Results tagged “newsroom management”

The Wall Street Journal print and online editions will be separated into different business groups under a Dow Jones corporate reorganisation, its president announced in a memo.

Under the restructure, president Todd Larsen wrote, five separate business groups will each operate with a clear profit and loss approach:

• - The Wall Street Journal in print
• - The Wall Street Journal Digital Network
• - Dow Jones Financial Markets, which includes Newswires and products for financial professionals
• - Dow Jones Corporate Markets, which includes Factiva
• - Dow Jones Indexes.

Kubas Consultants have released the results of their survey of over 530 U.S. and Canadian newspaper executives' and managers' expectations for advertising revenues in 2010 and what strategies they have planned to meet the New Year's challenges. 

Sunday was the second anniversary of Murdoch's purchase of The Wall Street Journal, an event that many press and journalism experts decried as sullying the hallowed status of the respected paper. Under Murdoch's leadership, the Journal has turned away from business-only analytical focus and towards broader general interest stories and politics with big front-page photos.

Tribune Co., which has spent the last year dealing with bankruptcy, has announced that Gerry Spector will be taking over at the new chief operating officer. He is replacing Randy Michaels who was promoted to CEO last week to replace Sam Zell, who became chairman.

Spector will be overseeing the publishing, broadcast, and Internet operations. He has been with the company since 2007, having previously been the chief administrative office.

Concerns have been raised over the level of gender diversity with the number of women in top newspaper positions dropping. The last week has seen three female newspaper editors resign from their positions 'indicating they are not likely to run a newsroom again,' reports Editor & Publisher.

Karin Winner, announced her retirement after 15 years as editor of the San Diego Union-Tribune. Sixty-four years of age, the decision is not a surprising one- though many are waiting to see who will be named her replacement.

Two American editors-in-chief have announced that they will be stepping down from their current positions. Sandra Mims Rowe, editor of The Oregonian since 1993, will be retiring from her post at the end of the year; Janet Coats, executive editor of the Tampa Tribune, will be finished on 18 December.

Rowe reportedly made her decision to retire over the Thanksgiving holiday in an altruistic attempt to spare other employees' jobs. In an email obtained by Portland-based Willamette Weekly, Rowe stated, "It became clear we would have to shed about 70 jobs total from the newsroom staff. As we have gotten much smaller as a newsroom, it is also clear we have too many editing positions concentrated at the top of the organization. Over Thanksgiving I wrestled with the number of layoffs we would need and determined it was best to start by removing my own salary from the budget. I informed [publisher N. Christian Anderson III] of my decision last week. Doing this preserves other jobs."

Clay Shirky, journalism intellectual extraordinaire, was interviewed at Yale University for a conference on The New News Ecology: "Who will pay for the messenger?" by Leonard Witt for Sustainable Journalism. 

Greenspun Media, parent of the Las Vegas Sun, has begun merging their print and online assets in the Las Vegas area. 

The Chicago News Cooperative is a startup news organization serving the local Chicago area as an internet-based nonprofit news service. 

         IN A SMALL theatre space underneath basement level of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, surrounded by videos of surreal contemporary 'dance,' the contributors to 'Libé des philosophes,' the November 19th, 2009 edition of Libération in which philosophers wrote all of the newspaper's content, gathered to ostensibly discuss the theme of 'philosophy and journalism'. We all filed in solemnly, the few young people avoiding eye contact with each other, pretending to be serious; the attitude was similar to the whole 'I'm going to go read Proust in the corner café with my notebook and black coat and coffee at 23:30 on a Saturday' kind of thing.

            The French word that is often used for 'moderated' is animé, which to my mind always means someone who 'animates' the gathering, someone who breathes life into a room of socially awkward academics, old people who have nothing better to do and young idealistic Bac or first-year Fac students. Marianne Alphant, the Centre Pompidou's lady-in-charge of expositions, and Robert Maggiori, a philosophy teacher and a regular writer for Libération, did their best as animateurs, although Maggiori was clearly in command. Probably because he seemed to be the one who organized the whole thing.

            After finding a seat, scoping the sparse audience, deciding that I was out of place then turning on the recorder (download the recording), I realized I had no actual idea what the talk was to be about. I was told to come, presumably, because I have a modest philosophy degree and an intermediate command of French; neither of which were much help when one only knows the title of the talk and have never really read Libération. Luckily for you I will draw out the interesting bits from the discussion, but it's a bit like pulling gum out of your hair; you don't get much to show for your efforts and will have to cut it in the end anyway.

