(Michael P. Smith)

I think Gannett lends great anecdotal evidence to the argument for change. As I mentioned in last week's blog entry there is a great deal of energy in their new information centers.

Gannett is not alone. Newspapers around the globe are experimenting with dramatic organizational and architectural (meaning newsroom design) change. There is not research that suggests that re-arranging the furniture or giving jobs new titles actually changes the culture of an organization. So, I cannot fully answer the question the headline above poses. I can say from my visits that it is changing the way many journalists view their jobs. I call this the Marcel Proust theory. He said: "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."

Here are three perspectives of change that may lead to journalists seeing things in new ways.






Sydney Morning Herald / Melbourne Age: Mike van Niekerk, Editor-in-Chief of Online for Fairfax Media took a change-or-die attitude into the process of integrating the two largest newsrooms in Australia. He explains:

"The biggest upheaval ever in newsrooms is now under way. You can still walk into some of the biggest and most venerable newsrooms on the planet where editors and journalists navigate through cramped rabbit-warrens overflowing with paper in order to speak to each other - sometimes they have to walk through doors or reach each other or between separate floors.

"And there are sleek, modern, open-plan layouts, fitted with the latest technology and a workflow geared towards instant and continuous communication.

"There's no guarantee that if you adopt the second approach you will be a successful media company in the future but I am sure that if you do not you will eventually shrink in size and probably fail as a business. To give yourself a chance of success you will have to change the structure of your newsroom and the workflow of your journalists and for both of these you are going to have to change your culture.

"The reason is simple: our audiences are on the move. They are increasingly accustomed to finding out what's happened or what's important when it's convenient for them, wherever they are. Digital technology has changed the game. They no longer rely solely on the morning newspaper and the evening network news."

With that as the backdrop and pressured to make a change in facilities, The Age was forced to integrate its newsroom and come up with a design that accommodated the integration. The result was a multimedia newsroom that produces content for all of the titles. Multiskilled journalists file for any title at any time. Editors commission stories according to the needs of the product.

Van Niekirk explained the results this way:

"Editors sit at the hub and key news editors and production journalists sit down the spoke, (most of the) reporters are on either side.

"With this new layout comes new workflow around content management and new roles. We are still working on precisely how this works but the essence is that we are now a 24-hour newsroom and that the digital editors have the major role in story planning early in the day, while later in the day print news editors dominate the planning and news lists.

"In terms of new roles we will be looking for people who can manage stories in all media and make decisions about where to place resources in gathering content - as well as "super sub editors" or "write-through" specialists, who are adept at quickly bringing together information from different sources - news wires, our reporters - to craft a constantly updating breaking news story, that becomes richer and deeper as the story evolves - and can then become available for the print edition.

"A new role we have just created is Multimedia Journalism Editor, aimed at engaging newsroom specialists in extending their long-form or enterprise journalism for the web, through slideshows or interactive multimedia.

"Now, it really doesn't matter what the floor layout is, the key to what you're looking for is better communication. It's about having people next to each other who can make quick decisions informed by regular communication. Physical distance is the greatest barrier to good decision making in the news room."




El Tiempo: The leadership of Casa Editorial El Tiempo in Bogota, looked at many of the same issues and saw opportunity in strategic change of the No. 1 newspaper in Colombia (227,598 daily, 351,608 Sunday) in Colombia.

CEO and President Luis Fernando Santos said the publishing house, which includes numerous titles and Internet verticals separated content development from story editing and presentation in each of the products. The content development is the province of a set of subject editors, including national news, Bogota news, sports, economics, international news, entertainment and health. Stories go from development to a story list or budget in what is termed a content database. Product editors choose stories from the content database and present them appropriately for their audience and platform.

The strategic plan for the media house has three horizons, from short term to longterm. In the short-term horizon goals, Casa Editorial El Tiempo is undertaking projects that build and strengthen the core brands, like launching a TV news channel, a free daily, and increased zoning. The mid-term horizon calls for investment and experimentation in new initiatives. The third, longterm option calls for projects that create new revenues in new businesses. The results have been good, even in Colombia's strong economy. Revenue is up 17 percent and El Tiempo (the old title) is now second in Latin America in subscriptions with a 7 percent increase last year.




The New York Times: When Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, began talking integration of print and Online, many began to pay attention. So how is it going? Deputy Managing Editor Jonathon Landman gave this update:

"A year and a half into our integration experiment, newspaper people have learned the usual new tricks. Reporters blog and podcast. They shoot some video; so do photographers. Editors work alongside product developers, helping to plan, execute and manage new web products like verticals and topics pages. Our latest homepage and the new Times Reader were conceived and invented by product managers, newspaper art directors, information architects, a few editors, and of course software developers working together in a way that would have been inconceivable before integration. Our executive editor, Bill Keller, told us it was OK to start talking like web people. We're now allowed to call the result of our sacred labors 'content.' You even hear people from the newspaper utter the word 'monetize,' God help us all.

"So what's different about the way we work now, compared to a year ago or two or five? Quite a bit. Physically, we're closer together. Web producers now sit on virtually all the major news desks. You may know that we've built a new building. … This is all exciting. Also unnerving.

"Our newsroom is huge. There are more than 1,400 people in a combined newsroom that includes web production, software development, product management and web design alongside the usual newspaper functions. It'll take three very large floors, each nearly an extended city block long, plus several smaller ones to hold all of us and there are lots of open stairways to make it as easy as possible to move between them. We are excited at the prospect of having our newspaper news desk... cheek by jowl with our continuous news desk, the heart of the web operation."

The caveat again is that there is no research that says this will lead to cultural change. But as I began this blog last week, we are here to praise change efforts, not condemn them.


By Michael P. Smith (m-smith3@northwestern.edu)
Michael P. Smith is executive director of the Media Management Center.