Results matching “times launches integrated news”

To mark the relaunch of the Editors Weblog and the Shaping the Future of the Newspaper Blog, the World Editors Forum is running a special series entitled "Doing More with Less." The series highlights major trends that editors-in-chief are using to steer their newsrooms through the difficult economic climate. This week, we looked at the Tampa Tribune, which has radically revamped its newsroom, and some examples of Editorial Outsourcing, a trend which many news publications have adopted. Below, editors from around the world share their own thoughts about EDITORIAL OUTSOURCING.

AFRICA
Azubuike Ishiekwene, Executive Director, Punch Nigeria
Editorial outsourcing is not an immediate problem for Punch, but we're already looking down the road to that moment. We think that before we reach that bridge, regular and forward-looking review of content (especially print content), and the continuous evaluation of job schedule of journalists across platforms might help us keep cost down and decide how best to apply our resources.

LATIN AMERICA
Marcelo Rech, General Product Director, RBS Group, Brasil
Due to labor laws in Brazil, it's difficult to outsource staffers, but I think the ideal newsroom would be the one with a "hard nucleus", made up of editors, assistant editors, page designers, some videophotographers and some reporters, and a broader staff of reporters, columnists and image producers working under specific tasks. In this way, we could have more diversification, flexibility and cost managing.

In my view, the newsroom looks like a tree: the trunk is the team of editors, the branches are the assistant editors and page designers - those are the structure of the newsroom, and must be very close to the general concepts for the product.

The leaves and fruits are the reporters and columnists. A tree without a healthy and strong trunk would die, but in the end are the fruits what people pay for. 

EASTERN EUROPE
Roman Gallo, Director of Media Strategies, PPF Financial Group
First, newspapers must target their product as specifically as possible. They shouldn't be developing products or writing articles which others could do better. To complement this strategy, newspapers should have a completely integrated newsrooms with skilled and competent staff that can produce material across all platforms. With a staff like this, editorial functions will not have to outsourced.

Newspapers can also tap into the community of Readers for content to supplement that of their newsroom. If the newsroom is looking for extra help, this can be a better means of gathering content than outsourcing because the readers are immediately familiar with the community.

WESTERN EUROPE
Espen Egil Hansen, Editor-in Chief, Verdens Gang Multimedia, Norway
 I don't think the key question should be "How to do more with less", but rather does the new technology and new market situations give us some new opportunities?

In VG Multimedia we spend some time and energy studying two companies outside the traditional media business that might inspire some change: Apple and Ryanair.

Can we learn from Steve Jobs and his Iphone?
Not only is the Iphone in itself a great product, in what appears as a stroke of genius Apple opened up, enabling everyone to create applications for the phone. Teenagers, programmers, and creative people around the globe develop great products for the Iphone - without pay. With no cost for Apple there has been added more than 15 000 applications to the company's Appstore   and they have already been downloaded more than 500 million times! For every new application and for every new download the value of the Iphone rises for the end users. And best of all, from Apple's perspective, since the company controls the distribution of these applications it gets a cut of every sale.

In Norway the 15 year old Knut Ørland has outperformed media companies developing the most popular TV-guide for Iphones. From his boy's room in a little city on the west coast of Norway he launches Iphone applications and earns a profit most teenagers can only dream about. For every sale through the Appstore he gets to keep 70%. The boy is of course happy, Apple is happy because it gets to keep the 30% and the end user is happy because the product is great. By the way - there is no need to buy a newspaper or go online to check what's on TV right now. Not all Iphone applications turn into a success, but if it does, Apple is guaranteed its share. Smart!

Media's approach to product developing has by contrast always been this: We want to do everything ourselves. If we are to make a new product - let's say a new travel section in the Sunday paper - our approach is always more journalists and more purchased freelance material. Smart?

Electronic media is by nature communication and cooperation. If we don't start to understand this we will be forced to ask the same question over and over in the years to come: How can we do more with less?

Can we learn from Ryanair?
While most airlines focus on how to charge as much as possible for each ticket, the low cost airline Ryanair has great success with going the opposite way: How can we charge less? The company compensates lower fares by turning what used to be costs, into new revenue streams. While the tickets are cheap you have to pay extra for food, baggage or boarding the plane early to pick your favorite seat. Together with a long range of cost cuts and commission based products like care rental and hotels, Ryanair has used this approach to become one the most profitable airlines in Europe.

The question newspapers should be asking themselves is: Are there costs in our company we can turn into revenue?


