How the New York Times is managing convergence

The New York Times used to house its digital operations in a separate building from the main news operation. But since moving into new space a year ago, all of the journalists are sharing space in a massive three-story newsroom. That has helped the Times speed up the process of integrating the print and multimedia operations, says
Susan Edgerley, assistant managing editor of the Times, in a QandA with readers. Photo is from the New York Times

"Being in the same space as our Web colleagues helped us put into practice what we had always thought was the best way to go into the future — we're going together. Producers and multimedia experts sit on the Metro, National and Foreign desks. They have skills the editors of the traditionally print newsroom don't, and they are valued for their expertise."

Edgerley is in charge of managing the process of convergence, which can be painful for readers and journalists alike. Readers asked about everything from a perceived pro-Yankees bias to the elimination of roll-call votes from the print edition.
Edgerley also fielded a question from a student who wondered if he was wasting his time studying print journalism. Edgerley replied:

Yes, the Internet is where the industry is going, and no, I don't think you're wasting your time getting a print journalism degree. Telling stories fairly and compellingly will always be at the center of what we do.

But I bet you're more of a multiplatform kind of guy than I am (even though I am thumb-typing this on my Blackberry), and that's a good thing. And I would be surprised if you don't find yourself picking up all different kinds of Web skills over the arc of your career, and that's good, too.

Regarding your question about cross-training at The Times, well, we're doing all of the above. We're hiring people, some of them straight out of school, for their Web skills. When I ask them why they want to work here, they tell me because they want to be journalists and they love The Times.

At the same time, we are training some folks who used to work in print to work on the Web. A photo editor becomes a videographer. Page designers become Web producers. A copy editor blogs. An editor on our Continuous News Desk honchos our Topics pages. Not everyone does it, and not everyone has to. But many welcome the opportunity to try new things.

The web has forced a change in how editors think about news stories. Now they break stories on the web rather than holding them for the print edition. They can't risk losing a scoop to competitors that include specialty publications in entertainment, culture, sports and business, among others. Increasingly, the web comes first.

Should a reporter file now for NYTimes.com, and again in 10 minutes, and again 10 minutes after that? Or should she file a quick 300 words to the Web and then spend the rest of the day reporting for the next day's paper? Or is the answer all of the above? We make the decisions in much the same way we have always decided the relative importance of a story and what is its best play.

It's the culture, stupid, not the design

Newsroom design is important in creating the right atmosphere for multimedia news production. But editors at several large news organizations that have redesigned their newsrooms, from The Daily Telegraph in England to Zero Hora in Brazil and De Volkskrant in the Netherlands, say that creating the right culture is even more important. Read about it here.

Skills needed in digital newsrooms

Digital media producers and managers need to know HTML but don't necessarily need to know Flash. And the intangible talents and skills that journalists needed in the ancient world of newspapers, radio and television are the same in the digital world.

These are some of the inferences that can be drawn from a study by C. Max Magee of skills used and needed by digital journalists every day. You can get a PDF of the full study here.

Since online journalists spend a lot of their time repurposing material from one medium to another, copy editing skills are more important than they might be in a traditional newsroom. As might be expected, those who work at larger organizations put a bigger emphasis on editing rather than reporting and creating original material. At smaller sites unaffiliated with a major news organization, the opposite is true.

Magee based the study on responses from 438 journalists, with more than half the responses generated from members of the Online News Association.

HTML, use of content management systems and Photoshop were the three most highly rated skills.

Be sure to have a look at the color-coded charts at the end of the study which rank all 35 skills and talents measured.

There are other articles and surveys on the topic referenced in this piece published by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

How to make your newsroom multimedia

For editors who are trying to get their newsrooms up to speed on digital media, Mark Briggs has produced an invaluable 132-page book that is available free online in English, Spanish and Portuguese. You can download it in PDF format.
"Journalism 2.0" is a good place to start with multimedia storytelling. Each chapter has simple, direct instructions on how to harness readily available technology in new ways. Editors and news directors who have been baffled by their lack of training in certain types of technology will find help in overcoming the barriers.

Briggs gives you just enough technical language so that you can understand both the potential and the limits of the technology so as to avoid frustration.
If you are, say, a veteran radio news director, the advice on how to make the most of photos will be invaluable; to a veteran photographer, the advice will represent the basics of the craft. At the same time a photographer who is trying to add sound to a slide show on the web will pick up some tips on how to edit for the ear that every radio journalist already knows.
It's the kind of book that beginners and veterans alike can use right now and begin getting their hands dirty.

Managing conflict of print vs. web
The information in this book could help manage some of the newsroom conflicts that occur when, for example, the print people and web people tend to isolate themselves from each other, a problem they have struggled with at the Washington Post. An editor could create an ongoing series of courses based on the chapters of this book that bring specialists from both parts of the newsroom together. The courses could remove some of the fear factor that veterans may be facing, and it may show the younger tech-savvy folks how the basics of good journalism translate into a better web product.

Useful in Latin America
For any of us who are doing training of journalists in Latin America, it is tremendously valuable to have this available in Spanish and Portuguese. And for those of us who are trying to remove the barriers to a multimedia newsroom, it is a helpful tool.

"Journalism 2.0" is an initiative of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism,
a center of the University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism, and of the Knight Citizen News Network,
which is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.