Results matching “the lead over print”

Last Monday, Katherine Weymouth, the Washington Post's publisher, announced that Marcus W. Brauchli, 47, would be the new top editor of the Post. Mr. Brauchli's former experience at the Wall Street Journal as top editor, with its integrated print and Web newsrooms, might prove valuable for the Post.

Weymouth is the first Post publisher to have direct control of the website. She hopes that Brauchli will help the Post to progress into new media.

According to the New York Times, the Post is undergoing budget cuts, job cuts, ad revenue reduction and circulation decrease.

In 2007, Brauchli resigned following News Corp.'s buyout of the Journal, lead by Rupert Murdoch, after which Robert Thompson replaced him.

In the last 8 years, the Post's circulation dropped from 800,000 to 673,000. Even though its website draws over nine million unique users per month, the paper hasn't been able to transfer the traffic into revenue. The Post's profit has declined from $14.9 million last year to $1.2 million.

Source: The New York Times

See Also:
US: Washington Post may launch separate political site
US: WaPo editor stepping down
US: Wall Street Journal's  managing editor  Robert Thompson announces editorial changes
US: Thompson named managing editor of Wall Street Journal

At a time when any local or national news outlet can potentially become an international online brand, and as newsrooms adapt to a 24-hour news cycle, editors can learn from The New York Times' most recent attempt to 'kill' both birds with one stone.

Last week, top execs from The Times and the International Herald Tribune announced plans to merge iht.com and nytimes.com into a co-branded international section, in order to increase both sites' reach and appeal to international advertisers.

In this two-part series, 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.

Through these moves, The Times intends to accomplish at least four ostensible goals:

Part 1:
- Build an outpost for its Continuous News Desk in Paris, and eventually Hong Kong.
- Integrate operations, streamline some resources by increasing efficiency and avoiding overlap.

Part 2:
- Reinforce its international reach and further compete against the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal.
- Use the strength of NYT's online brand while safeguarding the IHT's popular print brand name.

IHT: an outpost for the Times' continuous news

Although the proposed changes are currently undergoing a consultation process with the IHT's works council, as required by French law, the process of integration of both papers began ever since the NYT acquired full control of the IHT in 2003, and has accelerated in past months.

In Feb., NYT executive editor Bill Keller had already announced plans to integrate operations and develop an "organic, global, 24-hour news operation," in order "to create a Continuous News outpost in Paris."

In May, the IHT dropped its 142-year-old logo from its nameplate to replace it with the phrase "The Global Edition of the New York Times."

"That says, we are one, and we are," although both arms are managed separately, said Jim Roberts, digital editor at The Times.

Video: Roberts talks about the 'integration' of both newspapers. Footage was collected during an interview at the 15th World Editors Forum in Sweden.


Thanks to this outpost and the six-hour time difference, the NYT is now able to upload content to its site nearly 24 hours a day (from about 6am to 1am, New York time). The paper eventually hopes to establish a similar outpost at the IHT's Asian headquarters in Hong Kong in the next six months.

The creation of these outposts does not mean that the IHT is becoming a full-blown Paris bureau for The Times. "We have a Paris bureau," said Roberts, "and the newsroom of the IHT still has a print edition and right now they still have a website."

Integration, streamlining resources: evolution, no revolution

Since all proposed changes are undergoing a consultation process, editors couldn't give any firm preview of how workflows could be affected.

In the past, there has been "very regular contact between individual desks at the Times and corresponding desks at the IHT," said Martin Gottlieb, newly appointed editor of the Global edition. Many IHT editors come from The Times, regularly do edits on NYT pieces, and this past year IHT-written articles have appeared on nytimes.com with no distinctive byline.

However, there is no formal process of exchange between both newsrooms, and "There have been a couple of occasions when we've had IHT and NYT reporters covering the same thing," said Roberts.

The appointment of Gottlieb as editor of the Global Edition - note, no mention of the IHT in his title - is significant in that respect. In addition to fulfilling the role of editor of the paper, his mission will be to ensure that staff understands both papers are "two parts of one news-gathering operation, that should work in unison as much as possible in delivering the news 24 hours a day seven days a week," said Gottlieb.

A series of new editorial appointments at the IHT will be the symbols of this top-down integration. "There will be people coordinating the work of both staffs to, pretty much, make them as much as possible act as one staff," said Gottlieb.

For example, Alison Smale, who becomes European editor of the global newsroom, will be responsible for "coordinating the work of all NYT and IHT reporters in the region from the IHT newsroom in Paris," said the memo. To oversee the process, The Times also named Alan Flippen "Editor, Newsroom Organization."

It seems too early to say whether the planned reforms will lead to radical changes in workflows or content. Evolution, not revolution, said Roberts.

