Where newsrooms are rife with barriers

Globally, media houses are moving towards an integrated newsroom with print, TV and digital sharing the same space to provide news on the go. In India, such measures are at best a cost-cutting drive

On 31 January 2014, five days before the official announcement, Bloom berg reported that Microsoft was preparing to name Satya Nadella its CEO. The headline appeared on 320,000 Bloomberg terminals in 150 countries. Dina Bass in Seattle, Peter Burrows in San Francisco and Jonathan Erlichman in New York collaborated on the story that subsequently rolled out across its television (340 million viewers) and digital (24 million unique visitors) properties. Much of this happened in a matter of minutes. A decade ago, rolling out a report in this fashion would have been difficult, if not impossible. But it happened because Bloomberg had integrated news operations across its media arms for over two decades ever since it got into television.

CNN has had an integrated newsroom for more than 15 years now. BBC shifted into its new billion-dollar hub in the heart of London last year. In India, Network18 (CNBC-TV18 et al) has been attempting to integrate its news operations, somewhat clumsily. And the India Today group shifted recently to a building in Noida that is custom-made for its TV, print, radio and online arms to work as one. Integrating newsrooms is inevitable in a business where the product is getting commoditised, costs are going through the roof, revenues are stagnating and audiences are consuming their news anytime, anywhere and on any device.

"If you walk into our newsroom, people have multiple screens in front of them. They are looking at Twitter, Facebook and TV, and are more aware of who is saying what. When news breaks, we want to make sure that all major units are covering it and it is reaching audiences across touch points: apps, TV, online," says Ellana Lee, vice-president and managing editor, CNN International Asia Pacific.

Team effort
At BBC, it was found that cross-media teams on the same floor during a major newsbreak like the Syrian crisis actually "help produce a lot more solid information and analysis that builds up an entire picture," says Trushar Barot who leads the user-generated content and social media hub in BBC's newsroom. That all teams and bureaus should work together across formats sounds nothing more than common sense. But that isn't how the news business has evolved. Like all other sectors, newsmen too operate in silos and departments. "When we integrated everything, we moved into one facility and that physicality helped communication. It seems so obvious that you wonder why anyone didn't think of it before," says Lee. "We never leveraged the expertise of people who understand say Brazil or China even though there was a language service in Bush House (the old BBC building," adds Jon Sopel, BBC anchor and presenter. Now, if news on Egypt breaks, for instance, "the movement between the English and Arabic desks is quick. Also, between TV, online and radio," says Richard Porter, controller (English), BBC Global News.

The biggest game changer therefore is the physical sharing of space which fosters the collaborative spirit. Then there are the cost benefits. EY Partner Ashish Pherwani estimates that a news broadcaster with an integrated newsroom can cut operating costs by 8-25 per cent, the time required to launch a news channel goes down from 6-7 months to 2-3 months and manpower costs could fall 10 per cent. But "the starting point for having an integrated newsroom cannot be cost efficiency. It is how do we gather news and play it out," insists Lee of CNN. It also requires a different set of skills to thrive in an integrated newsroom. Andrew Demaria, executive producer, CNN Digital Asia and CNN Travel, says, "The staff we look to hire is very different from 10 years ago. They are more versatile and more flexible. Journalists now need to be able to file directly for the digital media too."

Bloomberg has one newsroom with 2,400 journalists. Any news break first goes into the terminal business (which generates the bulk of its earnings which subsidise the media business) and then to TV, radio, online and the print part (BusinessWeek et cetera). If Bloomberg did not have an integrated newsroom, a decision that was strategic for it, it would have required over 3,000 journalists to feed the same system instead of 2,400 currently, reckons Parameshwaran (Parry) Ravindranathan, managing director, Bloomberg Media (Asia Pacific).

A different story
For most Indian news organisations, however, newsroom integration is synonymous with cost cutting. "The way the news business in India has grown, channel after channel, there have been inflationary costs," says EY's Pherwani. The other is fragmentation. India has 135 news channels (the largest anywhere in the world) and more than 86,000 newspapers. Advertising revenues which bring in more than 80 per cent of the cost of generating news have remained stagnant at Rs 1,800 crore for news television. While newspapers have boomed, their massive expansion in the last decade has burned huge amounts of cash. Both television and newspapers have yet to master the looming threat of the digital media, where many of their consumers are migrating. There is still a gaping philosophical or strategic divide over the value that integrated newsrooms bring. For instance, at Network18, editors are not convinced that it is integration the way Bloomberg or CNN has done, which led to job cuts in the company recently. "BBC is about one voice, one tone. Network18 is not about one voice, one tone," points out one editor. Each of its editors has his own style. He agrees that cost rationalisation has happened because of the integration. For instance, instead of sending four cameras - one each for CNBC-TV18, CNBC-Awaaz, CNN-IBN, IBN 7 - to the same event, it makes sense to send one. Each channel then adds its reporter to that one van or camera. But integration hasn't moved beyond that.

At MCCS, the company that owns ABP News among other channels, there is common sharing of resources. "That is a process thing and we put that in place," says MCCS CEO Ashok Venkatramani. But philosophically, the company believes that "each channel is separate and should have an editorial point of view."

At NDTV too, while the net and TV teams leverage each other's content, they do not sit in the same place. Nor do they share common equipment. "They are related and synergistic, but not identical," says NDTV CEO Vikram Chandra.

You could argue that the Indian news industry as we know it is barely a decade old. Therefore, using CNN or BBC as an operational benchmark doesn't make sense. According to Sopel of BBC, even in mature news markets, "the danger is that it could become a factory where everyone is processing information for different outlets and nobody is doing original journalism". Maybe. But in an age where more than 250 million Indians are accessing news and entertainment on their mobiles, tablets and laptops, does it make sense for a news organisation to have separate teams of journalists working for TV channels, websites and newspapers? The other thing holding back several news organisations could be the cost. BBC, which is funded by the British taxpayer, spent a whopping £1 billion on its news hub. That doesn't mean it would cost the same for the India-based firms, but it is expensive. Then there are training and other expenses. Most Indian journalists who have spent their formative years in print, are somewhat challenged on that front.