Convergence in three continents. Trends and challenges for newsrooms.

Abstract

Purpose
- An overlook to the ongoing process of adapting newsrooms to the requirements of
information distribution multiplatform is the purpose. The authors seek to discover how
the news production routines in news companies are absorbing the new mobile devices
and the social media trends.

Design/methodology/approach
- The authors deal with the concepts of convergence and informative turbine, in the
process of news reengineering. The authors use a comparative research in three
continents. During the visits to four newsrooms, twenty-five professionals in managerial
positions were interviewed.

Findings
- The results suggest that new newsrooms are in the way to function as a plant, and the
production is connected, from a main desk, in circles. A central, multimedia desk
coordinates and organizes content. New functions are created. The newsrooms are on the
way to full integration, where sharing content is mandatory.

Social implications
- To show how all the informative complex can be understood within the logic of the
systems in relation with the ultimate recipient public citizen is an objective that has social
consequences, as far as technology gains a ubiquitous presence in our world.

Originality/value
- The sampling includes countries from Central, South American and the European media
system with a print tradition. O Globo (Brazil); La Nación (Costa Rica); BBC and
Reuters (U.K.) were chosen because they have disclosed their experience with converged
digital newsrooms. Those four enterprises are leaders in their sectors in each country.

Keywords: Newsroom convergence; Media industry; Journalism management; News

production; Print media

1 Introduction

Journalism in many contemporary democracies has been playing a central role in assuring
independent news and information for the citizens in general. But in the digital age, a sea
of novelties is convulsing the area, and this tsunami can be attributed to two factors: a)
technology and b) crisis (Grueskin et al. 2011; Pavlik, 2011). The newspaper industry,
accustomed to centuries of high profits and expansion, could not expect dramatic
alterations in the business model until the end of the nineties. And the changes came
quickly with the wide-spread adoption of internet, ubiquitous broadband and wireless
devices, raising a new generation of users at both sides of the information road: the
producers of news and its consumers.

Since the mid-1960s, important newspapers in many countries have seen their circulation
rates decline, and this is due to cultural shifts, to the rise of TV and to the advent of
mobile devices, as well as to a transformation in the citizens’ daily routines. In Brazil we
saw dailies stopping their print editions (like Jornal do Brasil –  now trying to recover –,  
Gazeta do Povo and Hoje em Dia); many of them reducing circulation (Zero Hora, Jornal
de Brasilia); others simply closing the doors (like Diário de Minas, Diário da Tarde,
Gazeta Mercantil); and other enterprises launching online-only news products (Brazil
247, Metrópoles, Congresso em Foco). Indeed, the global economic crisis has imposed
many restrictions for investments in the Brazilian news organizations, leaded fusions and
obliged to human resources reductions in the last years. This has left many problems for
the news coverage and to the quality of the production itself.

As per the technology, we can point out some recent phenomena:

1) All the newspapers have created digital versions of their news services, as well as
other media products, and deliver them via the Internet and other platforms
including tablet devices such as the iPad or smartphones.
2) New competitors have entered the scene, including giants such as Google, in the
past just a search engine;
3) Television is now fully digital, whether over the air, via satellite, cable, or
phone/fiber line.
4) Research shows that in many countries and in the U.S., the Internet, social and
mobile media are fast rising as daily news sources, especially among the young.
Some of these sources are aggregators but many youngsters prefer receiving news
through social media.
5) Augmented reality is a new form of digital, location-based content beginning to
find its way into mainstream journalism (Pavlik, 2011).
Research about the impact of new technologies in newsrooms may address various
points: the technologies themselves, the use of CMS and other softwares by the
journalists, the use of the internet, the social media, the data to help the news gathering;
the distribution of information through newspaper, radio, TV, smartphones and other
devices; the management of the newsrooms in a digital age; the influence of new media
on news content, how new technologies are being used to develop new stories which
engage the audience, etc.

This article is part of the project "Multimodal digital media in journalistic newsrooms: a
semantic computational model in a converged structure, funded by the Brazilian finance
agency for research, Capes. A study of information systems in Brazil, Costa Rica,
England and the United States", whose aim is an exploratory study of information flow in
journalistic newsrooms based on convergence. We believed that the mapping and
modelling of the production processes in the media industry could help us to identify the
characteristics of ubiquitous mobile devices and other technologies of communication
and information, in order to facilitate the dissemination of ideas, transparency,
information sharing and democratization of knowledge. So, our projetc intended to
monitoring the news production process in digital newsrooms, focusing the way graphic
and visual presentation and the culture change inside the journalist ambiance and bring
new requirements to the media complex. With a 24 hour-user, resources should be
reconsidered in regard to the news content, which is no longer in a two-dimensional
support (like traditional newspapers), but with the possibility of connection, the
uninterrupted use of geolocation features, and new forms of visual, tactile and responsive
presentation.

