Regional publisher Johnston Press is piloting new-look newsrooms at a series of titles in the Midlands which could be rolled out across the company.
Under the plan, journalists will no longer work for individual newspapers but will be part of a unit responsible for several different titles.
The idea, which JP says aims to “transform the way news is gathered and disseminated” is being piloted at the company’s centres in Derbyshire and North Nottinghamshire.
Titles affected include the Derbyshire Times, Matlock Mercury, Mansfield and Ashfield Chad and Worksop Guardian.
The plan, which was announced to staff last week, will see journalists at around 11 weekly newspapers in the region combined into the three teams or ‘units.’
The Derbyshire unit will cover the Derbyshire Times, Matlock Mercury, Buxton Advertiser, Ripley and Heanor News, Belper News, Eastwood and Kimberley Advertiser and Ilkeston Advertiser, while the Notts unit will be responsible for the Chad, Worksop Guardian and Hucknall Despatch.
There will also be a central unit covering entertainments, community news, ad features and sport working across all the titles in the region.
It is understood that Derbyshire Times editor Graeme Huston is in overall charge of the experiment, which is expected to last around six weeks.
A Johnston Press spokeswoman said: “We have launched a pilot project in one area of the north Midlands, led by our editorial teams, which aims to transform the way we gather and disseminate news and information across multiple platforms.
“We are looking at ways of allowing our news teams to focus on specific areas of content and improving our reader experience.
“The pilot is a work in progress and as such we can’t – at this stage – comment on the specifics of the scheme, although do anticipate it will allow our news teams to fully embrace their community relationships whilst providing a 24/7 news and information service.”
The initiative follows the recent introduction by Trinity Mirror of its Newsroom 3.1 blueprint, designed to encourage a “digital first” approach to publishing.
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Because journalists obviously need to be spread even more thinly.
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There has been a ‘unit’ in Wigan for years! While concentrating principally on the WEP and Wigan Observer, the same, over-stretched, small team produces copy/pictures for further substantial titles in Wigan, St Helens and Leigh. And they do it very well. Perhaps this unit has given JP bosses the idea!
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It makes perfect sense…. and no, I don’t work for JP.
Reporters should be able to write for a number of titles. Therefore, if there is sickness at one title then others can cover easily.
The doom-mongers on this site will have several complaints:
1. Lack of specialist local knowledge: Well, the ‘team’ will still include people who know each patch inside out and who can be used to check details with.
2. Reporters are spread more thinly: Not necessarily. It just means that on a day-to-day basis they can be directed to the work/title that needs them most.
3. ‘It wasn’t like this on my day’. Get over yourselves. We no longer have dozens of reporters in newsrooms. In your day, we also didn’t have access to the internet to be able to check many facts etc at the click of a button. So, if you’re in Ilkeston and need to write about Buxton, it’s not the end of the world.
Splitting the units into counties also seems sensible. There is much county-wide news that affects everyone, whether you’re in Ilkeston, Ripley Buxton or Bakewell. One person writing this story once is a good use of resources, and she/he can then localise it for each title if necessary.
Managed right, I do think this can work. The newsdesks need to play to each journalist’s strengths (local knowledge) but trust them to adapt to different titles.
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Here we go again: “designed to encourage a “digital first” approach to publishing.” I should think JP doesn’t want to comment on the specifics of the scheme as, at some stage, it will develop into a cost cutting exercise. Look at what became of the JP Virtual Studio plan that enabled Creative Studios from all areas to pick up work from other centres: in a word – India.
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Sometimes I wonder how local and regional journalists of 30, 20 or even 10 years ago managed to cobble together, without mobile phones, laptops, Google, Facebook and Twitter, newspapers which reported on and reflected their communities.
S, The Real World AND JP Cost Cut Victim both make good points, but I can’t help think, and shoot me down in flames here, this has got more to do with cost-cutting than genuinely ‘allowing our news teams to fully embrace their community relationships whilst providing a 24/7 news and information service and improve our reader experience.”
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I want my newspaper to be written by someone who is based in Ilkeston, not someone who is working nearly 25 miles away at the Derbyshire Times in Chesterfield. Clearly management doesn’t know the area well!
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Blah, “The real world”
Think about it; has JP introduced a single editorial change in the last ten years that didn’t have reducing costs at its heart?
Have any of the big regional publishers?
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This is simply a means of getting the maximum amount of work out of the smallest number of people – a reporting hub, if you like.
