A “quiet revolution” is taking place at an East Midlands daily newspaper – led by multiskilled journalists in a new newsroom culture.

Nottingham Evening Post editor Malcolm Pheby today told the Society of Editors Conference that having the same journalists working for both print and online allowed flexible editorial to be scaled to the differing needs of each day.

“The result of all this is a continuously refreshed and effervescent website as well as a frequently updated newspaper,” he told a debate entitled ‘New Newsrooms for Old’.

“What we’ve found in Nottingham is that great content is critical. We can originate brilliant local content more quickly than anyone else.

“How we do it 24/7 is more difficult. Getting as much on the website as you can is not easy but that’s what we’re trying to do.”

Mr Pheby told delegates the paper started with a vision of a place where every media in Nottingham met – sports, news, entertainment along with other local business and community needs.

Workflows were redesigned from the bottom up, meaning that stories were now checked by a maximum of three different people, not the sometimes nine which had become the norm.

“The result of this was to allow far more time for creativity and planning, much less in checking,” he added.

Sub-editors can now edit audio like its “second nature”, photographers shoot video and reporters write web-heads.

The team publishes seven niche websites and 20 so-called hyperlocal sites as well its daily newspaper. Feature content and blogs are also uploaded at the same time every day as readers look for familiarity, he said.

In April this year thisisnottingham.co.uk hit the 300,000 mark for unique users and it was recently crowned Newspaper Website of the Year by the Newspaper Society.

Mr Pheby was joined on the panel by editors from The Sun, The Guardian, Financial Times and ITN – all of whom agreed that content was still king whether in print and online.

There was a brief silence when one editor asked the panel if any of their efforts had resulted in increased profitabilty.

Financial Times managing editor Hugh Carnegy said: “The difficulties of doing all this is inevitablly we’re having to be more efficient, i.e. keep costs down – and we’re not getting away from that reality.”