UPDATE: THe National Union of Journalists disputes Greenslade’s analysis.
An interesting post by the Guardian’s Roy Greenslade after he visited the Trinity Mirror Group (publisher of the Birmingham Post, Birmingham Mail, Sunday Mercury and Coventry Telegraph) in its new multimedia newsroom in Birmingham. Greenslade says he was a sceptic, particularly since the move had involved the cutting of 65 jobs, sub editors working across several titles and all the other all-too familiar cost-cutting moves.
But my visit to Fort Dunlop last Friday dispelled every one of those concerns (and prejudices). I found instead a vibrant newspaper office on a vast scale, operating with the kind of journalistic enterprise that was heartening to see and to experience.
The changes include live-blogging of football matches. And there is an amusing tale about multimedia coverage of a clown being strip-searched at an airport. Greenslade concludes that the centralisation of production has not meant the end of “essential localism” in the titles.
Whatever the future holds for the papers as they cope with a 5% year-on-year newsprint decline, they are certainly not bowing their heads. The race is on to build audiences for the web Ad most important of all, they convinced me that what counts for all the journalists in Fort Dunlop is the journalism. I was truly elated by the visit.
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