferating. They are increasing faster, in basic circulation and number of titles, than they are declining in markets with more mature print readerships. It's a sweeping and very narrow generalization, which is wrong.

We will definitely have a printed product in 2014. If you said 2024 or 2034, who knows, I would say that's far too far away to guess, and it's possible not. Don't forget Arthur Sulzberger said: "I can conceive of a time when we will no longer produce the print paper." Whether he retracted it or not, it's clearly crossed his mind.

Alan Rusbridger, the editor-in-chief here, said he could foresee a time when we will be mainly a digital company and that we don't have a printed product. He actually said that the last printed presses that we bought would be the last ones that would ever be bought.

- In journalism's multi-centennial history, do you view the emergence of digital journalism as part of the continuity, or as a complete breakaway with previous forms of journalism?

It's a complete break. Not so much what happened with the advent of the Internet, but much more what's happened with various programming protocols since, what you would know as Web 2.0, which is the ability to allow the uploading of information by the local generation.

Flickr, blogs, etc. have completely changed the game, because it means all matter of information is exposed and is available to be manipulated, uploaded, reported on, etc. by a whole set of people who are no longer in control of a distribution bottleneck. Actually, what we were doing ten years ago was exploiting a Web publishing bottleneck, which was that we had the money to have the server space, the rack space, the designers - anybody can do that now.

That's completely different, it's not just another slight development of an existing cycle.

- Do you believe in the increasingly active role of the user in the news process, and is it a threat or an opportunity for professional journalists?

Yes, the participation of users in news is inevitable. It is growing and is welcomed. It is a massive opportunity for professional journalists to enhance what they do. The closer you are, the more authentic you are, and the more knowledgeable you can be, then the more purchase you have with the community that will come to you, tell you things and point to your work in certain areas.
I think if you don't have that, in the future as a journalist, you probably don't have much of a future.

'Threat' is a good thing. It's not so much a threat. Now you've got the news event itself, and an immediate set of breaking news competitors like wire services, the BBC, or SkyNews in the UK.
There's another band of capability roundup, people who are actually experts in the kind of events that are happening and who bring knowledge and insight and can communicate near the professionals - the professionals' job is (still) to communicate the stories and make them relevant and understandable. I don't think that's going away.

But what's happening is that there are now other people who can answer who might not be professional journalists - they might be professionals working in the world that you're writing about. It's Dan Gillmor's phrase, "There's always someone better placed in the story than yourself."
If I'm a media journalist writing about what's going on at the BBC... somebody who's inside the BBC, who's not part of their press operations, could be writing with more authenticity, because I can only ever have the view of the outsider.

However, the person who's inside the BBC might not really have the requisites and right perspective to be able to draw the conclusions that perhaps an outsider might have. So I think there's some kind of a blend of insights and knowledge which skillful and professional journalists ought to