IFRA

IFRA: How did the decision to reorganise your newsroom come about?

La Cour-Harbo: The management team saw that in the future, one leg would not be enough for a newspaper house. In order to be solidly planted on the ground, we needed more legs. The management team decided that the future was to combine all media because of the spin-off of the news gathering.

IFRA: What are the main benefits NORDJYSKE Medier has realised since reorganising its newsroom?

La Cour-Harbo: First of all, it helps to have all the media in the same house because there is a benefit from primary research. There are also some benefits for production, but research is very important, so you can benefit from researching once. Of course there might be different research for different media, but the basic research in the news work is used more than one time.

It’s also good that one person might produce more media for the same event. They don’t always do that, but they can do it when it’s the easiest or the best way to do it. Sometimes we have to send two reporters to the same event if there are deadline problems, or if the job is so big that it’s best to have two to do it. It’s also important that one photographer can do the same job for both still and video. In these cases – as with all the work we are doing in this type of newsroom – it’s very important to plan what you are going to do.

IFRA: How many journalists do you have in the newsroom?

La Cour-Harbo: Around 200.

IFRA: What is the circulation of the newspaper?

La Cour-Harbo: A bit more than 60,000. We have six editions, so we produce a lot of pages. We are one of the biggest papers in Denmark when it comes to unique pages per day, but when you see the newspaper, some of the content is only published in special areas, with local zoning.

IFRA: What are the main lessons that you learned from the reorganisation process?

La Cour-Harbo: We didn’t know what would happen when we started to do this, but nearly all of the journalists were very interested in participating in the project. They could see that this might be the future, that this type of newsroom could be the way that we were going to work in the future. They also understood the pressure we were putting on ourselves to work with multiple media.

There’s a balance in how much knowledge you can give a group of people during a certain period of time. You have to adjust all the time how much they are able to cope with because there are a lot of new things coming up and changing from a traditional newspaper house as we were, and combining it with TV and web and radio. That’s very challenging.

When you start, everybody is very interested, but the toughest thing is to do it in daily work. One of the things we have learned is that you have to be very focused on following the ways that you have decided to work and talk about it all the time.

We have adjusted a lot during this period. For instance, just moving one news meeting 15 minutes can mean a lot of how the rest of the day will be, because TV is very heavy when it comes to equipment and planning. Newspapers were used to having only one fixed deadline. When it comes to web, it is all the time. But when is the right time to have our meetings? How do we plan? The newspaper can be planned in the morning if you print during the night, but if you need something for your TV station in the morning, it is not enough to have a planning meeting in the morning because then it’s too late. So, there is a lot of adjusting the needs for the different media.

Also the tools we are working with – we had a newspaper prepress system. How could we use that for TV? We could not. But we could make our systems work together. We have not done this fully, but we are working on it. There is not an editorial workflow tool for all media. It comes to planning, workflow control, doing run-downs for TV production, things like that. We need a totally new tool, and we are working on developing that tool with our vendors. We are not there yet, but today it is routine for us to work in that way.

IFRA: Do you do a lot of training?

La Cour-Harbo: Yes, we run a kind of public school for journalists. We run a lot of courses on radio training, TV training, thinking in multiple media. Everybody is trained in thinking in multiple media, and there have been special follow-ups on performance education on TV.

In the very beginning, the biggest problem was with TV to those who were not able to do TV in a proper way. There was interest enough in being a TV journalist, but not everybody could do that, and not everybody can do that.

IFRA: What are you planning to do next?

La Cour-Harbo: To make the house become a true, full-media environment, it is important to have a tool that works in all media. We just started to put pressure on our vendors to work with this thinking. For years now everybody is talking about multimedia prepress systems, but they are not prepress systems anymore, they are pre-publishing systems. That’s very important to change the “press” to “publish” because we are publishing in a lot of different channels.

At the same time, when we publish there is the need to have contact with our users – not readers – and you can translate that to customers, because there are customers for the web, for TV, for radio, for the newspaper.

We have to be in contact with them, and we have to know their needs: how they spend money, their behaviour … all the things you must know from the web activities that need to be transformed into all that we are doing.

Then we must interconnect all the knowledge we have in the house with all of the content that we have. That’s the next big step. And we are not only talking about editorial content. We are also talking about ads, about user-produced things on the web – the whole media spectrum.

IFRA: You mentioned ads just now. Are your ad sales people also working and selling across all media?

La Cour-Harbo: There are still people who are focused on specific items, but in general, everybody is selling to everything, like the newsroom is producing for all media.

One of the things we believe strongly in is search. If we have the best search in this part of the country, we’ll be the most-used website. That is one of the items we are looking at strongly now, to buy tagging software that can tag everything so the product is surrounded by relevance. We want to surround all of the content we have with relevant links. For that, we need tagging with key words, but it’s not easy to find somebody who can offer you the right key words.

We are in the final part of making a contract with a company that can supply us with tagging software, and that type of software should go to both editorial content and to ads, and to ads from telephone directories and things like that, so we’ll have the same tagging on all of the content in the house. We have found out that nobody has really done that before. We have been looking for newspaper vendors doing that on both ad systems and on prepress systems and nobody is really doing it. There are some that are trying to do it, but not so that everything is tagged to all content.

I think it will be in common use in a short time because everybody is talking about search technologies and surrounding everything with the relevant links.

As an example, we have just bought new cameras for all the still cameras. We have chosen Nikon because they are very good right now. We have equipped all the cameras with GPS so all the pictures will be tagged with GPS coordinates, so when they are used on the web we can see where they are used.

We will tag all stories with geographic data so when we are searching on the web we can see where we have been, and finding small things to do to make it more interesting and combining these things from the newspaper which can be added on the web so we can give people on the web more than what they have in the newspaper. We are trying to supply users in the platform where they want to be in the best way with all this.

Interview by Brian Veseling, senior editor for Editorial, Advertising and General Management.