The case for, and against, integrated print-digital newsrooms

digiday reporting:

...Now that time has passed, some publishers are recognizing that each platform has a distinct nature that demands its own specialists. We talked to two publishers, one with an integrated newsroom and one with separate print/Web staffs, to give both sides of the issue.

Daily News The tabloid paper integrated its print and Web staffs in 2011 when it also adopted a new content-management system, believing a platform-agnostic approach would help increase its posting volume. Today, the 270-person edit staff generates 200-300 online posts a day, up from 50 two years earlier, and traffic has grown to 26 million monthly uniques, a nearly 50 percent increase, according to comScore...

Daily Mail The online arm of the Daily Mail of the U.K. has become a digital powerhouse, with a U.S. audience (47 million uniques) that trumps many homegrown news sites, and, it’s worth noting, doubling its homepage traffic in the past two years. It credits that growth with a site that’s always been managed separately from the print paper, a practice that continued when Martin Clarke became editor-in-chief in 2006...http://digiday.com/publishers/print-digital-newsrooms/?utm_source=API%27s+Need+to+Know+newsletter&utm_campaign=61770be421-Need_to_Know_January_23_20151_23_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e3bf78af04-61770be421-31701933

Hearst’s new approach to digital news

digiday reporting:
Hearst Magazines is building a centralized news desk to supply digital content to its 18 glossy magazines.
The desk is small for now, considering the size and diversity of Hearst’s portfolio — it consists of two photo editors, one editor and one writer — but Kate Lewis, vp of content operations and editorial director for Hearst Digital, hopes to add more writers over time. The idea is to cover the stories that have applicability to multiple titles, cutting down on duplication and freeing them to do stories that are more unique to them, she said.
“It is something we are building as we think about our competition and what our pure-play brethren are doing,” she said.
Legacy publishers have for years unified certain editorial functions like copy editing and photo and graphics services. Newspaper chains have long shared stories across their local papers. But as print fortunes continue to wane, more centralization looks inevitable (Digital First Media’s closing its Thunderdome project notwithstanding).
...
Still, a centralized desk is potentially fraught with issues for Hearst, with titles ranging from fashion and beauty (Elle, Cosmopolitan) to shelter (House Beautiful, Country Living) to men’s (Esquire, Car and Driver). Centralizing content production sounds good in theory but raises questions for the individual brands, which may worry about a loss of control or that the desk will come at the expense of dedicated staff. Will the quality of the articles from the centralized desk be better than what they could do themselves?
Lewis said that the news desk won’t replace but will augment what the individual titles are doing and that titles will be expected to tailor the desk’s stories to their sites.
“When Taylor Swift cuts her hair, I do not need six editors writing that story,” she said. Of the Kim-Kanye wedding, she said, “We don’t need 50 people writing about the first photos that come out.”
http://digiday.com/publishers/hearst-magazines-building-centralized-news-desk/

Media’s Brave New Digital World

Digiday reporting:
Much has been written over the past week about journalists’ favorite topic: the future of journalism. For once, it’s been about the business side of things, coming on the heels of Andrew Sullivan’s decision to strike out on his own with a subscription model and BuzzFeed’s most recent funding haul.
It’s useful to add to this discussion these pieces by Lewis DVorkin, chief product officer at Forbes, and Henry Blodget, CEO of Business Insider. Both men describe a future where the analog-dollars-to-digital-dimes equation is cemented. The idea of that gap closing, in a world of 4 trillion ad impressions, has moved beyond wishful thinking to pure fantasy. The question now for news publishers is what to do about it.
Paywalls, meters and subscriptions are one route. And yet in many cases, they’re treating the symptom and not the cause. I recently did an interview with Blodget on why he’s excited for the future of news. The main reason, as he outlines in his presentation, is algorithms can’t make stories — yet. Beyond that, there’s the simple fact that Business Insider has a vastly different cost base than a publication like Forbes. Out of Blodget’s 91 slides, this is the most instructive.