Literature review

The traditional journalism loses readers every day, impacted by new habits of the post-
digital generations that require participation in the news production process and do not
accept the hegemonic distribution of information. The mere transmission of information
in websites and portals, print or broadcast is no longer accepted, even if it has already
represented an innovation with the addition of sounds and images. We propose to study
the production process of news and its organization in different newspapers – which were
the basis of the journalism practice as we comprehend it now –, on behalf of improving
the process by which the news hit the users and society. In the recent years, the
journalistic culture is already undergoing changes and this is reflected in reporting,
especially with regards to language, visual and editorial presentation, and the way it
operates in the contemporary social world.

Even the improvement of mobile devices gives us clues of innovative trends that cross
organizational culture regarding the production routines and the presentation of the
journalistic products. In 2010, the US company Apple released the iPad, a portable
device, with touch screen and an operating system that has intended to be more intuitive.
Two months after its announcement, iPad had already sold 15 million units and that fact
gave the news entrepreneurs a positive wave.

In the newspaper industry in particular, mobile devices were believed to allow the spread
of instant news, with features that complement and contribute to add veracity and
credibility to reports: videos, animated graphics, photo galleries, music, in addition to
public participation. And we now face the wearable phenomenon, with the devices that
we can use, as in the case of iWatch, a wrist computer.

These recent inventions are also new for newspaper newsrooms, trying to adapt to the
progressive innovations. There is no doubt that the news production involves long and
concentrated collective effort in the media industry. A complicating factor in this field is
generated by the dissemination of information and communication technologies: a certain
familiarity, especially within the younger generations, with the apparatus and electronic
resources, created an independence of readers who had not been included in the
traditional modus operandi of the news production itself, in a recente past.

Despite the long previous run, the media industry entered the news convergent market
with the same weapons of the past, and tended to make the same past mistakes, when,
two decades ago, the Internet could only be imagined as a kind of digital arm of its
operations. As a new media mimics or is sustained, in principle, on an old media (the
radio has mimicked the theater, TV copied the radio, the printed newspaper had the style
of the ancient newsletters), the news content in tablets and smartphones have to strive
hard not to reproduce the already-seen situation and the old formulas of doing journalism.

This article is an overlook to the ongoing process of adapting newsrooms to the new
requirements of information distribution multiplatform; it seeks to discover how the news
production routines in news companies are moving to absorb the new mobile devices;
and intends to show how all this informative complex can be understood within the logic
of the systems that organize and provide its management with the ultimate recipient
public citizen.

Convergence as a Process

Convergence, integration, cross-media, multimedia, multiplatform - many are the

associated concepts, according Salaverría and Negredo (2008), to a phenomenon that
usually generates divergence with respect to the media. In a generic sense, media
convergence is the merging of mass communication markets (print, television, radio,
internet) with portable and interactive technologies through digital platform presentation
(Kawamoto, 2003; Dailey et al., 2005).

Convergence can be viewed from various angles and, according to the area of knowledge
by which it is observed, has different facets. To converge is "to come together and unite
in a common interest or focus", says the dictionary (Mish, 1993, p. 253). According to
Kawamoto (2003, p. 4), it is "the merging or joining technologies and services
historically separated." The media convergence movement took shape from recent
technological developments, especially the emergence of the Internet and the digitization
of information, which resulted, in journalism, in the use of digital technologies to
investigate, produce and make available news "to an audience increasingly more familiar
with the computer."

In this study, we will deal with the concept of informative turbine, a convergence model
that aims to help companies to structure themselves, in the process of news reengineering
[I], and enable them to offer products and services for various media, from an input,
which are the facts.
The concept was developed in the 1980s by professors from the University of Navarra
(Spain) and arrived in Brazil in the 1990s, when Brazilian newspaper companies began to
prepare for the digital escalation. We know that news organizations were structured
mainly in the late 19th century, influenced by Fordism, and have set up an internal and
external organization to ensure its economic support.

