The Evolving Newsroom

Nieman Labs’ Zachary Seward ran an interesting post on the New York Times last week discussing comments made by executive editor Bill Keller in a meeting to digital staff.

There were a few points that I was heartened to see. The first was this:

The single best advice we’ve gotten, I think, is to spend some time living without print. And we’ve [Keller and managing editor Jill Abramson] both been trying to do that, trying to experience The New York Times and our competition mostly on screens — iPhone, laptop, Kindle, Times Reader –- trying to better understand the joys and frustrations of our journalism delivered online.

It cannot be said too often or too loudly: you have to go online to know online.  The profound way the internet changes how people find, use and share information is something that has to be experienced to be understood. Reading half a dozen reports about it won’t do. News execs who don’t customarily spend hours online each day will not in my view fully grasp the challenges they face nor have the imagination to tackle them.

Another point that grabbed me was this:

One thing that jumps out from the analytics is that users under 35 — our future — are vastly more likely to be using social networking sites to share our articles, photos and multimedia. At the moment we have community-building endeavors underway in several places. We have TimesPeople, we have the new conversation tools that debuted in health care, we have Jennifer’s social-networking portfolio, and so on. So how do we make sure that all of our innovative intelligence is working in the same direction on community?

It’s a relief to hear a news exec talking about under 35s as the newspapers’ future and understanding that their needs are vastly different to those of their parents and grandparents. I have a feeling, in New Zealand anyway, that newspaper execs are overly comforted by their current subscriber levels.

A third issue for us is how to spread the gospel of integration more fully in the newsroom… The department heads all, to one degree or another, support the website, but they need to engage with it more. They need to be, to quote one of you, “more than web tourists.” We need to spread the word that the Well blog or The Caucus blog is as important and as integral to our future success as stories on A1 of the printed paper.

…

As long as we’re doing journalism on separate publishing systems, we will not be an integrated newsroom. We will not think and plan our journalism with the web in the front of our mind.

Absolutely true. The website should not be something that the ‘web team’ work on. It should be absolutely central to any news organisation. Fast forward 5, 10 or 20 years (depending on your market) and it will be by default. Why not start figuring out now how to run an operation with the web at the heart of it?

The post is well worth a read, I think, and there’s a video of Keller speaking.

In other news, the Times made a smaller than expected loss the third quarter of 2009 according to the BBC, and has set up a non-profit to produce pages for a Chicago edition.

The Chicago News Co-operative – comprised of former editors from the bankrupt company that owns the Chicago Tribune – will provide the copy for two pages, twice a week, in the first Chicago edition to launch on 20 November.