Tag Archives: integration

Haymarket merges editorial team for medical titles

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Haymarket has merged the editorial teams for its medical titles GP and Independent Nurse.

As part of the changes the publisher has appointed Emma Bower, who launched Independent Nurse four years ago, as editor of GP.

Bower will now take on the editorship of both titles and responsibility for the newly merged team, which will be responsible for producing content across the magazines and the group’s Healthcare Republic website.

“So far, much of the crossover between our print and digital operations has developed on an ad hoc basis. Now we can tailor the structure of the editorial team to properly fit the needs of both platforms, and allow for further growth,” said Colin Cooper, editor-in-chief of Haymarket Medical Media, in a press release.

The integration will take effect from June 16.

LA Times creates ‘visual journalism’ department

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The Los Angeles Times has integrate its print and web picture desks and video operations into a new visual journalism department.

The move is the next phase in the Times’ alignment of its web and print operations, which will see mergers across the continuous news desk and main metro news desk this month.

The new department will be headed by Colin Crawford, who has been promoted to deputy managing editor for photography.

“Combining these three departments under the umbrella of visual journalism will improve our ability to present multimedia storytelling in an even more engaging way, and take greater advantage of our outstanding photo staff,” editor Ross Stanton said in a memo to staff.

Three spheres of relevance for news online

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Today’s a good day to point at three examples of how you can enhance the value of online news by linking it to additional, meaningful and relevant content.

I’m calling them the Three Spheres of relevance, three different approaches to creating news relevance: locally on a news site by bringing related content to a single destination, by using tagged metadata to enable better linking to relevant material and in the newsgathering process itself (stick with me, this might get into seriously tenuous segue territory).

Thomson Reuters has launched a new version of its semantic tagging tool Open Calais that broadly enhances and builds on its first round of development (hat tip Martin Stabe).

Open Calais has made publicly accessible a piece of internal software used by Thompson Reuters that automatically reads content and creates relationships between different articles, news pieces and reports based on the businesses, places, events, organisations and individuals mentioned in them.

External developers have been encouraged to play with the technology to create an additional level of metadata for their own sites that could offer users a more sophisticated level of additional content around news pieces and blog posts by relying on automatically generated semantic links rather than more rudimentary manual or algorithmically created versions.

The second round of development two has brought WordPress plugins and new modules for Drupal to allow developers to more easily integrate metadata into the applications and third-party tools they are building.

As part of round two, Thomson Reuters has also launched Calais Tagaroo, a WordPress plugin that automatically generates suggested tags for bloggers that want to incorporate additional relevant content to their posts.

This weekend has also seen the launch of New York Times’ Olympics blog, Rings, as a destination where readers can get a plethora of Times content about the Beijing games. The blog is the latest edition to the Times’ Olympics sub-site.

In addition to covering the sporting competition the blog – like the Times’ sub-site – draws in reporting from Times’ sports, foreign and business desks, as well as taking pieces from bureaux in China.

Compare this with the Olympics destination the BBC is running for the games. It could easily draw sporting coverage together with relevant material from the news pages but it has chosen not to make that link and instead leave its users to drift off elsewhere to find out about the other issues surrounding the games. It doesn’t make the most of pulling all the relevant and related material togther in the way the Times does with its blogs and sub-site.

The final example of news organisations working on relevance comes before any of that content is even written.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger told the Press Gazette that as part of the newspaper’s adoption of an integrated print and digital news production process reporting staff would abandon the traditional newsdesk structure to instead ape the set-up of Guardian.co.uk reporting staff and be rearranged into subject-specific teams or ‘pods’ to allow closer working between reporters and the ability file for both the web and the print edition as the story demands.

Press Gazette: Rusbridger says integration of Guardian and Observer will ‘unlock creativity’ of staff

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The independence of the Guardian’s three national titles – Guardian.co.uk, Observer and Guardian in print – will not be compromised by the integration of the news production process across the titles, editor Alan Rusbridger told the Press Gazette.

Rusbridger claimed that combining the titles would ‘unlock the creativity’ of his staff but that the distinct voices of each title would remain. Senior editors met with staff last week to discuss the future of the newspapers as it integrates its production processes.

All change at the Telegraph: integration continues

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image of the Telegraph newsroom at Victoria

The Telegraph has moved further towards its vision of a fully integrated newsroom with a raft of promotions, new arrivals and a newly integrated Science team.

Integrated desks contribute to both titles and the web site, The Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and Telegraph.co.uk, and so far business, sport, foreign and comment desks have been reshaped to fit the new mould.

The integrated science team will be headed up by Daily Telegraph science editor Roger Highfield and Sunday Telegraph science correspondent Richard Gray, with Professor Steve Jones continuing to contribute. The team will be assisted by Kate Devlin.