The concept of informative turbine is that the newsroom should work as an industry of
online information production: multimedia, multiplatform and multi-channel. "The
newspaper has to be planned as multiplatform if everyone is multimedia and
multiplatform", indicates (Soria, 2011), for whom the moment is of "anxiety, confusion
and crossroads in communication": "Certainties were knocked down, but they had
remained for many years, and the panorama of the classic media has prematurely aged
now due to the digital revolution."

The media company should, according to this idea, function as a plant, organizing the
production in connected circles: on the one hand, enters the crude product; it is refined
(for the various uses) and then distributed by a network of channels. The most efficient
networks operate in continuous flow, changing and adapting to the innovations that the
reader requires. On the other hand, the new narratives of the 21th century require a
reinvention of workspaces to house the multimedia editorial team, connected to the
potential audience through platforms, in full time schedule.

In the model of turbo convergent newsroom, the information clock is governed by the use
of time of this information, as noted Soria (2011), pointing that knowing the habits of
readers is crucial in order that information, as a right of all citizens, can be returned to
them in important forms of symbolic and diffusion knowledge. We could summarize the
converged digital newsrooms integration in five phases (Salaverría and Negredo, 2008,
pp. 47-48): 1) essay digitization; 2) implementation of the writing structures for online
journalism; 3) physical integration of traditional and online newsrooms; 4) development
of new languages according to the public interest; 5) fusion of structures, making them
indistinguishable.

In the countries of the Western world, such as Brazil and other Latin American countries,
there are news organizations that are located in the various levels of convergence. Some
of them just fulfilled the first level and maintain the structure and culture of the printed
newspaper, without passing to the second level, which is the adoption of proper tools for
digital journalism, which would represent an intermediate stage of adaptation, for both
journalists and company.

The media vehicles of this study (O Globo, from Brazil; La Nación, from Costa Rica;
BBC and Reuters, from the U.K.) were chosen because they have disclosed their
intention and experience in order to operate a converged digital writing, that is, the
principle that the facts get in and are worked in production routines, in order to be
released to the public 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, across various platforms. They
belong to different realities, in terms of culture, organization and news tradition, in three
different continents: South America, Central America end Europe, but all of them
experience the convergent phenomenon as a process (Schwingel, 2012; Boczkowski,
2004) with complex routes to follow up. Besides, those four enterprises are leaders in
their sectors in each country.

Methodological approach

We present results from a comparative research among newspaper journalists and

newsrooms structures from three countries to gain insight into the strategic approaches
applied to implement newsroom convergence culture. The sampling aimed to include
countries that represent either the Central and South American and the European
democratic corporatist media system with a strong print tradition, such as Brazil, Costa
Rica and the United Kingdom. The journalists interviewed were all involved in
coordinating the implementation of convergence journalism in their respective
newsrooms.

This cross-national perspective allows us to understand how newsrooms in different

journalistic cultures adapt to convergence culture as well as to tease out which factors are
responsible for shaping it.

Twenty-five1 professionals in managerial positions from differently scaled and located

                                                                                                               
1
O Globo = 9; Reuters = 1; La Nación = 13; BBC = 2.
newspaper outlets were interviewed (39 minutes in average). The aim was to learn from
those responsible for decision making what constitutes convergence culture in their eyes
and what strategic challenges they have been identifying concerning its implementation.

Implementing convergence in the newsroom depends on existing newsroom cultures

while reshaping them at the same time. Hence, the influence of newsroom culture is
twofold. First, it defines the terms and conditions for the strategic implementation of
convergence practices and the requisite journalistic skills. Second, it determines the
attitudes and motivations of journalists toward the implementation of new editorial
routines.

News products and failure

With the help of Apple Steve Jobs, Rupert Murdoch (News Corporation) launched, in
2011, an iPad newspaper called The Daily. He hired an estimated 100 journalists to
produce his iPad Daily, much of which features original reporting and multimedia
storytelling. Full of enthusiasm, Murdoch believed The Daily would "make the business
of editing and news gathering viable again" and affirmed on the occasion: "No paper. No
multi-million dollar presses. No trucks. We’re passing on these savings to the reader"
(Pavlik, 2011). According to International Data Corporation (IDC), in 2013 would be
sold 190.9 million tablets all over the world, 48.8% more than in 2012, while desktop
sales would fall 4.3% to 142.1 million (G1, 2013). The company's projection estimated
that by 2014 the tablet segment should continue to grow, with a 23.8% advance to 236.3
million units. The rapid acceptance of the mobile devices was compared to the historical
phenomenon of the Penny Press in the United States, by experienced scholars:

