As newsrooms migrate toward a digital future, many news organisations find themselves trying to move forward whilst maintaining a legacy print product. During this week’s Webinar, Reduce the time you spend on print to focus on digital, INMA members heard two examples of companies that have streamlined their print production to give more time to digital.

INMA Newsroom Transformation Initiative Lead Amalie Nash, polled members to see how much time their newsrooms spend on print products. More than half said they still spend “a bit too much” time on it, while nearly one-third spend “way too much” time on print, and 20% said they felt they had a good balance of time spent on print and digital.  

This week’s presenters, Tore Nilssen of Aftenposten in Norway and Thomas Berndt of Politiken in Denmark, shared how their companies shifted the amount of time spent on print production while still creating respected and well-read products.

“They didn’t do the same thing, but they both got essentially the same results, which is to say that they were able to really streamline the print production process,” Nash noted.

Aftenposten simplified print

Nilssen, head of the print department, said Aftenposten has shifted its focus to digital-first content, with every story created by journalists intended for digital consumption. The printed newspaper is now a curated version of the digital stories:

“No stories in the printed edition are made for print,” he said, noting the newspapers carry stories that have been published digitally or will be published in the next few days. However, it’s important to keep providing a quality print product because “… a large part of our subscribers is still in love with print and they’re paying a lot of money to get it on the doorsteps every day.”

To keep the print version alive and profitable, Aftenposten uses Aptoma, a print production programme from parent company Schibsted. The programme increases efficiency in page composition without compromising print quality and ensures a consistent layout, Nilssen said.

He demonstrated how Aptoma works and walked through the simple process of composing a newspaper. The system operates through a browser and uses dynamic templates to create each page design. This simplifies the process tremendously, allowing journalists with nothing more than print editing skills to produce pages as quickly as their first day — a task that previously required specific skills and training.

“Three or four years ago, you had to find someone with InDesign [experience] so you could make pages. If he or she couldn’t do the pages on InDesign, it would take at least two months to [train] them,” he said.

The workflow starts with SMP, Aftenposten’s CMS for creating and writing stories. The stories are then edited for print in DrPublish, another CMS, before being sent to DrEdition for page creation. The system offers different layout choices, and editors can adjust the layout as needed.

Aftenposten has built about 250 different templates for page design, although only 10 to 20 are used daily for news pages. Special pages, such as cartoons and TV programmes, have their own templates that automatically update when new content is loaded into the system.

Despite the shift to digital, Aftenposten continues to produce a morning edition in print and an afternoon edition as an e-paper. The move to e-paper has been successful, with a 35% increase in readership over the last year, equating to about 40,000 readers per day.

Nilssen emphasised the importance of simplicity and efficiency in design and production. He also predicted that while the printed newspaper will eventually die out, readers will continue to want a curated edition each day, and he thinks the e-paper will become something of a hybrid of a newsletter and the newspaper as it is known today:

“There are so many stories, they can’t [read] everything,” he said. “They want a credible sender who can tell them what stories to read today. And that is what the e-paper is going to be for us in the future.”

Politiken redesigned its processes

For Politiken, streamlining print production was all about changing processes, explained Berndt, managing online editor and chief news editor. The company has made significant changes in its workflow over the past year and a half, with a goal of becoming digitally sustainable by 2030.

The transformation process begins with a key question, Berndt explained:

“If we were to start all over tomorrow, what would we do differently? It’s a very intriguing question and it’s not that we’ll think, ‘Hey, we need to do everything differently,’ but it’s a question that guides you to where you really can do a difference.”

Asking this question led the company to identify two main issues:

• The roles of staff in the newsroom and the physical layout of the workspace.
• The length of articles to streamline production.

In moving forward, the newsroom underwent a significant reorganisation. Previously, the focus was primarily on print, with the news editor for the printed version sitting at the head of the table. Even though the company was no longer taking a print-first approach, the physical layout had stayed the same.

“We had and still have a news editor who was thinking online, but you still have a lot of focus on print —  and even the people around the news editor who were supposed to be thinking about digital and print were facing the print editor,” he said. “So we changed the seating.”

Now, the newsroom has been restructured to think digitally. A separate print team was created, and it sits in the same room as the rest of the staff but is no longer in the centre. New roles were also introduced, including a digital designer and a producer role.

“They produce the stories [and] proofread the articles,” Berndt said. “If something is not adding up, they’re sending it back to the journalist, they send it to the spelling check team and make sure everything is as it should be. They are the gatekeepers of all our journalism.”

A new model for articles

In addition to the physical changes, Politiken introduced a new model for article production, which it calls the SML model.

The SML model has five story lengths to go from, ranging from small (S) to extra-extra-large (XXL). Each category has specific requirements, including character count, the inclusion of a picture with a caption, quotes, fact boxes, and other elements. This system has led to more disciplined article lengths and better-read articles.

The changes have resulted in a truly digital workflow, with more resources allocated for digital production, especially visually. In fact, the company has quadrupled the time spent on digital layouts. And operations run smoothly, Berndt said.

“We have created a huge mental shift,” he said. “Journalists submit articles earlier and especially around holidays [and] summer … planning has been so much easier. And I would say that we still produce one of the world’s best assigned newspapers.”

Berndt noted that such a transformation involves a significant cultural change and advised other organisations to prepare for it:

“Digital journalism is fluid, but it has been a gigantic cultural change. Prepare for it and talk about it and allow people to be a bit shocked,” he advised. “We are in different place than we were a year ago, but I hadn’t predicted how much of a big change this would be to staff.”

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