A reorganisation of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial and production operations will lead to around 50 jobs being lost, editor Robert Thomson has said in a memo.
The paper’s editing and production for print, online and mobile will be centralised around its New York ‘hub’, with editorial operations at its South Brunswick offices to cease.
The Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday have signed a four-year deal, which will see the papers printed in New York.
The initial run, starting in September, will be of the papers’ home editions, but New York-specific content will be added in due course.
Having separate newsrooms ‘has reached the end’, James Brady, WaPo’s site editor, has said following the appointment of Marcus Brauchli as executive editor.
A final decision is yet to be made, adds Brady, but a merger has been discussed ‘conceptually’ with Brauchli.
Last week LA Times, one of the biggest employers of journalists in the US, announced that it would be dispensing with the services of 150 of them as part of a total 250 job losses at the paper.
Yesterday afternoon it emerged that two more journalists would likely be leaving the LA Times, but not as a direct result of the editorial cuts.
According to LA Observed, Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporters Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber will be leaving the paper later in the summer to join the not-for-profit investigative start up ProPublica.
“It’s another big morale blow in the newsroom, which used to be a place where journalists aspired to reach and stay to do their best work. With new deep cutbacks coming and [LA Times owner] Sam Zell’s outbursts making many of the best journalists feel the Times’ commitment to serious news is precarious, it’s no longer surprising to see stars like Ornstein and Weber flee,” wrote Kevin Roderick.
Last week’s editorial staff cuts, which amounts to roughly 17 per cent of the employees, will be spread between the print newsroom and The Times’ web operations.
Those cuts led to this fascinating quote from Times editor Russ Stanton:
“You all know the paradox we find ourselves in,” he wrote said in a memo to the staff. “Thanks to the Internet, we have more readers for our great journalism than at any time in our history. But also thanks to the Internet, our advertisers have more choices, and we have less money.”
One hundred and fifty losses job losses against two hires doesn’t really make a great case for the internet as a growth medium for the employment of journalists, but nonetheless the growth of ProPublica and its journalistic modus operandi online marks a neat stab at Stanton’s paradox.
The ProPublica site will be fully operational later this year and plans to have almost 30 investigative reporters working on in-depth stories (it helps that self-made billionaire Herb Sandler has set up the site with a donation of $10m a year from his foundation and that it’s under the watchful eye of former WSJ editor Paul Steiger).
ProPublica will conduct investigations, largely online, in areas of significant public interest. It will also use TV documentaries to reveal on that large canvas issues that will be followed up extensively online.
It’s first major project, an investigation into US-backed Arabic language TV network Alhurra, ran on 60 Minutes two weeks ago.
Zell say that newspapers have to slim down and become more economically viable. Newspaper’s are about money, not news, that’s fairly self-evident. Little wonder then that Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber decided to walk and pursue their investigations elsewhere.
What awaits them at ProPublica?
A philanthropic backer claiming no editorial interference. No desire for profits. No ads on the site. Where almost all resources will be poured into journalism (what no free CD give away?).
The journalistic equivalent to Willy Wonka’s ‘golden ticket’, it seems.
Norway’s newspaper of record, the Schibsted-owned Aftenposten, is to start webcasting parts of its editorial meetings.
Following of a newspaper debate on media transparency where American regional newspaper Spokesman-Review, which has webcast its editorial meetings since June 2006, was upheld as an ideal in terms of editorial transparency, the paper’s editor-in-chief Hans Erik Matre told attendees it was time to open up more of the editorial process to public view.
“We are considering webcasting our editorial meetings, starting this autumn. However, instances were we broadcast these live online, in full, will probably be limited,” he later told Journalism.co.uk.
“What we have concrete plans for, is publishing parts of our editorial meetings online to get feedback. This could either be to get reader perspectives on the evaluation of our stories, in retrospect, or to involve readers more upfront in the planning stage of big stories – say on healthcare.”
Steve Smith, the editor-in-chief of Spokesman-Review, visited Oslo recently. He told Journalism.co.uk webcasting editorial meetings was a minor programme in the scheme of things for the newspaper, which also use reader polls and journalist-written blogs actively.
“Our webcasts have 40-50 viewers in the morning, 20-25 in the afternoon. It’s mostly our competitors or people who have, or think they might have, a stake in what is being said. We attract few viewers simply because these are boring meetings. It’s symbolic: the fact that it is there, that it is an option, is important. We also break out pieces of the webcast and put them on blogs when we are dealing with controversial issues,” he explained.
He added: “The whole transparency costs next to nothing. The challenge is time: I would much rather spend all my time blogging than being an editor.”
In May, Liverpool Daily Post (LDP) became the first British newspaper to webcast an editorial meeting. Mark Comerford talks to LDP’s editor Mark Thomas about their “transparency” experiments here.
US newspaper company McClatchy has set up a public wiki to act as an ‘online repository of ideas’ where its journalists and others can discuss innovation ideas for the group.
The wiki is called McClatchy Next and has been set up by Howard Weaver, vice president for news at McClatchy.
“It’s a wiki, the same basic format as the infinitely editable Wikipedia, intended as a way to collect ideas, argue about them and save information and reference points in ways we can all easily share and retrieve,” he wrote in the first entry on the wiki.
“If it works, it will be a more coherent version of the comments I very much appreciate at my blog – better organized, easier to follow, more accessible.”
Sky News has launched a beta version of its new website, to run in parallel with its existing news site.
It has adopted a top story carousel for the homepage that displays the latest breaking news in video and pictures.
It has also added a story tracker in the right column, which lets you follow a story as it develops, and in the left column a See Your News personalisation feature.
“What you are visiting is very much work in progress. We are testing and trialling new features and a very different design,” Steve Bennedik, editor of Sky News Networked Media, wrote on his blog. Play free online slots no download on this website.
“At the same time we are still offering our existing site. When we are ready, we will switch off the old site and this will be our public face.”
The paper will now operate with a central news desk to allow for ‘enhanced co-operation between print, web and Newswires journalists’, a memo from editor Robert Thomson has said.