            Present at the table, complete with mini bottles of water and much hand wringing underneath it, was Barbara Cassin, a philologist and sophist expert (my favorite of the speakers, 'animated' and interesting); Denis Kambouchner, a Descartes and ethics expert with big white hair; Frédéric Worms (who looks a little like Clay Shirky and managed to creep me out by staring at me for half the time), a Bergson specialist with an uncomfortable laugh; and Ruwen Ogien, who was slightly bitter about not being able to write about chemical castration.

            At first they focused on the technical and administrative details of getting 60 philosophers together to write an entire newspaper, cover to cover, including the weather and sports sections. This is the third year Libération has put together an edition written by a certain academic class, this year's philosophers having been preceded by historians and writers. Since a good portion of every newspaper that is ever published is pre-prepared as opposed to the quickly written actual 'news' parts, this posed quite a challenge for the philosophers.

            Philosophy takes a long time. The most seemingly straightforward of questions can take days or weeks to answer to one's own satisfaction, and sometimes you find at the end that you didn't even answer it or that it ends up being irrelevant to what you're working on. This is pretty much diametrically opposite to journalistic writing, and the philosophy vs. journalism, prepared vs. news theme was definitely the most interesting subject discussed by the panel, however briefly touched upon. In a nutshell, the philosophers were all competing for the pre-prepared parts during their editorial meetings, but since a good percentage of the contributors were abroad they got first dibs.

            The journalists at Libé apparently love having the philosophers there, and it's a good mix; lively discussions take place in the hallways, the pleasantness and solicitude of the philosophers enliven the journalists and together they form a community neither philosophical nor journalistic. Maybe today's struggling newspapers could learn a lesson from this and take an injection of fresh insight from 'outsiders' helping the editorial process.

            Maggiori discussed in depth these kinds practical issues, particularly the issues of dividing duties and the massive editing cuts as all the proposed articles went over the allowed length. After this Maggiori did manage to get in some nuggets that piqued my attention; he mentioned that he once met a German journalist who was taken aback by the 'Libé des philosophes' idea, and the total editorial freedom the philosophers have.

            "In Germany, it would never be possible. No newspaper would give their editing over to philosophers to write the entire edition," the German reportedly said. Maggiori thinks Libé is the only newspaper in the world that has done so, and was able to, because of the status of philosophers in France.

            In France, he said, "we are used to public and televised debates featuring philosophers, among others." Philosophers are consulted and listened to; their opinions are sought out and valued. This, in my opinion, is one of the best things about French society and a real problem in North America where it is clearly lacking.

            According to Maggiori, having a philosopher's edition allows the newspaper to have an 'organic link' with intellectuals and to facilitate the valuable 'long, slow thinking' that philosophers do. He continued to say that newspapers need to have such a link with the 'production of thought' as a way to save themselves; Libération went in the opposite direction of 'green' reporting (with short, online articles) to promote and publish the long, reflective and analytical articles of the philosophers. This is exactly the kind of quality reporting and content that has been and must continue to be newspaper's strong points if they are to survive.

            Barbara Cassin went on to detail her experience with writing about national identity and the questionnaire that accompanied that task, which was loaded with assumptions (as most non-philosophical texts are) thus required a good deal of interpretation and analysis; not quite what the writers intended but it ended up being a good article by virtue of this. Here the opposition (a concept philosophers revel in) between philosophy and journalism was seriously treated. She said "the 'time/pace' (temps) of philosophy is completely contrary to the 'time/pace' of journalism," that "while philosophers are of the 're-taking', 're-thinking', the cogitation of national identity, here in this case we had to go 'on site', find things and make phone calls" which is not really philosophers are used to doing.

            The talk continued, mostly with everyone else described what they wrote about and the process of finding a topic and writing on it. Interestingly enough, Denis Kambouchner said he knows Placebo, the alt rock/metal group, and would have liked to do a piece on them. He went on to describe the process or 'exercise' of writing journalistically as one of writing in a language of effectuation and 'in the last degree,' an 'extremely simple process for ourselves' that regardless is interesting for both the reader and writer, and valuable for society in bringing philosophical dialogue to the mainstream.

            Throughout, Maggiori controlled the talk, saving us from awkward pauses and topic drop-offs. He personally stayed the most on topic and had some good opinions.

            He thinks that rigorous philosophical critique must be defended in order to both save newspapers, which can be its home and promoter, and philosophical discussion itself. On TV, the radio, and in many newspapers journalists and writers are told to write things quickly and simply, even just mentioning a keyword. Critiques and comments are just mindless summaries, only saying whether something is good or bad with little reflection, like looking up ratings for a hair drier on the internet.

            Maggiori was clearly upset at this kind of journalism (as he outlined it), saying it has a serious negative impact on quality, and called it a 'real menace', something that as a 'stupefied avoidance of the difficult' would be 'death for us' if it appeared in Libé.  

