Summary

The first special report in the series ‘The Changing Newsroom: The fundamentals’ provided an overview of changes European publishing houses are currently making to their newsrooms. Many newsrooms are creating new and developing current editorial products across multimedia platforms and working out ways to handle the precarious balance between cost and time with quality, creativity and innovation. This special report, the second in the series, takes this overview of the current climate of change in the newspaper industry to the next level, by looking in detail at four case studies of newsrooms in Europe that are planning and implementing change programmes. The case studies show different approaches towards implementing change. Some have used incremental approaches such as a gradual increase in multimedia awareness for print reporters. Others have gone for more radical change, for instance headcount reduction, moving to a new building and creating completely new organisational workflows, organisational structures and IT infrastructure. One of the major challenges which all four newsrooms have faced has been increasing the awareness and understanding of editorial staff of the need for change, especially those case studies which embarked on digital content creation. Other challenges include planning and implementing new changes to core editorial workflows and facing considerable resistance from staff which has resulted in some cases in delay and, at worse, the undoing of a change process. But there are many examples of success, too. One case study shows how a three-part strategy succeeding in getting traditional print staff to work alongside TV reporters on a regular basis. Another demonstrates how a phased pilot project to new newsroom re design has proved invaluable in moving from mono to multimedia. All four case studies provide an account of some of the most crucial episodes in the histories of these newsrooms. The lessons learnt, strengths and weaknesses will find their way into the last report of this series which provides principles for those wishing to manage change more successfully in their own newsrooms.