Currently, an IHT reporter based in Hong Kong might build upon a Times' story about the rise of airline fuel prices by interviewing Asian carriers, whose input might not have been as relevant to the core readership of the Times in the US. Likewise, an IHT story published in the Times might be fine-tuned to be more pertinent to the American audience (see the example of Der Spiegel in Part 2, looking at different newspaper approaches towards international editions).

Future workflows will likely build upon these current processes, rather than start from scratch. "It's continuing synergies that are taking place and maximizing them and regularizing them," said Gottlieb.

The planned changes can also be seen as an attempt to streamline resources - terminology often equivocated with cost cuts and layoffs. But according to Gottlieb, there are no planned newsroom layoffs at this point (this is subject to change during the next six months). It is possible that an online merger of iht.com and nytimes.com could lead to redundancies for some technical Web production positions.


Editors couldn't comment on any upcoming changes concerning the IHT's planned print redesign.

Stay tuned for Part 2, which will examine The Times' international branding strategy, and how newspapers can grow a previously inaccessible international readership.


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

Guardian News and Media (GNM) officially announced today that it will integrate its print and online platforms for News, Business and Sport journalism once it moves into its new premises at Kings Place, London, at the end of the year.

Journalists from those sections will work for the company's three platforms (The Observer, daily Guardian and guardian.co.uk) and will produce text, audio and video.

As gathered during the World Editors Forum study tour in the UK and during our talks with head of editorial development Neil McIntosh, the Guardian's integration was planned collaboratively in the newsroom, as opposed to a top-down model.

Said Alan Rusbridger, Editor of the Guardian and Editor-in-Chief of GNM:

"Our model for integrated working has been designed through a long period of collaboration and consultation. More than two dozen editors from across the three platforms have worked together to design the ways in which they want to collaborate in the future.  It's very important that desk editors themselves have taken the lead: the last thing we wanted to do was impose a model from above.

As has often been the case for other cases of newsroom integration (Fairfax in Australia, the Daily Telegraph in the UK, The New York Times in the US and many more), the Guardian's move to a new building - and thus to rethink its newsroom design - coincides with the formal integration process.

"The move to a new building is the obvious moment to re-arrange the way we work in a way which more closely reflects the patterns of how people read and react to news," said Rusbridger.

Also discussed with McIntosh, the newsroom will redesign will include 'pods', which will group specialists around specific topics. For example, on the International News desk, pods will group reporters by time zones and regions.

The good news is that the Guardian's integration isn't synonymous with layoffs (the company had previously said this could happen) - at least for the time being.

"We've done this without any reduction in headcount.  It is important that news organisations retain quality and trust while being at the forefront of the digital revolution," he added.

Source: Guardian press release

Though there are economic strains on the journalism industry, Paul Myners, chairman of Guardian Media Group, remarked that journalists are not driven out of the industry, but instead are working on other mediums, such as blogs, radio, and local television, which reinforces a previous statement by Mediashift.

"The type of people doing work which might broadly be described as journalistic, may not have necessarily decreased to the extent of the proportion who are working in the newspaper industry," said Myner.  "Someone who was previously described as a journalist who sat at a typewriter, now podcasts, now speaks to video, now blogs online. It is a more challenging and appealing job.

Jeremy Dear, general secretary of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), said otherwise: "The plight of staff in the newspaper industry should not be overshadowed by increased new media opportunities for journalists."

He argued that staff "are spread ever more thinly across more media" and that there are "a lack of resources and understaffing." with a smaller number of journalists trying to deliver more content in more platforms.

Concurrently, the U.S. has suffered the biggest staff drop this year. Our colleague Robb Montgomery from Visual Editors has captured the hard times through images here and here.

However, Myners noted that in the last 12 months, the Guardian Media Group appointed 60 new journalists to its national titles in order to further their digital content, since their readership is moving online. According to Myners, more people read the Guardian's US website than read the print versions in the UK, Guardian.co.uk  was the most popular UK newspaper website in February with 19,519,923 unique users, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCE).

"We have gone from being a provincial newspaper... to an international, liberal voice on the web," he said.

He added that "the proportion of journalists at the Observer and Guardian covering international news has increased."

But Myners cautioned that the declining economy will lead to more regional newspaper mergers and more free sheets, which does not rule out the Manchester Evening News from being completely free in the city center yet being sold on the outskirts.

"It is an economic model which accurately reflects the cost of distribution," Myners said.

However, the freesheet model does not seem to be doing significantly better than traditional newspapers.