            The speakers finished up by affirming the importance of the union of philosophy and journalism, both critiques and reflections on news and culture. Unfortunately I could not understand everything at this point because the speakers were talking quite fast, and, getting rather excited, began using a level of vocabulary and grammar I could not easily follow. Nevertheless, they all seemed in agreement that such a marriage of philosophy and journalism was important to society, and even a part of the intellectual's responsibility to reflect upon the events that shape our world, rather than just transmit 'what happened'.

            It was too bad that the questions asked seemed to rather miss the point and focused things that could have answered themselves if the inquirers had read the articles on the subjects they were asking about.  The panel seemed rather miffed by this point and eager to leave, as was I since I didn't get to ask my question.

            Actually, if had I gotten hold - from the cold, wrinkly hands of the old lady who Bogarted it - of the microphone, I'm now not sure what I was going to ask. It was surely something along the lines of the 'opposition' in the kind of work philosophers do and what journalists do that was mentioned, and the entente that they all seemed to have when thrown together to make a newspaper. I would have imagined them getting into various kinds of (potentially amusing) disagreements making publication quite difficult, but then I remembered that this is France and philosophers are respected and respectful here. This is not to pose any kind of elitist or Francophile argument about the relations and status of intellectuals in society, but it is indeed difficult, as the German reporter said to Maggiori, to imagine such a thing happening in many other countries.

            Even so, this kind of initiative of the 'special edition' type is certainly a great way for newspapers to help save themselves. Rather than focusing on online content and its instant-access, tiny summaries and gross glossing over of issues, maybe it would be a good idea for papers to play their strengths; quality reporting, respectability and accountability, high intellectual standards and intelligent critique and reflection. However those who stick to the paper format are still running a business after all, and unfortunately quality and intellect doesn't always sell.

WMA recording of the panel

The circulation and printing offices of several large national and local papers have been raided by investigators of the Manhattan district attorney's office in a union corruption investigation.

As journalism morphs in the digital age to become more comprehensive than just the written word, newsrooms are looking for more efficient ways to get their stories out across all mediums, fast.
 
One proposed method is platform journalism, a notion that content is developed centrally, with the presentation later fine-tuned according to whether it is for television, internet, radio or print.

Gazette Communications in Cedar Rapids, Iowa is amongst the latest that has taken this concept, brought it to life and has been 'producing content' since February.  Gazette Communications, which owns newspaper The Gazette, local TV station, KCRG and website, Gazette Online, relocated all of its reporters, photographers, and other journalists from these outlets to a new "content room" at the newspaper, reports Editor & Publisher.

The Toronto Star, Canada's largest circulation daily newspaper, celebrated its 117th birthday by announcing its biggest restructure ever, reports AP.   

In a memo to employees, publisher John Cruickshank said the paper's owner Torstar co. would begin to broadly rework its flagship publication- a move that could mean job layoffs and internationally outsourcing work.   

The BBC is creating a new 'social media editor' position, the Guardian is reporting, amidst growing interest in the value of web services such as Twitter and Facebook to news publications. The BBC's decision comes as part of a wider campaign announced last month, designed to relaunch its websites with a greater social media focus.

"Like a lot of other news organisations, we are at the beginning of something very exciting, " said Nic Newman, the BBC's future media and technology controller, journalism. "We recognise social media plays an important part. With the new position we are co-ordinating best practice. We think that the decision to appoint a social media editor is the best way to understand what works."

Dan Gillmor has written a column over at guardian.co.uk about standards of journalism practice, his 'new rules of news,' that he would enforce if he ran a news organization. Here are a couple of the more interesting suggested guidelines:

2. Inviting audience participation and crowdsourcing, with a rewards system for quality contributors.

5. Encouraging conversation and comments, listing letters to the editor and replies in blog format, and listing comments posted under real names first. Local, community discussion would be fostered by these means.

6+7. Replacing 'Orwellian PR-speak' with real, everyday and neutral terms to describe things, without being afraid to paraphrase for clarity or even to call someone a liar for the sake of truth.

8. Link to everything possible, highlighting content from community members.

11. No 'Top-Ten' lists.

The Oregonian is to reorganise its newsroom, according to a memo obtained by Oregon Media Central. The plan described by executive editor Peter Bhatia would include organising reporters into two larger teams rather than the multiple smaller groups focused on traditional coverage areas which currently exist. The Oregonian is currently offering buyouts to staff, and is clearly anticipating a smaller newsroom.  

The two new groups will be called "Local expertise and enterprise reporting" and "Community." The larger work groups are necessary to "focus our work more quickly and to bring a critical mass of talent to the big stories as they arise," the memo said. The former will include 60 to 70 reporters, editors and support staff and it will cover politics and government, sustainability, business and the economy, and arts and culture, reported OMC. It will also cover breaking news, watchdog and investigative reporting, and narrative story telling. Susan Gage, managing editor for breaking news and online, will head the group. 