NORTH AMERICA
Ed Greenspon, Editor-in-Chief, Globe and Mail, Canada
We have not experimented, at least not yet, with very much in the way of editorial outsourcing of layouts I a major way.  We remain very interested in the experiences of others but a bit wary.
Of course, to some extent, we have always outsourced.  We tap the talents of a large number of freelance contributors, some of them highly-specialized.  We also have a few standardized pages, such as our comics and puzzles page and our stock listings, produced outside the newsroom. But we haven't ventured into outsourcing the kind of dynamically designed, valued added and pages that speak to our brand message on a given day.
In the opinion field, we tend to go outside in order to compliment our own columnists with more specialized contributors. In other areas, such as multi-media, we tend to use agencies for more commoditized news, thus freeing up staff journalists to focus on the value added material that distinguishes and differentiates us. Thus we have a small Globe Docs unit, which works with our staff to produce high quality video companion pieces to major print features, and sometimes vice versa. Our award-winning Talking to the Taliban is one such example.

Terry Eberle, Executive Editor and Vice President, Fort Myers News Press, Florida
We are using more freelancers and are partnering with other newspapers for certain sports coverage we once produced ourselves. We also are talking about partnerships with television stations to see what makes sense there. As we look for ways to cover more with fewer resources we must keep in mind that the quality of our information can not decline. We must guard against taking shortcuts that hurt readers and our image.

Are online-only websites the solution for publishers and editors to offer daily news to minority groups at low cost? The Tribune de Genève and 24 Heures, published by Swiss group Edipresse, launched yesterday an English-language, online-only, daily publication. Swisster.ch is the first media outlet to target the English-speaking community in Switzerland.

Swisster.ch's headquarters are integrated within the newsrooms of the Tribune de Genève and 24 Heures. The site will be updated five times per week.

The online daily will cater to the 100,000 large English-speaking population in Switzerland, and target managers, executives, educated elites and celebrities who come to live in Switzerland, particularly in Geneva and Neuchâtel.

Swisster.ch will describe and comment upon cultural, business, political and social life in Switzerland and its French-speaking region more specifically.

The online-only route seems to have been successful for Edipress, which had recently launched another online news site (www.nashagazeta.ch) that targeted the Russian-speaking population of the country.

Source: Edicom.ch (link in French) through IFRA Executive News Service

At the beginning of March, Fairfax Media, publisher of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Australia, unveiled two video studios in its new Sydney headquarters. Fairfax hired some broadcast consultants to help with the construction, which lasted about six months (with a previous four months of planning). Ian Vaile, Director of Fairfax Digital Productions, explained why newspapers shouldn't focus on TV-type bulletins, how journalists can manage the extra workload, and why newspaper video is financially viable.

The top floor studio is smaller, integrated within the Herald's newsroom. It is equipped with broadcast-quality HD cameras and 2-3 people can be on camera at once.

A larger studio on the downfloor, which can fit a car, was designed to be used by all Fairfax Media outlets. It is equipped with six editing suites with Final Cut Pro, and Fairfax has installed a fiber optic cable to enable quick transfers: all videos shot in the studio are centralized in a database which is made available to the various platforms.

The new building for The Age in Melbourne, which is to be ready towards the end of 2009, will also be equipped with two similar studios.

For Ian Vaile, Director of Fairfax Digital Productions, Fairfax and its newspapers can be at an advantage for online video, compared to broadcast TV professionals. Because they are not tied to a traditional broadcast news schedule, they can often bring breaking news online faster.

They can also benefit from the newspapers' core coverage, by using a "short video story associated to a much more in-depth newspaper story." In other cases, a news video can be the main story, if it has more impact or is more illustrative than a text report.

Fairfax's video and digital production team counts 18 staffers, 10 of whom are dedicated to news video. Each major city (each major newspaper newsroom) counts two or three videojournalists, one or two staff supporters and a local multimedia editor. Fairfax Digital news sites have been drawing about 6.5 million unique users monthly, with up to 3.4 million monthly video views, delivering video to over 800,000 unique browsers.

What type of video content works? Not TV news bulletins

Fairfax produces two main types of video content:
- video news reports, short and local
- everything else that can't be considered 'news', which consists mostly of sports, panel shows, thematic reports...

Fairfax's video content runs along the spectrum of newspaper video offerings, whether it's in-house studio footage, a TV review program with occasional guests, punctual shows focused on sports events, local news reports shot by specialized videojournalists or Fairfax journalists, or one-minute interviews with journalists about a topic in their field of expertise.

However, Vaile and Fairfax have already experimented with online video and TV-type content (see similar lessons from Le Télégramme) and have a clear view of the type of content that works. Vaile's words speak for themselves:

"The studios will make it much faster to turn around news from the newsroom. We are unlikely to do typical TV news bulletins for some time because they don't work online."

"The typical TV short bulletin didn't work online. That's because online people can choose to watch the stories they're interested in and don't want to watch the stories they're not interested in. The normal linear TV news bulletin fails online."

Even for typical broadcast channels, such as ABC in Australia, where Vaile previously worked, online TV-type news reports weren't successful online, "although they worked very well on mobile phones," because "the navigation on mobile hardware is so much more difficult" than online, so "people are much more willing to adopt a linear viewing platform."