Source: Journalism.co.uk ,Press Gazette

The Telegraph Media Group has appointed Adrian Michaels, the Financial Times' Milan correspondent, to the newly created position of head of foreign operations in another step towards print and online integration. Michaels will oversee the group's network of correspondents and will run world news output across the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and Telegraph.co.uk.

"Adrian has been a subeditor, news editor, and foreign correspondent, making him ideally suited to lead our new integrated world news operation. He will be a real asset to the Telegraph's executive team," TMG editor-in-chief Will Lewis said.

Daily Telegraph foreign editor Mike Smith will leave the foreign desk and will assume a new role, while Sunday Telegraph foreign editor David Wastell will not change positions.

The Telegraph Media Group has made several staff changes, including laying off home news journalists, as well as arts correspondent Nigel Reynolds. They have also changed people's roles, such as giving former Sunday Telegraph deputy editor Iain Martin the new role of head of comment and community for both newspapers' comment sections and the Telegraph's online blogs.

Source: Guardian.co.uk through IFRA Executive News Service

Last week, journalists Anne Stine Saether and Anders Sooth Knutsen from Norway's VG's online arm were awarded with the Skup-diploma, an investigative prize, for developing the newspaper's biggest multimedia project ever.

The idea for the online project about domestic killings in Norway was born in mid-2007 after a murder case that had been buried in the back pages of the paper. It took six months to complete, but on, Nov. 12 the front page of VG's print edition featured portraits of women killed by their men. The story was planned and executed on all platforms simultaneously, and included online blogs, articles, chats, and video interviews with some of the murderers, next of kin, psychologists, and others.

For the project, VG took on the task of extensively researching anonymous homicide statistics, using all the archives and registers they could access for the multi-media project.

"The idea for the project came as a result of my own anger and feeling of impotence half a year ago. Yet another woman had been murdered and the story was buried far back in the newspaper, I thought, dammit, this happens all the time, which lead to the idea to spray the front page with the faces of women who'd suffered such a fate," said Kjersti Sortland, the managing editor of the award-winning journalists.

The project took half-a-year to finish, but the completed coverage was "groundbreaking" and "led to a change in how murders are reported in Norway," according to Online Journalism Scandinavia's Kristine Lowe.

The Norwegian government plans to map domestic murders, and starting in 2007, the Norwegian police had began to register the relationship between the murderer and victim in their reports.

"In contrast to other countries, we did not know how many women were killed by their husbands, partners and boyfriends in Norway," said the jury who awarded the prize.

Source: Journalism.co.uk (photo)

Despite the current financial struggles of "old media," John Carroll, former editor of the Lexington Herald-Leader and the Los Angeles Times, believes newspapers and other "old media" should unite with bloggers and other "new media" to "keep each other honest and provide the kind of public service journalism a republic needs to survive."

Although Carroll believes that quality investigative reporting will continue, he sees non-profit websites and Internet publications taking over some of that responsibility from newspapers.

Carroll also hopes that new media will continue to grow, and like the old media, "stand up decisively to the government and other institutions," which may lead to the "golden age of journalism."

He isn't ecstatic about corporate ownership of the media - he believes that most corporate executives "print a lot of trash" in "giving the public what [the corporate executives] believe they want." But he praises some corporate takeovers, citing Rupert Murdoch sustaining "high level" journalism at The Wall Street Journal, which was "faltering," according to Carroll.

"There will be journalism in the future and it will have tools unlike any the people of my generation commanded," he said.

Source: Herald-Leader

In a March 14 memo to staff, the Washington Post's Executive Editor, Leonard Downie, outlined several significant changes in the editorial process that will initially affect the main news section, before being applied across the newsroom.

Read more about the specific changes here.

As explained by Slate's Jack Shafer, The Post's A-section pilot program is marking the switch from the 20th century assembly-line editing model to resemble a network (President of Le monde interactif Bruno Patino also evoked this notion).

"Information, which once marched in orderly lines from sources to reporters to editors to mammoth printing presses to fleets of delivery trucks to readers, now caroms every which way in a network," wrote Shafer.

As online editions gain importance and 24-hour news cycles become the norm for newspapers, the press-centric organization of newsrooms, whose end goal is the print press, becomes less adequate.

"We will create truer alignment of editing for the web and for the paper, recognizing that deadlines for many pieces are defined as the earliest moment they can be edited and published online," wrote Downie in the memo.

With the changes, the Post will move editing resources to earlier in the day, merge the night National and Foreign copy desks, and will move the editing of feature stories and other non-breaking news stories to earlier in the day, to avoid the congestion of the evening print deadline.

