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Sky to integrate news production operations

Posted: 04/08/08 By: Laura Oliver
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Sky News is to integrate its online, television and radio news production operations to form a single multimedia unit.

From September 29 more than 130 producers behind Sky News TV, Sky News.com, Sky News Radio and Sky News Active, will become part of one multimedia team, a press release said.

As part of the changes a new department tasked with developing new technology for use across the platforms will be set up, led by current Sky News editor Steve Bennedik.

Peter Lowe, assistant editor of output, will have administrative responsiblity for all Skynews.com, Sky Active and Sky News Radio producers.

Chris Birkett, executive editor, who will take control of news output across TV, online and radio under the changes, told Journalism.co.uk the move would bring new opportunities for Sky's journalists.

"It's not about changing the way a journalist works on a given day; it's about changing a journalist's perception of their career," he said.

"We really pride ourselves on the production teams that work in each medium as the most effective unit of delivering quality output in that form. We will retain those teams, but we want our journalists to see their careers a bit more broadly and also to allow us in the future to deploy our journalists on the medium that needs the most resources during a defined time period."

No physical changes will be made to the layout of the newsroom, but bringing multi-platform production operations under a centralised control will increase efficiency, he added.

The New Technology Department will involve editorial, engineering and web staff and will not have 'strict parameters', Birkett said.

"We want people whose sole task is to think of new ways of delivering news. If we're going to retain our mantle as the primary innovators of broadcast journalism we've got to have people who just concentrate on that," he said.

"It isn't only about technology: it's about ideas and using existing technology in an original way. Some of it could be very engineering based, some of it could be quite TV based. I still think there's a lot of new technological scope for innovation in delivering television more efficiently."

Traffic to SkyNews.com, which was revamped in June, has increased by more than 35 per cent over the last 12 months, the company said.

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