'One newsroom, no secrets': the Birmingham Mail's move to Fort Dunlop

Last week as publisher Trinity Mirror announced a company-wide pay freeze, sister Midlands titles the Birmingham Post and Birmingham Mail moved into their new offices at Fort Dunlop.

But, according to Mail editor Steve Dyson, moving into the UK's largest open plan office space outside of London has been a morale booster for staff, who are also facing a series of voluntary redundancies,

"It's such a lift, the new building is a brand spanking new open plan office it's an entire floor of the old Fort Dunlop building, which is an iconic building here in Birmingham," Dyson told Journalism.co.uk.

"We've gone through harsh changes here in terms of how we're restructuring things. We've taken a lot on the chin about the redundancy progamme and the new building has made a tremendous difference."

The timing of the move and readying the new multimedia and computer systems in the new space played a key part in this.
 
"We deliberately tweaked the timing of the move to coincide with the end of the consultation period for the voluntary redundancies. When we moved we chose to move without the people who had chosen to leave the company and the people who moved into these offices were the people of the future," says Dyson.

The change of premises also coincides with a wholesale restructuring of Trinity's Midlands titles, through which Dyson himself has been made responsible for the Sunday Mercury and the introduction of new centralised multimedia, newsroom and production operations to the region.
 
The Mail, Post and Mercury will now have the same production team and news staff for each title working within a hub alongside their editors, who will operate from the newsroom floor rather than staying in closed offices.

A 'one newsroom, no secrets' principle has been introduced in order to avoid duplication of content across the three papers.

Despite defending the decision to co-ordinate production of the three papers, Dyson concedes that staff were generally unimpressed with the prospect.

"The initial response from most staff was fury. They were furious when they were told, because it was so different from what they'd done before," he says.

"That has, over the last few months, quietened down, because people have seen the new structure working. Of course there's a lot of tweaking still to be done and a lot of learning."

Conversely the current economic situation and its impact on local and national media has helped drive this innovation and can give publishers the impetus to make more changes, says Dyson

"We were already facing a multimedia future, which was challenging us to change the way we worked. The long-term planning had started and we were looking at how we could reinvent ourselves," he says.
 
"The economic crisis has sped this up by about two years, because now we can no longer afford to do what we were doing, so we have to change quickly.
 
"When we look back at the recession, although it was bad, it will have gotten us over this hump of pontificating about whether to do this or whether to do that - we just got on and did it."

Yet as this new chapter begins for the paper at Fort Dunlop, Dyson is adamant that the paper's readers are still its top priority.

"A local newspaper has to have a beating heart, whether it be in print or online. It has to have opinions and lead opinions and change things for the better. We can't just stand there and stoically report - sometimes we have to fight on behalf of our readers.

"We can't stand still or we'll die. We've got to change and reinvent ourselves progressively in the future," he said.

See the slideshow below for images of the newsroom at Fort Dunlop:

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