During our interview, I summed up his position as: Everyone’s screwed, but some are less screwed. The less screwed are publications that have gotten their cost structures in line with the new economics of digital media. Blodget likes his hand because he isn’t crating around enormous legacy costs like an old-school media company.
This isn’t lost on DVorkin. He’s engaged in restructuring Forbes, root and branch, from a lofty magazine for globe-trotting execs to something more like The Huffington Post for business. He calls this “entrepreneurial journalism,” where Forbes rents space out to dozens of contributors. Some of the content from these contributors is quite good. Much of it is dreck. That’s the price you pay nowadays, however, in a world where pageviews are king.
The pageview game is brutal. Once on that treadmill, it’s quite hard to get off.
http://www.digiday.com/publishers/medias-brave-new-digital-world/

Focus on the story, not the pipeline, says The Seattle Times' David Boardman

WanIfra reporting:
City newspapers in the US have been among the toughest hit by a disrupted business model and economic recession, and those that want to survive as successful businesses are being forced to make some dramatic changes to the way they operate.
One such paper is The Seattle Times. After its competitor, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, closed its print edition and let go the majority of its journalists in 2009, the Times absorbed many of its readers and experienced a welcome rise in print circulation. However, like most US newspapers, it must still seek to cut costs.
Faced by shrinking resources and the need to make use of more and more platforms, The Seattle Times, under the leadership of Executive Editor David Boardman, radically restructured its news operation.
Whereas the newsroom was traditionally separated by platform – print and digital – staff are now divided by position in the news reporting process. The three teams are:
-       creation: the reporters, who report the stories, without thinking about platform
-       curation: the editors, producers and designers, who choose the best platform for each story
-       community: the team who make sure that the paper’s journalism reaches the community via social media and elsewhere...
http://www.editorsweblog.org/2012/07/11/focus-on-the-story-not-the-pipeline-says-the-seattle-times-david-boardman

How Rodale approaches tablet design

emedia/vitals reporting:
The rise of the tablet edition has arguably placed the biggest operational burden on a publication’s design staff. Publishers are addressing tablet edition staffing, skills and budget issues through plenty of trial and occasional error.
At Rodale, tablet editions have spurred the creation of a dedicated interactive design team that serves the enthusiast publisher’s Healthy Living Group, which includes Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Prevention and Organic Gardening. Sean Bumgarner, the group’s interactive design director, leads an eight-person team that focuses exclusively on tablet editions. The group, with a mix of full-time and freelance staff, works closely with the brands but has tablet-specific expertise.
Deciding whether to keep app design and development in-house is one of the key decisions publishers face as they build up their mobile offerings. Some prefer to outsource all aspects of mobile app development to remain focused on their core competency: content development. Others attempt to layer mobile onto existing design and production workflows – often placing an undue burden on existing staff. Still others, like Rodale, have created dedicated digital edition teams, which tend to have a little more freedom to experiment with new techniques and are not hidebound by traditional print conventions.
“We have experts with the technology who work with the experts on the brand experience,” Bumgarner said in a recent phone interview. “This allows us to be more agile, more responsive and more thoughtful about our digital editions.”
http://www.emediavitals.com/content/how-rodale-approaches-tablet-design?utm_source=Daily+Buzz&utm_campaign=db8b129045-_nb_DB_06-13-2012&utm_medium=email

Journatic CEO: We are creating a better future for journalism

gigaoma reporting:
The Chicago Tribune recently laid off many of the reporters and editors who produced its hyper-local editions, and announced that it was outsourcing those functions to a startup called Journatic — a move that drew criticism from those who saw the company as a Demand Media-style “content farm,” replacing journalists with algorithms and poorly-paid freelancers. In an interview with GigaOM, however, Journatic CEO Brian Timpone said that not only is his model more efficient than that of a newspaper, but it can actually help produce better journalism.
Timpone — who got his start as a journalist working for TV stations and broadcast affiliates in Duluth, Minnesota and Springfield, Illinois and at one time owned several community newspapers — said he got the idea for what became Journatic after the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, when he started a content-management service for newspapers (Timpone also runs a data-driven real estate service called Blockshopper). He said that at the time, he was fascinated with the difference in market penetration between smaller community papers and large metropolitan papers:

[I]n Chicago, the penetration is so low, but in a small town it can be huge. So I started thinking about how you can build higher penetration in those kinds of markets… there are suburbs of Chicago with 50,000 people and there’s no newspaper at all, not even a weekly.