Pile all the reporters into an edge-of-town industrial unit so they can stare at their screens all day and ‘churnalise’.
The future is bright.
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Johnston Press should study the H.T. Heinz Company, of Pennsylvania, when it comes to dissemination across multiple platforms.
Heinz is one of the world’s most successful and profitable companies which has retained its market leadership thanks to constantly increasing productivity among its multinational workforce.
While production capacity has quadrupled during the past decade, the number of employees by output ratio has declined significantly during this same period.
From their headquarters in Pittsburgh, Heinz oversee a product which is consumed across six continents and in an estimated 230 countries.
For those who claim that beans and journalism don’t mix, remember that the famous “57 varieties” label proves as popular today as when first devised many years ago.
In other words, economy of scale or standardisation, does not need to affect flavour.
With media output, local differentials are retained.
The time will come when journalists in one factory unit will be able to produce media output not merely for platforms in the UK, but right across the English-speaking world.
So, for example, a reporter in rural Ribble Valley, Lancashire, writing about Northern clog dancing, might tomorrow have to turn his hand at updating consumers on the continuing drought in Cactus County, Arizona.
In fact, the multicultural UK is ideally placed for global journalism. Today, an East European graduate trainee based in Birmingham will be uploading the latest traffic smash on the M6 outside Sutton Coldfield, tomorrow it will be reporting from Krasnyy Luch (Ukraine) on the success of western consumer durables being introduced into the Donetsk Oblast.
There’s no need to send any journalist outside the factory gates, it can all be done via webcam.
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Media Wales was one of the first, if not *the* first, to do this—and it has been an unquestionable disaster.
It is no coincidence that the company’s Celtic titles are now among the worst performing weeklies in the UK.
There’s clearly a commercial need to reduce costs but merging papers into oblivion is not the answer.
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This isn’t a particularly new idea and it absolutely makes sense…up to a point. Problems arise when the geographical beat is just too big for a single person to know, or the number of titles they’re writing for becomes so large and diverse that they lose familiarity with (and loyalty to) the individual papers.
One major potential benefit it does bring is for journalists to develop more specialisms, so you can start to have (e.g.) a health reporter or an environment reporter on weeklies – something that’s impossible when you only have one or two people on a title.
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Isn’t it time for the government to step in and force near bankrupt organisations like JP to sell off local newspapers who are failing to serve the local community? Journalism was once about informing, educating and entertaining the local populace – and holding those in power to account. Far too often now reporters are stuck in offices churning out ‘right first time’ filling-box articles for all and sundry, and courts and council meetings are rarely covered. My own local weekly, once an excellent paper with twice the circulation it has now, recently celebrated GCSE exam successes with pages and pages of pictures of delighted students who, according to the captions, had gained A’s, B’s and C’s! It’s shameful really and surely time bring back the subs.
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Top post Pluto!
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Make a note of this date. The final nail in the coffin of Local reporting.
And newsroom?would that be one or two reporters?
Actually its already happened in some areas, where offices were closed and no replacements found in time. Now JP will save even more money but not reopening them.
But you have to be realistic. Look at share price.
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Real world. E mails just don’t bring you the exclusives you get from personal contacts. As a reporter I picked up loads of off diary stories just by being in town. True you can fill your paper from e mails. Crime from cops press releases, planning stories everyone else has, press releases from councils, charities etc. Heavens, reporting 21st century is so sterile and boring.And the public does see through this!
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Real word. How many local papers now have reporters who live on the patch and know it. I know mine doesn’t and it shows in the shallow writing. My local is full stuff of no interest from way outside. This all about money and nothing about quality, sadly.
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Pluto. Very interesting. But are you saying that is a good or a bad thing for local journalism?
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Let’s give JP a chance to redeem itself. Every decision taken in past few years has led to job losses and huge drops in newspaper sales. Give it a try folks. Its the only game in town.
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Pluto – I wish I was on your planet! Sounds like fun!
Seriously, this is not ‘new’ – it’s been happening on the JP newspapers (with the emphasis on the plural) that I escaped from for many, many months. People have been shuffled around like chess pieces and made to fill in here, there and everywhere. Fine to a point – except when holidays and sickness leave every publication and journalist stretched to breaking point.
Also… a blueprint for ‘newsrooms’? Can they fit all these staff into the nearest Starbucks??
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Sounds like a logistical nightmare for editors – and there are fewer of them around these days too. How about just one office to cover the whole of the UK? (Scotland can fend for itself, of course!)