Given the pricing structure of The Daily, it might signal an

opportunity to digital newspapers almost as significant as
Benjamin Day’s Penny Press of 1833. Recall that Day innovated
a model of newspapering based on a new technology of his era,
the Cylinder Steam Press which made rapid printing of 18,000
copies per hour possible (Stevens, 1994). Printing had been
limited to about 125 copies per hour, and newspapers were
targeted to the elite, and priced accordingly. With Day’s
 innovation, the era of mass media was born. His innovation
ushered in a model of advertising-based media, which was
adopted by commercial radio and television in the U.S. and has
stood for more than a century (Pavlik, 2011).

As we would see, the market reacted differently from those predictions.

Corpora

O Globo: illusion with tablets

In Brazil, Globo A Mais (Figure 1) was created in 2012 as a news product exclusive to
iPad tablets, developed by the newspaper O Globo in the wake of The Daily. At the time,
it was marketed along with the digital edition of the newspaper for the price of US$ 1.99.
The publication won the same year the Esso Award (the most important prize for
journalism in Brazil) as "the best contribution to the press". Starting in 2014, it became a
"magazine designed for digital reading" and started to be developed with the same
content adapted for reading on smartphones (App store, Samsung apps and Google Play)
and tablets (App store, Samsung apps, Google Play, Amazon); as well as viewing on
desktops. On mobile devices the publication lowered the price, costing $ 0.99 [ II ].

It was distributed Monday through Friday, at six o'clock PM, identified as an afternoon
newspaper. Paid, it had no updates and intended to make a differentiated cut of the main
events of the day. With its own staff, it offered exclusive reports, interviews, and
columnists. Videos, photo galleries, audio, 360º images and page views in two directions
were elements of the publication. With the end of Globo A Mais, in May 2015, the
newspaper O Globo, which is the second newspaper in circulation in Brazil –   193.079
copies/ average a day, according to Associação Nacional de Jornais (2015) –, was still
promising to launch soon another product for tablets. The excuses were attributed to the
business model.
The fact is that the expectation of profit and expenses with an exclusive newsroom did
not balance. At least 100 professionals were dismissed between 2015 and 2016, and the
product that came out on tablets was just a version of the website. In 2016, O Globo and a
reduced group of journalists were responsible to publish the daily newspaper, the website
and this version for tablets.
In O Globo's convergent model, journalists work towards the core of news, regardless of
the destination of the content (paper, website or InfoGlobo, an agency that distributes
news by subscription to other organizations). Like many media companies in the world,
Globo Organizations have launched popular newspapers, such as Extra and Expresso,
now sharing the same newsroom in a brand new building, finished in 2017.

Convergence has taken place over several stages and over a long period, and is still
underway. The objectives of the first convergence actions at O Globo newsroom, early in
2007, were: to better exploit the market; seek a new business model; competition with
other media enterprises, such as Folha de São Paulo and O Estado de São Paulo; improve
future prospects and launch new products for market segments. Meanwhile, new
workflows were established as well as the flow of information while re-configuring
workplaces (director, O Globo, 2015).

In the beginning, O Globo had two separed newsrooms, each one at one side of the same
street, linked by a passway. But the two groups did not connect, and acted as competitors
(Jorge, 2007). Then, in a second phase, there was a decision to integrate both newsrooms
and some arrangements of people and spaces had to be done. By that time it was
launched O Globo A Mais, with new journalists and enthusiasm for the new technologies
–  smartphones and tablets. A third phase comes now with a new headquarter basis, where
a newsroom was built to converge the production of O Globo, Extra and Expresso –  print,
online and mobile.

The new space is called "Redação Multimídia" (Multimedia Newsroom) and obeys to the
principles of a central desk that coordinates the production for the newspapers O Globo,
Extra and Expresso, as well as digital content for mobile and the development of their
respective websites. The organization works through Agência O Globo, and distributes
articles, photographs, infographics, columns and special covers, united under the name of
Infoglobo Participações S.A.. It also provides real-time content from reporters based in
Rio, São Paulo and Brasilia, and correspondents in Europe, America and Asia,
calculating that approximately 180 news stories are delivered daily (O Globo, 2017). That
means just a small part of the big Globo Organization, which owns TV and Radio Globo,
cable TV and many other products and communication services in Brazil and the world.

