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Future of newsrooms is integrated, claims editors survey

More than three quarters of newspaper editors believe that integrated newsrooms will be the norm for newspaper production in the next five years, a global survey has claimed.

Eight six per cent of respondents to the Newsroom Barometer 2008 survey agreed that multimedia newsrooms - where digital and print productions run as one process - would dominate in the short term.

North American editors are most in favour, with as 95 per cent responding that they thought this would be the case. In Europe the figure was 85 per cent.

The system - much eulogised by several newspapers, such the Telegraph since it moved into a new integrated newsroom in 2006 - had been taken up in 53 per cent of newsrooms run by editors contributing to the study.

Of those editors not already overseeing integrated newsrooms, seven out of ten expect their operations to become integrated within the five years, with eighty three per cent of editors believed that in that time journalists would be expected to know how to work in a multimedia environment.

The World Editors Forum undertook one of the largest ever surveys of editors’ attitudes toward future production by running an online survey that collected responses from 704 editors from across the globe. The findings were presented today at an industry forum held at the London headquarters of Thompson Reuters.

The survey found that an increasing number of newspaper editors were very optimistic about the future of their newspapers - 31 per cent of editors, up from 24 per cent from the first Newsroom Barometer study in 2006, which polled 435 editors globally.

Overall, Eighty five per cent of editors said they were to some degree optimistic about their newspaper's future - the same number as in 2006.

"When we did the first Newspaper Barometer last year we were stuck firstly by how optimistic editors were about the outlook and how for a very substantial number integrated newsrooms were a complete given and entirely accepted," said George Brock, Times Saturday editor and president of the World Editors Forum.

"What I notice very strongly from this year, apart from confirming that optimism, is that there is a very big disconnection between that way of thinking about the future newsroom and the preparation, training and resources that editorial organisations seem to be giving to it. There seems to be really quite a disconnect."

Asked about the apparent contrast between the optimistic tone of the survey results against a prevailing appearance of gloom that surrounds the newspaper industry, Brock responded that a doom-laden outlook was not coming from editors.

"This is a survey of editorial opinion, most pessimism is a survey of commercial opinion," he said.

"I don’'t think that most editors yet know what future business models of their organisations will be, in full detail, but at the moment they are reasonably optimistic."

In addition the survey suggested that a growing number of editors (44 per cent, up from 41 per cent in 2006) believed that in ten years time the web would become the most common way for reading news.

That was reflected in the response to a question asking editors where they would spend additional funding - if it were made available - to improve quality. Thirty five per cent answering that they would spend it in training journalists in new media.

The number believing that print would remain dominant fell from the 2006 figure of 35 per cent to 31 in the latest study.

A growing number of editors also believed that the majority of news – print and online – would be free for the reader in ten years time, with 65 per cent thinking that future production would involve outsourcing editorial services.

Fifty eight per cent believed falling youth readership was their biggest threat, ahead of the internet itself (38 per cent) and lack of innovation and development (36 per cent).

Over a quarter (28 per cent) expected the quality of journalism to decline next year, while 45 per cent expected it to improve.

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