Italian daily La Stampa created an innovative newsroom design to house its new editorial operation re-engineered using Méthode
Based in Turin, La Stampa is Italy’s third-largest general interest daily. In addition to the print daily, the paper’s content is published through a web portal and mobile apps with subscription paywalls.
As part of a plan to create greater integration between print and digital operations, La Stampa adopted an Eidosmedia editorial platform in 2011, followed shortly afterwards by the creation of an entirely new newsroom, designed to favour the new integrated workflow.
La Stampa’s old newsroom reflected the essentially linear, one-track nature of the editorial process.
News coverage was decided early in the day at the management end of the newsroom and was delegated through a series of editorial teams, each in its own isolated office, before emerging later in the day as articles and layouts ready for printing.
The Web editorial team worked largely in isolation from the main workflow mostly writing their own materials and occasionally cutting and pasting content created by their print colleagues.
As the importance of the digital channels grew, there was increasing risk of duplication of effort between print and Web.
The new newsroom layout is concentric in form. At the center sit the news executives, art director, photo editor and Web editor who originate and direct the news creation operations. They are free to exchange information and requests between themselves.
In the second circle sit the editors responsible for the fastest moving news categories: politics, crime, business etc.
In the outer circle are the technical and typographic staff responsible for preparing content for its online and offline publication. There is a high degree of visibility around and between the circles.
There is no longer a demarcation between print and digital staff - all journalists produce materials for all channels. The workflow now follows a ‘digital-first’ model in which the day’s news content is published to the digital channels, before the editorial staff start to prepare the print edition.
Time-to-market for online content has been significantly reduced.
The concentric arrangement results in efficient workflow from the executive teams in the central hub to the editors and technical staff in the outer circles.
The arrangement also facilitates lateral communications between colleagues working in different output channels. Duplication of effort has been eliminated.
Time-to-market for online content has been significantly reduced by allowing digital workflows to proceed in parallel to the print stories at different speeds