This month I've been dispatched to Fleet Street to attend a training day hosted by Ifra Newsplex in association with Journalism.co.uk along with more print journalists than this part of London has seen for a while.

Alongside some of these print heavyweights, I'm feeling a little bit of a web-only minority, I have to say. I'd Twitter that if I could, but as is the case at so many of these conferences, there's no wifi.

Maybe that's a good thing: it means the 15 or so journalists can give Newsplex's Dietmar Schantin their undivided attention - well, apart from occasionally nipping out to take a phone call from their newsrooms.

Numerous papers and magazines have turned up: regional as well as national, consumer as well as business. News International is out en masse, with newsroom representatives from the Times, the Sunday Times, News of the World and the Sun.

We’ve all gathered to find out how to make the newsroom an integrated multimedia one. IFRA is fresh from doing just that with the Nottingham Evening Post's newsroom, but is more famous for overseeing the Telegraph's transformation from traditional broadsheet newsroom to an integrated 'hub and spoke' formation.

Speaker, or should I say motivator, Schantin, throws ideas at us. This is about streamlining systems and re-designing workflows – in short making things more efficient and being faster, while not losing quality.

In his mission to make us 'communicate with the audience through the brand' as efficiently as possible, he's not afraid to play devil's advocate, and likewise his audience are not afraid to tell him when something wouldn't work for their own newsroom.

But that's crucial, says Schantin: it’s not about applying the same formula everywhere, it's 'about tailoring and analysing the needs of each newsroom.'

Schantin uses newsroom examples from Europe (specifically Germany and Austria) and throws the idea of 'seven-stage checking' out the window. It's okay 'if it's fast enough,' he says: "But very often it's a very clumsy slow process. Quality doesn't necessarily improve after seven stages and this is proven."

He introduces us to three models for newsroom design: the traditionally separated model; a matrix model used by one Danish newspaper; and the Telegraph's integrated newsroom model.

In groups we draw up pros and cons: certainly the Telegraph's model does seem to make a lot of sense, although concerns are raised about whether it could lead to a loss of quality.

As one participant points out, although the Telegraph has gained in web traffic, the recent Ipsos Mori British Business Survey suggested the daily paper has lost many business executive readers since 2005 – it now attracts 187,000 business executive readers each day, down from 202,000 in 2005.

Later in the afternoon, it's the turn of Schantin's wife and colleague Sarah Schantin Williams, a consultant, trainer and researcher for IFRA Newsplex.

She talks us through the changes at the Nottingham Evening Post and uses examples from other newsrooms to show how the way the changes are introduced is crucial.

In a team exercise we're asked to take an example from the day's news and think about how we'd launch multimedia orientated coverage: it's quickly apparent that when journalists' roles are converged, so many factors need to be taken into consideration.

This training day is only a start, and for us just an introduction to Ifra's initiative to prepare international newspaper publishing houses for the multimedia challenges ahead.

I ask a few of the participants about whether they could see the move happening in their newsrooms. Robert Hands, integration project leader at the Times, said he could see it working for them 'up to a point'.



Richard Caseby, managing editor at the Sunday Times, tells me how they have found the introduction of change.

"What we found is there is more demand for change from our staff than we imagined, and in a way it is about managing those expectations," he says. "Everybody wants to do a lot, and it's a matter of trying to do enough, without actually damaging our users."

Speaking to me after the event, Schantin reiterates that the Telegraph model is not universal. It's a special model, he says, that needs to be tailored to each newsroom.