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Juan Antonio Giner has posted a series of photos of newsrooms from around the world at the Innovation Media Consulting Group’s blog. (I am an occasional consultant for Innovation). He reports that traffic to the site has far surpassed any other post. The photos show the attractive as well as the archaic. At one extreme are some cluttered cubicles at the Toronto Star, at the other is the state of the art Daily Telegraph’s new facility.
Giner’s take is that “We must be shamefaced about the design of our newsrooms…The future of newspapers starts in the radical design and redesign of the newsrooms.”
The new Al Jazeera Newsroom
My colleague at Innovation, Juan Senor, writes at the blog: "Open, airy spaces create energy and facilitate communication." He is referring in particular to the UK's Sky News Channel's newsroom. There might be something intuitively attractive about this and other expectations for more thoughtfully desgned newsrooms for a multimedia world. And if one is designing a new space it is a no-brainer to give fresh thought to the placement of editors, other newsroom staff, to lighting and work flow.
The key, though, is "payback." It's obvious why editors and reporters would be interested in how others are living, in many cases envious of the likes of the Daily Telegraph's newsroom. But most publishers and owners of ongoing newspapers, before signing off on an expensive newsroom rewrite, will ask "what's the return on investment?" Is there hard data that a revamped, reorganized newsroom has a return in a better newspaper-- and through that improved circulation, online traffic and/or advertising?
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