Mario Garcia is 62, but he's not too crazy about older people. They make his professional life difficult - older traditional readers who scream and complain when he redesigns their newspaper. And editors who embrace these readers and resist change."If an editor can't be redesigned, he or she must be re-assigned," he said to a roomful of editors. He got a laugh from his audience, but there is seriousness behind the remark.

The departure of the Agence France-Presse bureau from Fleet Street on Sunday, the last international desk remaining on the strip, is a further reminder that home of British journalism is now history and shorthand.

The image of Fleet Street today, filled with investment bankers and lawyers, is radically to different to that of thirty years ago, when the street was bustling with British and international newspaper hacks moving in and out of their headquaters. As of Sunday, Scottish publishers D. C. Thomson's London bureau will be the only newsroom left standing in the street, laments the South Africa's The Times.

Armed with the goal of "demystifying newspapers," the Victoria Advocate, a small Texas newspaper, began webcasting its daily editorial meeting last year, according to an Associated Press article hosted by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The paper uses a free technology called Livestream to open up its decision-making process to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection.

This idea is not altogether new. The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Wash., was apparently the first to offer live web videos of its news meetings starting in mid-2006. However, the paper discontinued the practice earlier this year due to lack of interest; just a handful of people were tuning in to watch reporters hash it out with editors each day.

In a bid to increase its international audience, the French business newspaper La Tribune has begun using software to translate its website into English, German, Spanish and Italian. Unfortunately for the paper, the cost-saving measure of automatic translation produces some confusing results.

A current headline on the English-language site reads: "The United States: confidence of the consumers in Bern, reduced trade deficit," which appears to make a serious error in geography. What do American consumers have to do with the Swiss capital?

In recognition of the hardships freelance journalists face due to today's economic conditions, the National Union of Journalists has launched a campaign aimed at improving the morale and working conditions of non-salaried employees. Throughout the month of July, the union will host events and discussions specifically for freelancers at local branches.

Many publications are currently strapped for cash, meaning fewer assignments for freelancers. In addition, recent layoffs at news organizations have resulted in more freelancers vying for the same jobs. Thus, protection of freelancers' rights is more important than ever, concludes the NUJ.

The Washington Post is restructuring its newsroom to be revolve around a cross media software concept.  The daily is the third US based publication to adopt the Methode system from EidosMedia S.p.A., following the Seattle Times and The Wall Street Journal who made the move last year. 

The adoption of the Methode is a firm indication of the convergence of the online and printed media in news provision.   The choice of software corresponds with the decision of the Post to combine its online and print operations.  The two teams will merge into a remodelled newsroom, in theory before the functioning of the new software begins. The Post is approaching the restructure with vigour: In January it appointed two new managing directors to oversee the developments, Elizabeth Spayd and Raju Narisetti.  The paper's new Executive Editor Marcus L. Brauchli, headed the previous restructure whilst at the WSJ.  The logistics of the move however, highlight the gloomier side of necessary evolution: according to Narisetti, the combined staff will measure the same or just under that of the print staff as it stood eighteen months ago.  The diminishment has been due to attrition and buyouts.

A little over a month ago, msnbc.com celebrated its first anniversary as America's #1 news site. According to Nielsen Online, the MSNBC Digital Network (msnbc.com) experienced record-breaking traffic for the past twelve months, with May marking a full year of dominance in the online news space.

"The success of msnbc.com is the result of a remarkable collaborative effort by some of the most innovative journalists in the business," said NBC News President Steve Capus. "These extraordinary numbers prove that if you provide your audience with quality journalism, offer it in a compelling, easy to use way and make it timely and accessible, they will respond."

As the World Association of Newspapers and IFRA, the association that empowers the news publishing industry, will work together closer in order to provide excellent services for our industry, we are glad, at WEF, to promote this instructive IFRA event at German newsrooms.

Im Hinblick auf die vom Weltverband der Zeitungen und der IFRA angestrebte engere Zusammenarbeit zur Offerierung eines herausragenden Serviceangebots möchte das WEF Sie auf diese aufschlussreiche IFRA Study Tour zu führenden deutschen Redaktionen hinweisen.

Ifra invites you to learn about the best ideas in German newspapers on its study tour, "The New Generation of Newsrooms". During this highly educational and infomative tour, Ifra will answer participants' most pressing questions about the multimedia evolution of newsrooms with visits to:
- Süddeutsche Zeitung
- BILD
- WELT Gruppe
- Frankfurter Rundschau
- Die Abendzeitung