The president of the Society of Editors today suggested that the recession had helped the industry to weed out what he called “wasteful duplication and unnecessary practices.”

Giving the opening address at this morning’s session, Donald Martin said the balance of resources in the industry had been “too heavily biased towards production.”

Donald, editor of the Sunday Post, Dundee, said the downturn had forced editors to reappraise their traditional ways of working, and that in many cases it had been “no bad thing.”

But he went on to say that news providers were now emerging from the crisis as “lean, mean fighting machines” which understood their customers better.

He told the conference: “The recession, declining revenues and the need to become multi-media to serve a fragmenting audience forced us all to challenge our very purpose and our traditional ways of working.

“And in many cases that was no bad thing. Yes, I accept it was painful. For both staff and us as editors. We would not be human if it didn’t take its toll. But to survive we needed to change and adapt.

“Not all of us were not operating as efficiently as we thought and had many lessons to learn from an objective, dispassionate scrutiny of everything we did.

“Our balance of resources was often too heavily biased to production and not enough to content. We had wasteful duplication and unnecessary processes.

“Yes, we valued our collective output but had often failed to prioritise that which truly adds value. We needed to put our time and effort into that which delivers the audience we want.

“We are emerging from the pain lean mean fighting machines with a better understanding of our customers, wherever they may be, and a greater understanding of what we truly need to add the unique value that will ensure our long term success.”