A revolution in the production of news was heralded this week when the editor of the Financial Times, Lionel Barber, announced that the newspaper would switch its focus from paper to digital.
The pink pages are not about to disappear from the news stands. But from spring 2014, it will be put together by what Barber called a ‘small, print-focused team’ who will work beside a larger web unit.
In a memo to staff, he left no doubt about the radical nature of the change that’s coming.
'The 1970s-style newspaper publishing process - making incremental changes to multiple editions through the night - is dead,’ he said. ‘In future, our print product will derive from the web offering - not vice versa.’
What does this mean for the paper, the newspaper industry and everyone whose job involves communicating with it?
For the FT’s journalists, there’ll be a whole new way of working to get used to. The plan is to produce a single-edition, global print product with minimal changes in the evening. So the title will move resources from night to day, from afternoon to morning, especially in London.
The news editors and reporters will shift away from what Barber called ‘reactive news gathering’ to producing ‘news in context’, while remaining faithful to the pursuit of ‘original, investigative journalism’.
News editors, Barber said, ‘will need to do more pre-planning and intelligent commissioning for print and online. This will require a change in mindset for editors and reporters’. He added: ‘Much of the newspaper will be pre-planned and produced.’
As for when they get the news out, there’ll be no more saving the top stories for the morning, as Barber made clear. ‘Production journalists will publish stories to meet peak viewing times on the web rather than old print deadlines,’ he said. ‘The process will be akin to a broadcasting schedule. Where once we planned around page lay-outs, we will now adopt a news bulletin-style approach.’
The emphasis online will no longer be on section pages, as it has been traditionally; it will be on articles instead. And reporters and commentators will be expected to communicate with readers. The aim will be to deepen engagement and meet readers’ demands whenever they turn to the FT for breaking news and analysis.
The main reason for the wholesale changes is that the FT is building a global subscription business. Last year its online subscriptions surpassed its print subscriptions. Today, it has more than 100,000 more digital subscriptions than print sales.
The rest of the industry is watching carefully. Digital readership is rising everywhere, while the numbers buying the printed papers is in steep decline. The trends are more advanced at the FT but the other titles are moving the same way. One or two editors can see a not-too-distant future when newspapers which are published daily now will come out in print form only on Saturdays, confining themselves to tablets, phones and the web for the rest of the week.
Whether or not that is true, those who deal with the media on a regular basis are having to adapt fast to a rapidly changing landscape. Like the FT, the Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Mail and Sun and Mirror are breaking stories throughout the day on their websites and phone apps. This means that stories offered early in the day have a decent chance of getting published on the same day, whereas previously the editors might have been bored with them by the end of the day and consigned them to the spike instead of putting them in tomorrow papers.
But it also means that media professionals must be more alert and must respond faster to stories than anyone would have dreamed 10 years ago. Then, you might have had hours to draft a statement or set up an interview, for instance to rebut a criticism. The newspapers will still give you a right of reply, but they might not hang around for it. They’re more likely to publish on the web and update the story with your comment later, by which time thousands of people will have read it and the tone will have been set for follow-up reporting in other media.
The faster the turnover of stories in the digital revolution, the greater the pressure on spokespeople to keep pace.
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