@Society of Editors: ‘The future is already here’

Posted by Martin Stabe on 6 November 2006 at 11:23
Tags: Journalism, Lancashire Evening Post, Observer, Press Association, Society of Editors, The Herald, World Editors Forum

Society of Editors conference

This morning’s second panel, a “digital update” entitled “the future is already here” is chaired by Lesley Riddoch and comprises: PA’s Robert Freeman; Gordon Mack of The Herald; Simon Reynolds of the Lancashire Evening Post; Bertrand Pecquerie of the World Editors Forum; and John Naughton of the Observer.

Freeman, PA’s multimedia editor, starts with a video clip. The public have started to take the multiplatform world for granted, he says. The vox pops on the video clip prove it.

Freeman echos Carolyn McCall’s stress on software development from the AOP and World Digital Publishing conferences.

Mack is the digial media editor of the Herald, and describes himself as a “paidup member of the old media”. The Herald has increased onllne readership 45 per cent year on year, he says. It has worked with PA to produce online multimeida content, particuarlly at the Edinbourgh festival. But the paper has been “unmoved” by mobile. And there’s a digital editon, which has extended the Herald’s reach — for a few subscribers.
Web content remains wedded to print, he admits, and says this is a mistake. But now the first multimedia journalists are making their mark at the paper.Human resources, he says, is a major stumbling block to making
Another challenge are legacy print workflows that are not really adaptable to multichannel delivery.

Referring to Tim O’Reilly’s AOP speech, Mack says compares his online staff — two producers, a quarter-share of a developer and one salesman — to the 9,000 staff at Yahoo! and 85,000 and Time Warner. Asymetrical competition indeed. But perhaps old media are not the big media.

Simon Reynolds says the 120-year-old Lancashire Evening Post in Preston is no longer a newspaper, but a “fully integrated news organisation”. He shows a hilarious clip from the paper’s News Idol competition, with the mayor of Preston reading the news in a monotone that was “hardly Jeremy Paxman”. A more sombre clip shows the return of the remains of a local soldier who had been killed in Iraq. The paper managed to cover this event better than local television as well.

“The result of this revolution really speaks for themselves,” he says. “We’re doing well over 500 stories a week on our site; 500 photographs and much more audio and video”. The site has 1.5m page impresssions month, had quadrupled to 120,000 unique users, all while the paper’s print circulation has increased.

Bertrand Pecquerie tells newspapers to become a news aggregator for their region by building a network of targeted web sites, giving Dagbladet.no in Norway as an example.

Sharing tools, like links to Digg and Technorati, should be on each story page, he says, showing the sharing sidebar from WashingtonPost.com.

Next, he shows Bluffton Today as an example of hyperlocal coverage. Social community news, not breaking hard news is the centre of papers that are embracing this approach, he says.

Only one newsroom will be vry difficult to manage. He shows Axel Springer’s Die Welt group, which has three newspapers: the quality national Die Welt, the regional Berliner Morgenpost, and compact edition targeted at young readers, Welt Kompakt. They have three different teams, but they share several services. This sort of multiple paper platforms will become more common as freesheets and other

Then it gets interesting. He compares the Telegraph’s new hub-and-spoke newsroom design to Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon prison. No seriously. It reflects an authoritarian tendancy for managment to control jorunalists, he says.

“I believe this kind of newsroom will fail,” he says, stressing that it undermines the creativity journlists need in favour of a Modern Times-style industrial news production on multiple platforms.

John Naughton deserves his own post for his presentation about future generations of “digital native” readers.