The Journatic founder said that he reacted negatively to suggestions that his company is a “content farm” because he believes it is completely different from what someone like Demand Media does, which involves aggregating information in the hope that it will do well in search. “We produce a ton of content, but we are completely different,” Timpone said. When asked how many stories or items Journatic produces, he said he couldn’t say exactly but it was in the range of “tens of thousands a month, and growing quickly.”

A lot of community news doesn’t need a reporter

What the company produces for clients like the Tribune — and a number of other papers such as the San Francisco Chronicle and the Houston Chronicle — is community-level news, Timpone says, but it is able to do so much more efficiently:

The base of community news is what they call in the industry ‘process news,’ and it doesn’t really require a reporter, it just needs some cleaning up. This is not some new concept, it’s how community news has worked for decades. Who makes community news? Churches, schools, municipal governments, all the town councils that have 5 meetings a month where no one ever goes to them. This is the same stuff you’d read in a community newspaper in the 50s....

http://gigaom.com/2012/04/27/journatic-ceo-we-are-creating-a-better-future-for-journalism/?utm_source=Daily+Buzz&utm_campaign=2d8f48e4d4-_nb_DB_04-30-2012&utm_medium=email

Engagement editors: an emerging, important job in Digital First newsrooms

The Buttry Diary reporting: igital First Media newsrooms have several engagement editors and social media editors, most of them fairly new to these posts.
The duties vary depending on the needs of the community, the size of the newsroom, the initiative and interests of the editor and other duties (some of these editors wear multiple hats). Engagement and social media can be different positions (the New Haven Register has two full-time community engagement editors, Ed Stannard and Angi Carter, plus a city editor who also serves as social media editor, Helen Bennett Harvey.
I’ll blog here with a job description to help these editors as well as to help other top editors decide whether and how to name engagement editors for their newsrooms.
We’ll start with a tweet-length job description, then I’ll elaborate:
If some of that echoes my definition of community engagement, which I blogged about last year, that’s intentional. The engagement editor’s job is to lead community engagement efforts.
Before I dig in with the details, I should make one important point: Community engagement must be a high priority for the top editor in a newsroom. The engagement editor should help the top editor carry out his or her engagement duties, not take them over entirely. So as I elaborate on the list here, coordination with the top editor will shape how the engagement editor handles these duties. In some cases, the top editor might take the lead in a duty, assisted by the engagement editor. In others, roles might be reversed. And certainly some duties will be carried out entirely by the engagement editor.
Just as important, community engagement must be a priority throughout the newsroom, not just one person’s job. In the same way that having copy editors does not mean that reporters don’t need to worry about clean copy, having an engagement editor doesn’t mean that other journalists in the newsroom don’t need to engage the community. The engagement editor leads, guides and stimulates the newsroom’s engagement efforts.
http://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2012/03/22/engagement-editors-an-emerging-important-job-in-digital-first-newsrooms/

Condé Nast Aims To Unify Tablet And Mobile Magazine Production

paidcontent reporting:

Wired and GQ magazine publisher Condé Nast is amongst those now seeking a cost-effective cross-platform tablet production workflow for the blossoming number of new devices, after earlier implementing an iPad-specific strategy.

The publisher pioneered tablet magazines when it built out an early iPad design on Adobe Digital Publishing Suite in 2010. But now Nook, Kindle Fire and multiple Android tablets and mobiles of various shapes, which would compel additional production investment, are requiring a re-think.

“Bringing it all together in to a cohesive workflow has been a real challenge for us. It’s been tough - there’s a lot more work,” Condé‘s content innovation VP Scott Dadich said during a briefing in which the publisher courted London advertising buyers on Wednesday.
“Frankly, the technology really hasn’t caught up to that notion of a high-fidelity design that is adaptive. The adaptive web is teaching us a lot about what that’s going to look like. We’re working toward liquid layout with our friends at Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE). It has springs and cushions in it so it can fit on different screens with the same kind of experience.”

