The current issue of Media Week contains an interview by Rachel Bolton with News Limited’s Campbell Reid, in which he says a little more about the mystery plan to restructure News Limited’s features. Naturally, he emphasises that it is all about good journalism, while acknowledging that there may also be redundancies.
As for exactly what is planned, Reid talks about editors working “more and more in tandem”. In this context, Alan Oakley as national editor, features, is trying to “align all our features sections” so they deliver value to print readers, advertisers and online readers.
Perhaps the main thing that is new in all this is that Reid clearly indicates the plans are some way off.
“Alan is working on a plan for how we deliver that and we’ll be talking to editors and managing directors over the next weeks and months to get their buy in and discuss how we go about producing those outcomes, what the products are and when they appear.”
It all sounds a lot less definite, and less imminent, than News Limited staff were led to believe in briefings a few weeks ago. Which makes me wonder why those briefings were given.
As for the publications working more closely together, that is certainly true.
News is in the process of installing the CyberPage editorial system across all sites, including regionals. Everything will then be standardised, including the way desks are named and keyboard shortcuts work. A real one-size-fits-all.
Meanwhile, Reid insists that while there will be more redundancies, there are no targets or set numbers in mind.
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It’s fairly plain that they’re planning a single national newspaper structure, with local edition variation to take in local press releases, pictures of naked nubile non-pollies, dog race results and venomous pulp and rantings. Much as Messrs Eric Beecher, Chris Warren et al have intoned: RMurdoch’s vision is the future of journalism. Congratulations, all round.
News Ltd journalists (including myself at the time) discussed just this possibility in the early 1990s when classified column widths, in cold type at that stage, were standardised across national mastheads. After that — purely from a commercial point of view — why would a stable such as News need a separate national politics page generated in each state, or a separate world news page, for that matter, if the pages could be produced centrally and press-faxed around state sites? This happened some years later with nationalised supplements such as Body+Soul which are now distributed by FTP as complete PDFs.
Same goes for Cyber, which was introduced at Queensland Newspapers in 1996 and quickly moved to the Windows version CyperPage. This operated well in Queensland (rolling out to Townsville in 2000-2001) but bosses held back from Windows roll-outs in the bigger southern states markets.
Like so many things which are happening now, there is evidence of long-term planning having been in place since those early days. In fact, look very closely and the changes all took place either side of the adoption in the US of the Telecommunications Act, 1996 which set the stage of the WWW boom: by April 1995, Netscape had sold 250,000 of its shares to some of the largest and most influential newspaper publishers in the United States, and formed strategic alliances with Adobe (to develop digital publishing systems) and Macromedia (now one and the same company).
Although some journalists and commentators like to label this as a conspiracy, it’s not: it’s simply long-term corporate planning. Something which the same population of journalists have let slip under their professional radar. And failed to implement in our own profession. Let’s not make that mistake twice.