A wee word on the Telegraph, which is attracting only good news at the moment for its revitalised digital strategy.
As a judge at the AOP awards this year, I was part of a group that put the paper’s cross-media budget coverage in the Spring into one of the best three of the entries. It was an impressive array of print and online coverage (including a specially-recorded parody by Rory Bremner produced after the chancellor’s speech).
Then was news that – according to Nielsen//NetRatings – Telegraph.co.uk had overtaken The Sun for online visitors. It is second now only to the Guardian in terms of online daily nationals by that measure.
Last, late last week we had sight of a new iPod Nano sent out by the Telegraph to media agencies. It came pre-loaded with a clip from Telegraph TV – broadcast-quality TV content produced by Telegraph journos (under the remit of the paper’s audio and video-content chief Guy Ruddle).
But all of the above is just the output of a radical shift at the paper that has truly put digital in the middle of all it does – and this did not come without some major pain.
At the AOP last month, Rhidian Wynn Davies, consulting editor at the Telegraph, explained how only by moving the entire paper to its new offices in Victoria has it achieved the ‘integrated newsroom’ required to get print journos to produce audio and video content as a matter of course.
At the middle of its new newsroom sits ‘the hub’ containing heads of section such as the news editor, city editor, deputy editor, picture editor etc. Ruddle – who was initially hired as ‘podcast editor’ – runs the audio-visual team and has his own space (with the studio equipment) but sits in on morning conference (where the news coverage is decided).
There’s more about it all in the vid below.
In the end – to do something about digital – it is steps like these that are required to allow it all to make sense.
We are often asked for quick-fix solutions to solve the digital challenge: what should I buy? who should I hire? what should I launch? If only the appropriate response to such a radical consumption shift was as simple. Naturally, it requires something much more fundamental; commitments like reorganising an entire business, literally (right the way down to the floorplans), are required for companies to make sense in a digital world. But, if The Telegraph can do it…
Filed under: Publishing Tagged: | Daily Telegraph