"So it will be some time before we go to making digital TV news bulletins again."

Fairfax will try other online video alternatives, "the kinds of things which use newspaper journalists who are specialists in a particular area and have very high credibility," to produce specific reports.

Do multimedia journalists work more? No, if workflows change

As mentioned above, under Fairfax's integrated approach, local news video reports could potentially be shot by Vaile's digital production team, or by a regular reporter, or by a combination of both. In some cases, the reporter will simply take a few minutes to walk to the studio and provide some comment. In others, the text reporter will be expected to shoot video, perhaps even edit it himself (this year Fairfax is making available in every newsroom a couple Canon Tx-1 cameras, a hybrid between a still and video camera, which cost about 400-500$, for reporters to take while on the ground).

Does this mean more work journalists?

"That's a problem that has yet to be fully resolved," Vaile said, admitting that "inevitably it's more work and / or different work to what they have been doing."

For Vaile, management must make "space in their working day for them to do this work without it being on top of what they have to do already."

"Working as a cross-media journalist means that you are expected to work in many different platforms, on the paper, for online, potentially for radio or for video, but you clearly can't do all those in addition to everything else."
"The working day has to be planned bearing in mind that each of these things takes time and precludes you doing something else. Because this is all new it's a balance that has yet to be fully worked out."

In some cases, the idea of multi-skilled journalists can also be counter-productive. For some aspects of video production, such as editing, it can be much more efficient to have specialists rather than waste hours of reporters' time.

Audience and business: is video viable?

The construction of the studios was "a very significant investment," in the range of "several million dollars," said Vaile.

Traffic to Fairfax Digital news sites (mainly those of The Age, Brisbane Times and Sydney Morning Herald) have been averaging about 6.5 million unique browsers and 214 million page views monthly. In contrast, there have been roughly only 3.4 million monthly video downloads, for over 800,000 unique video browsers (so roughly 12-13% of the total audience watches video, about 4-5 times monthly on average).

About 50% of video traffic goes to news items, while 'the rest' draws the other half. Interestingly though, Fairfax is attracting significantly more advertising revenues for segments within 'the rest', as advertisers are more interested in a less scattered, more targeted audience, such as for sports.

High traffic goes to news, high value advertising goes to the rest, according to Vaile.

Ads consists mostly of display advertising, pre-roll ads, as well as sponsorships for shows, However, sponsors "have no say in the editorial content in the programs," said Vaile, following standard editorial independence practices of newspapers - and quite unlike TV. In 2008, major advertisers are starting to flock towards online video, such as LandRover which will sponsor a 28-part travel program that launches at the end of March.

Future of newspaper online video: HD, streaming, tapping the TV market

In the future, "we are ready to go broadcast in HD, should we need to do that," said Vaile. "There's no question that at some stage in the near future we'll be delivering something in HD format, whether it's podcasts or products going into a very high bandwidth environment."

Vaile also believes "very much" in the future of live video streaming. Fairfax has already had a few successful experiments with live streaming, including coverage of a ship that ran aground last June thanks to cameras from the local surf patrol boat, as well as live streaming from the victory speeches of last November's federal elections in Australia. Fairfax has equipped a few of its reporters with 3G kits, which enable live video wireless streaming.

But considering the significant investments and costs of newspaper video online and badnwidth, is the current business model viable?

"Yes, definitely," said Vaile, although "we're at the very beginning of seeing the benefits of a business model which is based on display advertising around online video."

Although Fairfax doesn't have the same resources or content as a TV network, many traditional broadcasters aren't sure how to approach online video, and many traditional TV media buyers are hesitant to buy into the much smaller online audiences. So Fairfax Digital's longer term goal is to eventually tap into some of TV's advertising budget, both in news and non-news areas.

"The intention is that by providing a comprehensive video news service during the day, we will remove a share of the people who watch broadcast news bulletins at night."

Source: Ian Vaile, Director Fairfax Digital Productions

The L.A. Times has just announced several newsroom changes that will allow readers to have significantly more access to the publication. The paper launched a new blog, "Readers' Representative Journal," which aims to inform readers of how editorial decisions are made.

Reuters has launched new web and mobile sites in India. The English-language sites will carry text-based news, video and blogs with news from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh.

Today can officially be considered the start of the London afternoon free newspaper battle between Associated Newspapers and News International. The two publishers have been preparing for this moment all summer as a combined 800,000 copies between them will now be distributed to evening commuters.

After cutting 51 editorial positions, the Financial Times announced on July 14th that it had launched its project dubbed the "new newsroom" that will "create one of the most integrated multi-media newsrooms in the world."

The Roanoke Times of Roanoke, Virginia has begun offering a daily online video newscast four minutes in length. The newscast becomes available online at 3:30 PM every day.