With lay-offs imminent, photographers, who previously worked separately for print and online, are now to be shared between the divisions, with 50 reassigned to the online office, Borchert told Journalism.co.uk, at this month's Digital News Affairs 2009 (DNA) conference.
While this means more experimenting with video on the group's newspapers sites, such as DerWesten.de, Borchert also plans to launch a pro-am photography agency service - similar to independent site Demotix.
A site for professional WAZ photographers' content could be used by other regional and national media groups looking for quality, local news coverage, she explains.
The platform could then be opened up to users with a revenue-share scheme, she adds.
"It's an interesting experiment and a great opportunity to tie the community closer to you paper online," says Borchert.
Recent pictures of a fire in Cologne were obtained by Der Westen contact via Twitter with a reader - information that the title would otherwise have not had access to, and which beat the competition, says Borchert. Such events show the demand for rapid, extremely local news coverage and this can be provided by utilising a series of online tools, she says.
The quality of amateur visual content, such as images and video, is typically better than text submissions, particularly because of the availability of equipment, adds Borchert.
As well as creating a potential revenue source for the group, Borchert sees the experiment as a further way to connect readers online and offline.
Efforts are also put into organising community meetings, as well as into developing third party applications, such as Qik, Twitter and other social media tools, and creating online communities and 'buzz'.
"When you are reporting local news and people are sharing their ideas about news, those are people who might potentially meet," she says.
"We keep telling people to link, link as much as you can and distribute our content out there. Get our widget and use it one your own site; embed our videos. Local papers are in deep trouble, most have losses in circulation and we need to introduce new users. We can't wait for them to buy it on paper."
After Der Westen was created three years ago, to integrate news coverage from four regional papers in the area, Borchert has increasingly used social media to build networks around content on the site.
An important feature of this is the Community section - a social network for Der Westen users, which allows them to build blogs, profiles and find relevant local news using a map tool.
The site's content management system allows journalists to geotag their content for the mapping, but Borchert admits that this isn't always possible: all local authority news, for example, is tagged with coming from the region's capital.
It is, however, just one piece of the puzzle: "You have to link readers to the rest of your community - not necessarily just by geography," she explains.
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