La Nación: new project, new building

The digital project at La Nación was born in 1995, but walked slowly. In the beginning,
two parallel newsrooms were created – printed and digital – and there was no
communication between them. The construction of a new building, called "Medios"
("Media") began in 2007 and finished in 2011 (La Nación, 2017), with an investment of
US$ 7 million, and had the advisory of Innovation Media Consulting Group (IMCG),
from Spain. A total of 470 persons work in the building, among them circa 200
journalists, but they suffered losses the past years, due to the crisis context. Large screens
over the walls and online systems to control the audience, a central desk and aisles for the
editorial sections – like "Actualidad", "Radar", "Eco", "Deportes" – in a room with
acoustic treatment and a "paperless principle" are some innovations that the project
presented.

"Fifty years of print newsroom culture fell down over the young and old journalists
heads", summarized the chief editor (2016). "We did not know how to do the digital", he
confessed. Even that time, they knew that the previous model – print operations with a
digital extension – did not work. One advice from Innovation actually was not to permit
mental or physical walls: "print vc digital is not an option", says IMCG website
(Innovation, 2016), in a list of "dont's" that the newspaper industry should avoid as, for
example, not creating "print or digital ghettos" inside the newsrooms. But yet the
dilemma persisted inside La Nación's newsroom: "Who are we? What puts the bread in
our mouths is the print edition", says the assistant editor (2016), comparing the bigger
revenues from the advertisement in the newspapers of the group, which are, besides La
Nación, El Financiero y La Teja (popular). La Nación Group also aggregates two
magazines, Perfil and Sabores, but the newspaper itself has a circulation of 100,000 daily.

The newspaper's journalists were trying to adopt the model of Digital First, which means
giving priority to the digital devices, other than to print edition, convinced that this is the
trend of the moment. Everything that is produced has an orientation to be published first
in digital. La Nación's interest is to offer a multiplatform experience to the reader: "I
believe we have to enter into a consensus to publish news, but rather offer informative,
visual, auditory, multiplatform experiences", emphasizes the general manager (2015),
recognising that the newsroom goes through an identity crisis for being between two
platforms: "What we need is to clarify if we are a digital media, mixed or if we are
printed. We are in this discussion now." So, the uncertainties persist.

But "going digital first" for La Nación still meant to publish primarily on the website, not
necessarily on smartphone, tablet or on social media, despite the fact that there were
Community Managers (specialized journalists) to do that (digital editor, 2015). At that
point social media was not seen as an obligation, but as a service due to the readers,
divulging the newspaper content into one more, diverse channel. Presently, La Nación
says that from 20 years up to now it has diversified the traditional portfolio of printed
newspapers "to a media portfolio of print and digital media, consumer platforms and
means of payment" and has also with an insertion in the entertainment area with a
gastronomy school (La Nación, 2017).

BBC: tradition and modernity

The BBC headquarters in Central London has an integrated and convergent structure,
with a central decision table. It is called "The World's Newsroom" and is marked by
"fusion of the BBC's international journalism and state-of-the-art technology, pulled
together under one roof" (BBC, 2015). The aim is to share stories, video and audio and
produce content that serves the various audiences. The different segments – BBC
London's TV, radio, online and digital services – have separate production routines, but
the production teams sit side by side in the newsroom.

In terms of newsroom dynamics, breaking news or hot events still stir the structure. In
describing how coverage of an event such as September 11, one of the IT managers
(2016) sees visible clusters of people at certain points, defining the bulletin board
schedule. He was there on the coverage of the Brexit and sayd:

We worked through the night and it was very exciting to see

people kind of running around and stuff as we started getting
results coming through; at 10 o'clock in fact when it is obvious
 that the exit poll and the predictions for the elections were
completely wrong there was a lot of frantic reworking of the
video we had already prepared. What really changed was the kind
of dynamic of how much we have ready as a result of news
panning and gathering, versus how much we need to work on the
fly from live (IT manager, 2016).

Acoording to that point of view, a newsroom is always a newsroom: a place where facts
are transformed into news, or where information is fit to be published, and that means
that workers (journalists, IT technicians, designers) have to communicate quickly, in
order to negotiate what is going to be divulged and how; what comes first, what comes
next; who is doing the news and where everything is happening. That includes an
efficient, collaborative workflow and the structure of a newsroom may certainly help to
sharing content and information. But the old tradition of the cry – as an alert or as a
means of reaching out colleagues at the other side of the space – remains in novel
newsrooms as the BBC's or La Nación's, as was reported by the journalists.