Several media operators have been here before. Having built out its iPlayer video service for a dozen unique platforms by 2010, the BBC, fed up with the investment required for each new device, re-coded the service as a one-size-fits-all HTML product, carryable by any web-enabled gadgets.
An upcoming upgrade to Adobe InDesign, the software many publishers to use to lay up pages for print and for tablets through Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, helps magazine designers make pages that adjust for different device sizes by leveraging “liquid layout rules” through HTML5. They no longer have to redesign for each separate platform...
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-conde-nast-aims-to-unify-tablet-and-mobile-magazine-production/

Financial Times to set up new 'live news' operation

Journalism.co.uk reporting:
The Financial Times is to create a new "live news desk" at the heart of the FT.com operation, tasked with providing a rapid response to breaking news stories including on live blogs and Twitter.
The project, which has been in the pipeline for some time, will be led by Ben Fenton who until now has been the title's media correspondent.
He will lead a team of reporters on the breaking news operation, the size of which has yet to be confirmed.
The initiative aims to provide a "more live response" to developing stories and get a well-written first version online quicker, while freeing up specialised reporters to develop a longer take on the story.
FT.com editor Robert Shrimsley told Journalism.co.uk: "We think it's a natural evolution in the development of our digital offering.
"I was really pleased that Ben could come and do this. It's really important to have experienced and well-regarded journalists doing this."
Fenton wrote on his blog: "I am finally moving on to a new role that the FT has been keeping warm for me for several months.
"I am going to be overseeing the creation of a new live news desk, with live-blogging, Tweeting and rolling news stories about world events and business news from around the world."
Fenton said he was meant to start the job last year, but the "extraordinary events" surrounding the phone-hacking story and the Leveson inquiry caused the launch to be postponed.
He added: "Now, it's been decided that if we wait, it could be years before this story slowed down, so I'm pressing on in this new role.
In other FT news, the publisher has been awarded the best mobile innovation award for for its web app at the Global Mobile Awards in Barcelona.
The HTML5 app, which launched last June, includes automatic content downloads and the ability to read offline and has attracted more than 1.7 million visitors, according to the group.
http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/financial-times-to-set-up-new-live-news-desk-/s2/a548144/

Condé Nast Aims To Unify Tablet And Mobile Magazine Production

paidcontent reporting:

Wired and GQ magazine publisher Condé Nast is amongst those now seeking a cost-effective cross-platform tablet production workflow for the blossoming number of new devices, after earlier implementing an iPad-specific strategy.

The publisher pioneered tablet magazines when it built out an early iPad design on Adobe Digital Publishing Suite in 2010. But now Nook, Kindle Fire and multiple Android tablets and mobiles of various shapes, which would compel additional production investment, are requiring a re-think.

“Bringing it all together in to a cohesive workflow has been a real challenge for us. It’s been tough - there’s a lot more work,” Condé‘s content innovation VP Scott Dadich said during a briefing in which the publisher courted London advertising buyers on Wednesday.
“Frankly, the technology really hasn’t caught up to that notion of a high-fidelity design that is adaptive. The adaptive web is teaching us a lot about what that’s going to look like. We’re working toward liquid layout with our friends at Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE). It has springs and cushions in it so it can fit on different screens with the same kind of experience.”

Several media operators have been here before. Having built out its iPlayer video service for a dozen unique platforms by 2010, the BBC, fed up with the investment required for each new device, re-coded the service as a one-size-fits-all HTML product, carryable by any web-enabled gadgets.
An upcoming upgrade to Adobe InDesign, the software many publishers to use to lay up pages for print and for tablets through Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, helps magazine designers make pages that adjust for different device sizes by leveraging “liquid layout rules” through HTML5. They no longer have to redesign for each separate platform.

“Every one of our Adobe magazines has to have new staff to help us design that,” Condé‘s UK digital director Jamie Jouning told paidContent. “As the number of tablets grows, we’ll have to increase our investment. Our aim is to publish once and distribute everywhere.”