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Wonder why JP hacks are so cynical?
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Instead of all this management pseudo-speak, when has JP conducted a survey into why their circulation of titles is in free-fall.
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Great stuff guys!
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There is an obvious pro to this reporting hub arrangement – countywide news stories that were being duplicated by titles will no longer be so, freeing up reporters to cover other stories and saving time and money.
However anyone who knows this area will know just how large an area it is geographically. What really do residents of Hucknall have in common with residents of Worksop, or residents of Ilkeston with residents of Buxton? They might be in the same counties, but they are not the same communities.
For this to work there needs to be enough reporters covering truly local stories for each of these areas so that the pages of the paper and websites are not just full of wider, more generic countywide news. They need to be able to get out on their patches and make contacts.
I fear though that this is a way of ‘streamlining’ reporting teams and will result in fewer people being employed. Are there really enough people working for these papers to provide 24/7 news coverage?
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Sure. You can fill a paper any day with e mails. And by the look of most weekly papers I have seen that’s good enough for bean-counting JP bosses.
But unless you are out on the beat it will never have any heart.
Get out in the LOCAL pubs,clubs, shops, streets, etc and find some human interest stories. Anything else is short-changing you as a journalist and the readers, despite the management spin.
Oops, I forgot. All those non-journalism production jobs to do first and short of staff anyway. Forget everything I said.
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Of course it can be made to work. Will it make the papers better, Real World?
The answer is no. Journalism is dead. Churnalism rules.
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If the journos involved in this ‘experiment’ have any sense they’ll make sure this fails miserably. If it works they’ll have innovated themselves out of their jobs – it won’t be long before every weekly in the country is produced from a silo in Peterborough, Sheffield or Preston.
An old editor of mine used to insist on his reporters living on patch. That’s how they really got to know the area and got the tips that lead to great stories.
It won’t be long before reporters have never even been to the patch they cover.
Glad I got out before the job stopped being fun.
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Just ANOTHER excuse for cost cutting by JP. When are JP and TM going to realise that for weekly local newspapers DIGITAL ISN’T WORKING. They can’t effectively monetise digital but are stupidly and stubbornly pushing on a yway at the great expense of their core print products. A well run weekly paper will sell but these greedy and basically incompetent companies are gaming the family silver for a prize that doesn’t exist.
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Exactly Mr Angry. They are chasing Fools Gold. The jackpot does not exist. The grand vision is deeply flawed. Those behind it either won’t see it or simply refuse to admit it because of their arrogance and over-inflated egos.
But the miners are being flogged into the ground and then tossed aside as the pit bosses grow ever more manic and frustrated.
Great, have a team of inter-changeable reporters covering a huge patch for several publications. I’m all for versatility and multi-skilling but make sure the team is BIG ENOUGH to do the job and the publications (newpapers/websites, podcasts or whatever) justice.
The hub fad spreading like ebola across this once-proud industry is doing irreparable damage.
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Let’s forget the notion that it was inevitable digital would rule and papers were dead. Many JP papers thrived before the firm wasted a small fortune on needless redesign, started disastrous subbing hubs, and enforced several prices rises. Then reduced staff and increased workload in their fruitless pursuit of digital gold. I know its history but it is what brought us to this latest piece of desperation. I too once worked for an editor who would not employ reporters who did not live on their patch. Most don’t now and it shows.
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AH is stubbornly flogging the dead digital horse in the hope it will arise again and gallop to the winning post! Sadly it will be too late by the time he realises and moves on to his next chairmanship!
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Supplementary question. Do content editors edit-check copy?
Judging by latest edition of my paper no. Full of literals, style and grammar errors.some as basic as ….the council HAVE.
Of course they won’t pick up place name errors if they don’t know the area, and a lot will not. Bring back proper subs, please.
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Didn’t JP once have a slogan something like Life is Local. Laughable.
Still if you put a digital man in charge of newspapers you can expect only one thing.
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Yet another daft idea from a senior management with woefully little experience of actually working in a newsroom. They are right, though, that it will “transform the way news is gathered and disseminated” — it should bugger it up completely..
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It is worth noting that every village pub I visit on my travels has copies of local newsletters. Some are admittedly extremely amateur in terms of both production quality and editorial content, but others compare quite favourably with the professional weekly newspapers which claim to cover the local areas in question.
These publications benefit from being truly local and my impression is that they are often considered by the local population to be of greater value to the community than the professional weeklies, which in many cases are just a shadow of their former selves.
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