However, the Post's changes will also lead to "fewer 'touches' on some stories," according to the memo (remember newspaper analyst Alan Mutter causing an uproar after he suggested that editors may simply be getting too expensive for news organizations). Many A-section stories are currently changed and edited by about a half-dozen different editors. In the new structure (in accordance with Mutter's survey about the number of editors necessary to proof a story), the Post will follow a "two touch rule," meaning they will be read by two editors, whether these are assignment editors, assistant editors or night editors. The more complex enterprise and major breaking news stories will continue to have more reads.

According to Washington Post Managing Editor Phil Bennett, this shouldn't lead to decreased editorial quality if done smartly. In fact, too many editing hands can have the same effect. "The more people who touch a story, the less authority and responsibility each take," said Bennett.

Consider the fact that the Post's newsroom employs about 300 reporters, and just nearly as many editors.

Under the new flexible copy system, the aim is to put more "original journalism in play in the Web and the paper."

Source: Slate

UK broadcast and online media ran stories yesterday about Prince Harry's military deployment with the British Army in Afghanistan, after the US Drudge Report broke the blackout that UK media had agreed on with the Ministry of Defence.

A deal had been made between British media and the Ministry of Defence not to report on Prince Harry's frontline position, for fear that he may become a privileged target for Talibans, in return for access to the prince during his deployment.

According to the Guardian, the story had already been broken by Australian women's magazine New Idea on Jan. 7. In fact, many insiders are surprised the blackout lasted two months.

Significantly though, UK media only decided to run the story after it was broken by US news blogger Drudge, showing how much influence he has acquired. Yesterday, nearly all of the national newspapers, except for The Independent, ran the story on their front page.

"I am very disappointed that foreign websites have decided to run this story without consulting us," said Sir General Dannatt, head of the British Army.

"This is in stark contrast to the highly responsible attitude that the whole of the UK print and broadcast media, along with a small number of overseas outlets, who have entered into an understanding with us over the coverage of Prince Harry on operations."

Should Drudge have broken the news? Should UK media have agreed to the blackout for so long? In any case, this story illustrates the powerful effects of Web 2.0: one influential blogger's scoop can lead to a massive reaction for all traditional media.

Prince Harry is expected to be taken off the front now that the news has been broken.

Source: Brand Republic - Guardian

Hearst magazines Marie Claire, Seventeen and Good Housekeeping have all three launched YouTube-branded channels, and more are on the way.

Heart Magazines Digital Media and YouTube have made a deal for 15 Hearst print and online publications to provide content online, contests, and allow viewers to upload personal videos.

Readers will be able to view on YouTube video content from the publications.

Any newspapers to follow the lead?

Source: WWD.com through I Want Media

“Use your readers’ collective intelligence”

Newspapers, radio, magazines, and many more traditional media could all learn from Skyrock’s successful transition from being a radio broadcaster to generating more than 50% of its revenues through digital – thanks to one of the world’s most popular blog platforms. In the following, founder and CEO Pierre Bellanger advises the press to use its readers’ collective intelligence – even to unite in order to do so.



From traditional media to social network

Undoubtedly, traditional media insiders have jealously eyed Skyrock’s journey, at a time when many of the most digitally-innovative papers still garner less than 10% of overall revenues through digital operations.

A few mouth-watering figures for Skyrock Blogs (henceforth referred to as ‘Skyblogs’), which targets the younger teen population, unlike Facebook: to this day, Skyblogs counts more than 22 million subscribed users, 14 million active blogs and 5.3 million profiles. The site is the world’s 17th site globally in page views, has more than 20.2 million monthly unique visitors, and counts a whopping 1.8 billion comments, 22.5 million videos and 400 million pictures. The platform was launched in 2002.

The main difficulty when trying to create a social network is reaching the critical mass of users that will lead to a snowball effect. Skyrock is currently the most-listened-to radio station among its target audience, 13-24 year-olds. So cross-promotion with the radio station helped Skyblogs’ original expansion initially. “The dynamic and the existence of the radio helped” to grow the social network.

So much so that in 2006, for the first time, Skyrock generated more than half (51%) of its revenue digitally and less than half through its traditional channel, the radio station. However, Skyblogs and Skyrock radio are considered as two distinct subsidiaries within the same parent company: one is an entertainment media channel, the other is an independent social network. Unlike many social networking experiments by newspapers, Skyblogs was considered and managed as an independent Web 2.0 venture, rather than as a new tool to complement the traditional media.

The digital world: newspapers must use the collective intelligence of readers

Is it too late for newspapers to harness the power of the Web and social networks?

Said Bellanger: “As did all traditional industries, the press perceived the Internet as a new way to do the same thing,” as a new distribution platform to publish the same product – instead of conceiving how deeply the Web could change the actual work of journalists and newspapers. “This turned out to be an extremely modest usage of the possibilities enabled by the Internet,”