It’s not just about tablets; mobile, too, could get the same flexible repurposing treatment.
http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-conde-nast-aims-to-unify-tablet-and-mobile-magazine-production

MIT Unravels the Secrets Behind Collective Intelligence – Hint: IQ Not So Important

Singularity Hub reporting:
When it comes to a successful group, the easiest way to ensure victory may be placing women on the team. MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence seeks to understand how humans get better (or worse) at solving problems as they work together. They studied hundreds of people working in small groups and found that they could determine a “C factor”, a key statistic that would predict if a group could perform well in a variety of tasks. C factor was more important in determining group success than the individual IQs of the people in the group. In other words, having a successful team isn’t just about having smart people, it’s about having people who will work together well. And what gives a group a high C factor? Women. Well, to be more precise, a high level of social sensitivity and willingness to let everyone talk equally. As forms of collective intelligence grow in importance, as we see with crowd-sourcing projects like Wikipedia, social search engines, and the scientific community, the value of socially aware individuals is going to arise as well. Is the future going to be inherited by the peacemakers?
MIT’s research into measuring collective intelligence was lead by their own Thomas Malone in partnership with Carnegie Mellon’s Anita Woolley. The results were published in late 2010 in Science Magazine and have since been discussed in over 30 major press agencies. Everyone loves to talk about how women make teams better, probably because it fulfills some of our most beloved (reviled?) 20th Century Western stereotypes. “Women Are the Key To a Successful Team” makes such a great headline, doesn’t it? Despite my own use of that trope (mea culpa), Malone and Woolley didn’t find that women per se were the key to a good C factor. It’s just that social sensitivity, which was overwhelmingly the leading ingredient in high C factor, was overly correlated to women. In fact, when they controlled for the number of women in a group, it was shown that it was the emotional sensitivity scores which won out.
http://singularityhub.com/2011/08/26/mit-unravels-the-secrets-behind-collective-intelligence-hint-iq-not-so-important/?utm_source=Singularity+Hub+Daily+Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dfd34c2be9-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN

Newsroom systems too old-fashioned

Strangeattractor reporting:
Most newspaper CMSes are more WordPerfect from the 1980s than WordPress. That’s why you have journalism outfits setting up blogs on Tumblr. Creating content on tools like Tumblr is like falling off a bike instead of trying to write caligraphy with a telephone pole. You can build a robust, advanced content management system without making the tools to create content so piggishly ugly, bewilderingly confusing and user surly. However, newspapers code their workflows into their CMSes. The problem is that their workflows aren’t fit for modern purpose.
Newspaper newsroom workflow is still print-centric, apart from a very few exceptions. The rhythm of the day, the focus of the tools and much of the thinking is still for that one deadline every day, when the newspaper goes to the presses. From this post by Doc Searls on news organisations linking to sources (or not linking as the case may be), see this comment from Brian Boyer about his shop, The Chicago Tribune:

At the Chicago Tribune, workflows and CMSs are print-centric. In our newsroom, a reporter writes in Microsoft Word that’s got some fancy hooks to a publishing workflow. It goes to an editor, then copy, etc., and finally to the pagination system for flowing into the paper.

http://charman-anderson.com/2011/05/18/linking-and-journalism-the-workflow-issue

Magazine Publishers Scramble To Streamline Their App Production

paid.content reporting:
Magazine publishers are not only trying to pack more features and content into their apps—they’re also trying to design for an ever-growing variety of devices and formats. The result is wreaking havoc with traditional print production schedules and, in some cases, budgets. And, then there’s the fear that even after all that blood-sweat, advertisers and readers will see the magazine apps as irrelevant.

One executive at a major publisher told me: “We shouldn’t be doing magazine apps. It’s a different format entirely from a print publication. We should be spending the resources to come up with special extensions of the brand.” The source added: “Consider the fact that iTunes doesn’t even have a dedicated ‘magazine section,’ so we’re effectively competing with Angry Birds and Flipboard at the same time.”
Yet despite the hurdles, major publishers are, of course, building apps, and are scrambling to streamline production and technology to make that process easier and cheaper. To get more insight into ways that big publishers are dealing with the new deadlines and formats, I spoke with executives at Time  Inc.‘s Sports Illustrated, Hearst Magazines’ Popular Mechanics and Condé Nast.
Sports Illustrated: On top of developing apps for each of Sports Illustrated’s weekly editions, the Sports Illustrated Group has done about 20 additional apps this year and two books with “enhanced” for iPad editions. Yet the SI Group hasn’t added much in the way of personnel to handle the additional workload—just two new art department staffers, one for tablets and one for print. Executives say rather than adding more people, the key is getting the production routine down.
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-magazine-publishers-scramble-to-streamline-their-app-production