Die Zeit’s paper and online editions are better off as independent entities, said Wolfgang Blau, editor of Zeit Online. The weekly print paper is run out of Hamburg, while the website is based in Berlin. Blau was speaking at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, on a panel on the future of weeklies.

Many European newspapers are moving towards a more integrated structure, but Blau argued that the culture and reporting structures are different in print and online, and hence it makes sense to keep them somewhat separate, although of course with collaboration between the two. As the paper’s circulation is growing and revenue is still going up, the approach seems to be working for Die Zeit.

One third of Die Zeit's editors frequently contribute articles written exlusively for Zeit Online, Blau said, a number which is much higher than at the paper’s competitors. The Economist’s website, for example, is full of content produced by the print journalists, who embrace the opportunity to write blog posts and more, said the paper’s social media editor Mark Johnson.

The news industry is transitioning from print to digital, and nobody said it was going to be easy. For one thing, many news publications still simply make more money from the shrinking paper side of their business than from the growing digital end. But as newspapers struggle to make the switch, perhaps part of the problem isn’t financial; it’s that newrooms are hooked on print. 

This is the argument made by two recent articles, one published by Nieman Lab, the other by Poynter, which suggest that journalists have been struggling to prioritise digital content because their professional environments reward them for achievements in the printed paper, but don’t incentivise their work online.

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The Financial Times is to launch a "live news desk," reported Journalism.co.uk. It will provide rapid responses to breaking news stories on the paper's website, including on live blogs, and make use of Twitter, said Ben Fenton, who will lead the desk, on his blog.

The live news desk will cover world events and business news from around the world, wrote Fenton, who until now has been the FT's media correspondent. He will lead a team of reporters focused on the project, according to Journalism.co.uk.

The plan to create the desk has been in the works for some time, it appears, and Fenton said that it had been intended to launch in 2011 but due to the "extraordinary" events of last year it was delayed.

At a time when news is broken almost in real time on social networks as well as on news wires, newspapers are adapting to meet the challenges of a faster-paced news cycle, trying to balance speed and depth.

The aim of the FT's new desk is to get a first version of a story online quicker, Journalism.co.uk said, freeing up specialized reporters to develop longer, more in-depth pieces. If it works, will it be a step that other news organisations will take?

Source: Journalism.co.uk, Keepbloggeringon

Two internet giants have made announcements this week that suggest the increasingly thin boundary between social media and the news is about to be stretched to its limit.

The first is Twitter, which has just released a new "top news" feature. The function means that when a user searches for a news-related term, they are not only shown relevant tweets, but are also given a link to one related news story. The release was first reported by Coleen Taylor at GigaOm who responded positively, calling the new function a "nice move". "Twitter has established itself as a great platform for crowdsourced information and citizen journalism, but these new features should help to make the site equally useful for finding stuff from traditional content producers such as news organizations," she wrote.