The British Broadcasting Company (BBC) was formed on 1922 by a group of

manufacturers including the radio's italian creator, Guglielmo Marconi. Even if today
nobody remembers its original name and it markets the company as a world one, the
group continues to defend a strong relationship with the British people, as the Director-
General Tony Hall said: "Every week, the BBC informs, educates and entertains almost
everyone in Britain." But, besides being "the cornerstone of the UK’s creative industries",
the BBC sees itself also as "an engine for growth, supporting jobs and businesses in the
wider economy." The mission of the media group is expressed by Hall: "The public
wants a strong – and independent – BBC that produces great programmes, gives them
impartial news and ensures Britain’s voice is heard abroad." (BBC, 2015)

Those statements clearly reinforce the role of BBC in the United Kingdom, but foresee
"an internet-only world whenever it comes", justifying the transformation of BBC's
services to be "internet fit". More than that, the public station expects to keep BBC
Worldwide as an integral part of the enterprise and predicts a commercial return of £1.2
billion until 2020 (BBC, 2015). Today, the Broadcasting House, restored after being
bombed during the Second World War, has undergone renovation and extension to house
Radio, News and World Service, a complex that reunites one of the largest live broadcast
centres in the world, with 36 radio studios, six TV studios and 60 edit/graphic suites. The
World's Newsroom is part of it.

Reuters: across the wall

Thomson Reuters is proud to be the most important news agency of the world, created in
1849 out from a pigeon financial news service. In 1851 Paul Julius de Reuter opened his
London office and begun to set the principles of his work, trying to organize
'scientifically' the activity of reporting. It is also in London that remains Reuters
headquarters, supposed to be the largest newsroom in the world, with 400 people, but yet
the desks are 200 in more than 100 countries, with a total of 14,000 workers – 2,500
journalists – that offer news to 204 cities, in 19 languages (Reuters, 2018).

"The world’s largest international multimedia news provider", was indicated the number
one international brand for digital reach, according to the Ipsos Affluent Europe 2017
survey, that put Reuters ahead of 44 international media brands measured monthly across
digital platforms (Reuters, 2017). "With growing concern over fake news, more and more
consumers are turning to the digital sites they trust for accurate news updates. Reuters has
built its reputation on delivering unbiased and credible news", commented Munira
Ibrahim, Reuters representant for Sales and Content Solutions (Reuters, 2017).

In fact, since the 1940s, the company put in place "Trust Principles" as a safeguard to its
business model, and they can be summed up to "independence, integrity and freedom
from bias in the gathering and dissemination of news and information". In 2008, The
Thomson Corporation and Reuters Group decided to combine to form Thomson Reuters.
According to a concern to offer innovation for subscribers, consumers and advertisers,
Reuters TV was launched in 2015 – in association with BBC –, aiming to provide video
news "for the digital age", a product that could be retrieved anywhere from any device.

So, Reuters, the news and media division of Thomson Reuters, according to the assistant
executive editor, is "a mixture of agency – B2B (Business to Business), B2C (Business
to Clients) – television, photos, texts and also digital material for the consumers".
Although raw information continues to be the main product, some of its senior staff has
being asked to present analysis too, and so react in time, help with insights and produce
more “what does it mean” journalism for the clients. Everything at "a very high speed"
(assistant executive editor, 2017). We can observe that content is also in a move inside
the corporation.

But not simply that. As the business changes to adapt to how people find information
online (and consequentely how the advertisers want to catch the consumers' eye), more
and more the conditions for content production seek their way to the post-modernity.
Integrating the newsrooms is a "hard task", because it deals with different professionals
with different time-based works, such as TV and text, finance data and photos, having in
mind the clients and the consumers (executive assistant editor, 2017).

Reuters was preparing to move to a new newsroom just across the walls, in the very year
of 2017, but still had doubts about the process. On one side, a huge program of training
was undergoing and the purpose was that each journalist would learn a new activity or a
new way to cover a subject under a new platform before the inauguration of the new
newsroom. One of the measures taken was to use more and more "the cloud" as a means
of having all the data available quickly and securely, including programmes, software and
CMS. The other measures will be a central desk, digital walls with metrics that can be
seen by all, and to group the journalists and other professionals by editorial affinities, the
so-called "pools". On the other side, Reuters took advantage of its long previous
experience in the news market. If an important news break, like Manchester, for example,
it is perfectly possible to call journalists from Mexico, New York or Berlin and work
together in a "virtual" newsroom.

