Three newspapers in northern France will combine their editorial teams next month, but the goal isn’t just to reduce costs and create efficiencies. It will also allow the creation of new jobs to reflect new digital realities.
When Voix de Nord, Direct Lille, and Nord Éclair bring their reporting and editing teams together, there will be no reduction in staff. There will, however, be a reorganisation to focus on multimedia, video, interactivity, audience engagement and local and hyperlocal news.
“We decided to learn from other experiences to try to identify major trends and to find good ideas. We went to numerous conferences and saw more than 200 presentations,” said Pierre Mauchamp, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of La Voix du Nord, who cited dozens of media companies that provided inspiration for the reorganisation – the New York Times, Ringier, Le Parisien, The Telegraph, BBC, Washington Post, Zero Hora, and Le Soir among them.
“Big institutions, small institutions, media around the world, pure players, all contributed without knowing it,” he said. “We picked small ideas, and tried to identify the big trends, and choose among the big trends – they’re not always compatible.”
The new jobs in the newsroom include multimedia sub-editors, community managers, data journalists and visual sub-editors. All journalists will work in multimedia.
