Ifra Publishes Newsroom, Mobile Services Research Results

By: E&P Staff The following Special Reports were published during the last six months or are being translated into German, English or French and prepared for distribution by Ifra, the international organization for newspaper and media publishing. All contain numerous illustrations and tables.

"The Changing Newsroom II - Change in Practice," the first special report in the series "The Changing Newsroom: The fundamentals," provides an overview of changes under way in European newsrooms. Many are creating new editorial products or developing current ones across multimedia platforms and devising ways to handle the balance between cost and time. This second report in the series examines four newsrooms' programs. The case studies show different approaches to implementing change, from incremental to radical (including headcount reduction, moving to a new building and creating entirely new workflows, organizational structures and IT infrastructure). All four studies provide an account of some of the most crucial episodes in these newsrooms.

Lessons learned, strengths and weaknesses will be taken up by the series' last report, which provides principles for those wishing to manage change more successfully in their own newsrooms. Author Sarah Schantin-Williams is an Ifra associate consultant.

A follow-up to a 2003 Ifra report, "Mobile services - an update: What all media companies preparing for mobile need to know" maintains that future consumers will always be "on" regardless of where they are, making mobile devices their life companion and personal assistant. Communication will still be the key function, however, information, personal expression and entertainment are some of the needs that will be fulfilled through mobile devices. Flat fees for data traffic have been launched in several countries, and the mobile development will be similar to that of the fixed Internet - flat-fee-based and broadband. This will cause an extension of usage as we have seen with the fixed Internet. So mobile services must be part of media companies' strategy -- as a return channel for print, context or location-based services, or news-publishing channel.

The various possibilities to build relationships with customers led to an exploration of which kind of services media are now looking at. The study gives insights into service portfolios, business models and expectations of how newspapers may best exploit the mobile market. Author Kristina B?r?n is a business development manager for Ifra Sweden.

The third report, "Cross-Media Newsrooms in Germany," sees the cross-media working methods trend accelerating in Germany, where growing numbers of newsrooms no longer work exclusively for the printed newspaper, but also for Internet with video and audio, mobile services, and even TV programs. Case studies of Die Welt (Berlin), Handelsblatt (Dusseldorf), Hessische/Nieders?chsische Allgemeine (Kassel), K?lner Stadt-Anzeiger (Cologne) and S?dkurier (Constance) investigated how newspaper newsrooms meet the challenges of convergence, how they structured newsroom and workflows, and the challenges they face.

The report was published by Dietmar Schantin (IfraNewsplex), Torben Juul (CCI Europe) and Klaus Meier (Darmstadt University). The authors are 19 sixth-semester students of Darmstadt University's Online Journalism Faculty.

Besides the three new Special Reports, Ifra also published this year the fifth and sixth reports on its "Where NEWS?" project on future media consumption, which that was launched in March of last year. Those reports are "Economic and selected institutional framework conditions in Northern America and Europe up to 2020" and "Drivers of change in media channels."

Reports cheduled for publication in the first quarter of 2008 are
- No. 7: "Future of Printing Technologies" (No. 7) and "Scenario Development Workshop Documentation" (No. 8).

The Ifra research initiative will run for three years and has a budget of more than one million Euros. The corresponding Ifra reports are published as (translated) original versions or as summaries in various languages. To obtain copies of them, contact Ulrike Leis-Kolb at +49.6151.733-772 or leiskolb@ifra.com.

Headquartered in Darmstadt, Germany, and with 10 locations worldwide, Ifra acts as a platform for newspaper industry decision-makers. Ifra publishes the newspaper techniques monthly several languages, holds the IfraExpo trade show and conference every October, and conducts research and standardization, international conferences, training events and consultations for its 3,000-plus members in nearly 80 countries.