Interview: Steve Dyson, editor Birmingham Mail 'We're planning local community websites'

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The Birmingham Mail editor Steve Dyson talks to Journalism.co.uk about the Mail's planned move to a new HQ, the impact of the BBC's decision to expand its local online offering and future integration plans.

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SD: I guess that we are doing that already. The way that we use the multimedia editors and the video journalists, they are smack in the middle of the newsroom.

What we have got at the moment is quite hungry print journalists wanting a piece of that action. I have a queue of people wanting to go on the video journalism course.

The two new multimedia editors haven't been shipped in from elsewhere, one was a senior reporter the other a news editor…we had enough strong people internally to move us on.

Will it be an entirely multimedia newsroom? I think it will be, but not necessarily from day one when we move in - it's a constantly evolving thing.

What we have to remember is to look after the print titles that we have now, the figures haven't been properly audited yet, but last year we made something like £20 million profit from our print titles in the Midlands, something like 70,000 sales a day. We have got a lot of reader interest and commercial value in the print title, we can't just suddenly say 'we're just a multimedia newsroom now.' That's where the blue-sky-thinking goes ultimately, but to continue printing seven editions a day, six days per week, you have to retain those original print disciplines and deadlines.

How we will move forward is not by having a separate multimedia team, but by integrating them slowly and effectively within the existing set up, so whether that is by the time we move, in six months or in two years time, we'll eventually [have a position where] the chief sub thinks in all other channels not just print.

That will happen, but I think it would be false to say that by the time we move into our new building it will be a multimedia newsroom. I don't think you can suddenly create it…the process for us to get to that point is not to integrate but to grow it from inside the current team, we're organically growing it.

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I don't see why that couldn't happen, but that just depends on the strength of the things that we do.

At the moment the plan is for a brand strategy round the Birmingham Mail. Villa, Blues [Birmingham City] and Baggies [West Bromwich Albion] fans will go to the Mail because they know that we have reporters who are specific to those areas. I think that translates to the web too.

Now, if we get the feeling that our news on Villa is going mad and that we need a new site for it then we will, but in my mind at the moment is the thought that it might almost dilute the strength of the Mail's strategy…I'm not ruling it out but it's not part of current strategy.

What we are planning further down the line is local community websites, again hosted by the Birmingham Mail, but they may well be sites in their own right.

We are looking at a variety of community sites, mainly around schools and media courses in schools, where they have asked if they can fill a local community website for us.

We are talking to educational groups about it. There are about 15 schools around Birmingham that are developing media courses and as part of the courses they have to have websites which have to be updated daily by students. What we are talking to them about is hosting it for them.

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The danger is that in some areas they might either put off or even kill off what local newspapers are trying to do online.

I don't think they will do that here, I don't think they will succeed because Birmingham is such a large area no one in this footprint has such detailed coverage as the Birmingham Mail.

We have a reporter per suburb…the BBC in the Birmingham area can't do that. Radio WM has about five reporters to cover the whole of the West Midlands. They can't go to the local, local level that we go to.

I don’t think they will succeed here. They tried it with their local TV network. One of the BBC's local TV pilot areas was 'Birmingham'. That was as local as it got.

Their local TV strategy was 'let's do Birmingham as a local area', well, we do three editions for Birmingham and a reporter for each suburb, so there was no way their local TV initiative was going to out-'localise' us. I would like to think that we could out-localise them on internet coverage as well.

The BBC wouldn't go past city level, it wouldn't go much more local. Unless they are going to invest a lot more money in it and I don't think they can afford that.

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We have a lot of traditional readers, we are a traditional man-in-the-street newspaper, so we will have many couples in their 50s and 60s who just get the Mail, or are early users of the internet.

So we have to tell the story from scratch, but it doesn't mean that we can't have a broader version of that story. If we have broken a really big story on the net, we'd mention that in the story the next day…but we wouldn't always do that as we would begin to piss off the readers that do not have the net.

It's a balance really: even with the furniture going into the paper [referring readers to online services] we have got to be a little bit careful about not having it on every page, otherwise your average user of the paper, that is not on the net, will be antagonised by it.