The changes follow the abrupt departure of Nic Fleming, Daily Telegraph science correspondent, two weeks ago.

Following the significant number of departures from the Telegraph sports desk last month, former Times sports feature writer Alison Kervin is joining as chief sports interviewer. She replaces star interviewer Sue Mott.

Other changes include Stephen Adams’ promotion to arts correspondent, replacing Nigel Reynolds who was axed last month.

The Daily Telegraph has also appointed former Press Association chief reporter John Bingham to take a senior reporting role.

Further changes are expected as the integration policy continues to roll out.

There has been talk of strike action over management decisions to axe staff members, which included the Telegraph Media Group’s decision to remove the entire reader relations desk as well as individual journalists over the last few months.

Sunday Telegraph editor Patience Wheatcroft resigned in September 2007, reportedly over the integration strategy.

Press Gazette: BBC News opens multi-platform newsroom

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News 24 Journalists and colleagues from radio and the TV news bulletins have become the first to move into the BBC’s new integrated newsroom and start work.

According to the Press Gazette, the first stage of the project was completed on Monday.

International and World News staff will be phased in over the next few weeks, along with journalists covering the text-based areas of the BBC News website.

Guardian: Telegraph strike threat on hold

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The Telegaph’s NUJ chapel have postponed the threat of staff strike action as they wait for news of their employers plans on flexible working.

According to the Guardian, staff at the paper are again smarting from a round of quick-fire dismissals – a chapel meeting yesterday was reported as being ‘furious’ as staff railed against the treatment of colleagues.

Yet journalists decided not to do anything ahead of an NUJ meeting with Telegraph Media Group reps next week.

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Print and online integration ‘not the key to success’

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Image of Kristine Lowe Kristine Lowe is a freelance journalist who writes on the media industry for number of US, UK and Norwegian publications. Today Online Journalism Scandinavia asks why not integrating print and online may be the way forward.

Integration is not the recipe to become a nation’s newspaper of choice, says the editor-in-chief of Norway’s leading news site.

“It is very demanding to take the poll position both in print and online as VG has done in Norway. It demands a very strong focus on both platforms,” Torry Pedersen, the editor-in-chief of Schibsted-owned VG online, Norway’s most profitable and most read news site, told journalism.co.uk.

“Print and online are different disciplines and will only become more different. Until now, we have been so fortunate as to be able to develop on our own and build our own culture,” added Pedersen.

VG.no is organised in a different company than its printed sister publication, VG (short for Verdens Gang).

This separation has transfered into dramatic success because each company has a core business with specific aims, rather than often counter productive aims of a newspaper company producing online and print under one system.

In 2006, VG.no had a profit margin of 42.1 per cent compared to the 12.6 per cent of VG’s print edition. In week 11 2008, the news site had 3m users (according to TNS Gallup).

“Our success is to a large extent built on the fact that VG online has had its own floor and been separate from the rest of the newspaper. This is changing now that VG online has become so big we need more space, but I’m adamant that VG online will be a separate news operation,” Pedersen said.

Pedersen, who has staff keeping a constant eye on worldwide online innovation, told Journalism.co.uk that he had yet to see an example of online and print integration being fully successful.

Web feeds in Independent’s newsroom could cause ’stress’

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The Observer’s media diary reports that the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) is concerned over new plasma screens in the Independent’s newsroom, which display feeds from the paper’s recently relaunched website.

“We are worried that such large visual displays are being sited directly above staff, and the stress they could bring through visual disturbance and heat,” the NUJ is quoted as saying in yesterday’s Observer media diary.

Channel 4 newsroom reaches halfway stage of integration

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Channel 4 news has reached the halfway stage in its plans to integrate online and broadcast operations, according to an email update from More4 news presenter Kylie Morris.

In the daily Snowmail news bulletin, Morris says the programme has ‘moved into half a new newsroom with completely new technology’ – something that seems to be ruffling a few feathers, if you read the full text of the email announcement below.

BRAVE NEWS WORLD (DIGITAL VERSION)
I’m going to let you into a small secret today, but an interesting one. This is a milestone in modern television news production. We have moved into half a new newsroom with completely new technology. There’s no paper, there’s no tangible video or film. Everything is digital. And those of us who were mad in the analogue age are now completely crazy in the digital follow-up.

Perhaps I should have made that a singular observation. The potential is fantastic – instant everything and instantly edited everything (perhaps I exaggerate a little). But the human capacity to keep up with it all and to ensure that the journalism does too – that is the real issue. You won’t notice any difference – well, not unless the entire thing blows up and blue smoke starts coming out of my ears. But we certainly hope that we will be able to provide you with an even better Channel 4 News than heretofore. The whole process of change will not be completed until well into April.