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Newspapers’ response to the digital challenge

Newspapers are playing a game of digital leapfrog. One paper does not merely catch up when another jumps ahead. It usually overtakes by taking advantage of technological developments its rival was unable to embrace. There is no possibility of standing still.

In a sense, the online revolution is like a train journey without a destination. As soon as one paper arrives at a station that had once appeared to be a terminus, another title has built a new line and sped onwards.

For the moment, given the need to keep on printing while simultaneously uploading, it means driving as fast as possible towards a brave new world while keeping the engines running at full power in the old — but still lucrative and popular — world of newsprint.

In Britain, regional newspapers, as so often, have been in the forefront of this cultural change. Their reporters and subeditors have been embracing multi-platform journalism for several years. The national press in Britain has been slower off the mark, but they are forging ahead now. Editors, naturally enough, tend to justify the merging of print and digital staffs by talking of the journalistic imperative. But they are aware that there has been a commercial impulse too. With falling revenues from both circulation and advertising, it does not make financial sense to employ two sets of overlapping staff.

A similar, if somewhat controversial, financial logic has also dictated a reconsideration of the staffing requirements across seven days.

One of digital transmission’s greatest benefits is that it allows for the merging of staff on daily and Sunday titles in a way that proved unachievable 20 years ago. Some call it another wonder of the web; others call it job cuts under a digital cloak. But integration is about much more than internal office structures. It is really about the creation of a new journalistic culture, a method of working that reflects both the technological possibilities and the demands of a wised up, increasingly media-savvy public.

Indeed, it is also about the response to a new public because newspapers are no longer serving a geographically distinct area.

The challenge is to provide 24/7 news, to offer a minute-by-minute, round-the-clock news service. This can only be achieved through integration, by journalists responding to the demand of filing for website and the paper, by them bringing into play audio and video material whenever relevant.

In my visits to the offices of The Financial Times, The Times, and The Telegraph (all in London) — where there are different forms of integration — I was struck by the way in which their journalists have grasped, or are beginning to grasp, the benefits of integration, not only at a practical level but as a philosophy. Every executive I met was at pains to point out how the mindset of their editorial staffs has changed. They are no longer troubled by that old argument about whether a story should be web-first or print-first. With their news editors they are developing an instinct about the appropriate way to publish.

One persistent criticism by sceptics is that journalists are being asked to do too much. Again, that’s not what I discovered. As far as I could ascertain, journalists are grasping the opportunities offered by online publishing to write more freely. There is much more fulfilment involved in writing a developing story when you discover that there is no longer any need to cut it to ribbons to fit a space.

Updating for newsprint editions tended to be dispiriting because some material would inevitably be lost. Now it can be accommodated without any loss of detail. Now journalists are realising that integration is not only proving much less painless than expected, it is releasing them from the straitjacket of the single 24-hour deadline. — ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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