Trinity Mirror Regionals Editor of Digital Innovation, Alison Gow's presentation to #Newsroom14 in Amsterdam on October 13th

1. Slides for WAN IFRA
Newsroom Summit panel
on culture change
October 13 2014

2. Planet Internet, 2008
● Alive with discovery and exploration
● Home to nearly 187m websites - 31.5m of which sprang
to life in that year
● 133m blogs, and 900,000 new posts published every
day
● 100m active Facebook users
● More than 3m tweets sent every day
● More than 3m photos on Flickr
● 15 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every
minute of the day in 2008

3. Planet Newsroom, 2008
● Focused on a single platform
● Working towards rigidly set deadlines
● Enslaved to historic design, production and distribution
methods
● Holding back news to fit a schedule, or page space
● Watching company revenue charts dive floor wards
● Sending reporters to sit in court ALL DAY to file a 350 word
lead, published the next day...
● …oblivious as to how many people read said court report
● Believing print is king, while fact-checking via Google

5. The fact we still discuss whether print
and digital need to slug it out for
supremacy is a blocker for change; it
means we are still only thinking in terms
of platforms, not audience and user
demands.
We have to get past this - and fast

6. Beating the blockers
● Build your business around a digital-first, audience-foremost newsroom
● Provide engaging content, when your audience wants it
● Be accessible - operationally, via platforms and culturally in how you
engage and interact
● Experiment, collaborate, innovate
● Be committed to engagement with communities
● Understand and anticipate what audience demands
● Embrace social media - it’s your communication system, newswire,
distribution platform, contacts book, playground. Also your judge and jury
● Innovation is not restricted to the newsroom - what’s your system for
managing ideas?

8. Trinity Mirror’s Newsroom 3.1 model
Workflows built around audience data
Multi-platform: Print, desktop, mobile web, app, tablet, e-newsletter,
social media
Digital-first, and responsive
No deadline - only audience spikes and streams
Deeply informed by analytics
Allowed to fail - with an understanding we learn from failure
When it comes to audience we want local - although it’s great that we also have global reach with our
brands - we want retained, and we want engaged. These are not mutually exclusive goals.

10. Quick wins for newsroom leaders
● Positive results win hearts and minds better than any explanation of
strategy
● Share the knowledge - training is the lifeblood of a digital
newsroom and no one should feel left behind
● Put real-time analytics at the heart of the newsroom
● Know the audience spikes - staff accordingly
● Ensure your newsroom knows an active, engaging social media
presence expected, not requested
● If something doesn’t work, learn from it, move on
● Be the biggest exponent of digital in your newsroom
● Smash any lingering ‘them and us’ mentality between digital and
print teams

11. Alison Gow
Editor, Digital Innovation
Trinity Mirror Regionals
Twitter: @alisongow