Discussion and conclusions

News media organizations are still central as producers of news. They disseminate
content across platforms and are recognized as powerful brands by the society.
Academics and the literature have often focused on the negative outputs that have come
from the process of convergence in the newsrooms and could challenge the quality
journalism. Those consequences can be pointed out: the decline of the print market, a
scenery of economic and advertisement crises, job insecurity, and business model
uncertainties. Nevertheless, journalism as a discipline, a career and an economic activity
has been proving, along centuries and from Guttenberg on, that it is good for democracy
and, besides, has tools for adaptation.

It is, indeed, a moving environment. Challenges for the journalism are the sudden change
from a traditional culture – print or broadcast – with fixed journalistic roles in a pre-
determined structure into a new one; a body of professional norms and productive
routines built along the centuries that are been questioning by the audience; and a new
connective way of thinking and working with another kind of news, sharing information
with the public and the network society. The limits that have maintained the profession
from the past up to the present times, and the values that have distinguished journalists as
a career and a social role, have been blurred (Jenkins, 2006).

Manuel Menke et al. (2016) have claimed that the dynamics of convergence processes
"are highly interrelated with newsroom cultures". The results of our research may
confirm this statement. Although the fact that the newsroom culture is not static, but
"constantly evolving", this character of continued experiencing that seems to be a
common attitude inside newsrooms reflects on strategies which alter the physical
structure of media outlets and influences the journalistic culture itself and yet the editorial
routines, in a two-way flow of mutual incidences.

Newsroom convergence processes are related to cultural factors, under media industries
frameworks that depend on the national specific scenario (Kaltenbrunner et al., 2013).
Besides, convergence is not linear and may be a trial and error method to adapt to new
technologies. Not in all countries convergent journalism reaches the levels of ideal
journalism that are in theoricists or in journalism philosophers' mind, at the same time
and inside the same organizations (Deuze, 2004).

Studying the process of reshaping newsrooms is, by consequence, the study of

convergence as a framework for action in the newsroom (Appelgren, 2004), hence the
importance of investigating the multiple dimensions involved. It is clear that news media
organizations have awaken to the process of convergence, although they do not name it
like that, but there is not a model for implementing it nor a unique way to change the
business enterprise in order to attract both consumers and financing agents. Three facts
document the centrality of the theme among news industry nowadays: 1) the frequency of
reforms (Reuters), buildings raised (La Nación and O Globo, but also El País and The
New York Times) and another architectural design for news production; and 2) the
absorption of new technologies and new platforms inside the newsroom; and 3) the
participation of the consumers, as it is unquestionable that the way people find, use and
share news constitutes a fact that is changing journalistic routines.

Journalism has undergone a handful of transformations over the last decades. The
purpose of this article was to offer an overlook to the process of adapting newsrooms to
the multiplatform distribution, to find out what adaptations are running in traditional
production routines and how those processes can be analysed within the logic of the
systems organization.

Our observation in those four newsrooms suggests that there are some trends in process:
a) media architects are key persons in redesigning the "open spaces" of the newsrooms;
b) a central, multimedia desk seems to be important to coordinate and organize content;
c) the names of the sections are changing, as La Nación, that has "Radar"- responsible to
detect news all over the world - and "Eco" - with the incumbency of echoing the news
through social media and mobile devices; d) new functions have been created, such as
community manager or social media editor; and e) the process has no turning point, but
there is still resistance to change.

Convergent newsrooms seem to practice the new principle of integration: "forget 'one
journalist, one desk, one computer, one chair'" (Innovation, 2016), but in this
reengineered design there is much more space to discuss, make interviews, meetings and
conversations. Sharing is the word. And there seems to be a significant reduction of the
use of paper and a strong employment of instant messaging among journalists and the
other professionals who work in a newsroom. Hence, integrated or convergent,
newsrooms inside a news organization have to be independent and capable of working as
a turbine, processing facts and delivering products that justify the existence of the
industry.
The results suggest that those new newsrooms are in the way to function as a plant, and
the production is connected, from the main desk, in circles. We may also say that the
most part of our sample (La Nación, O Globo and
Reuters) is yet on phases 3 and 4 of the convergent process, i.e., implementation of the
structures and physical integration and they act through a strong concern about the public
interests. The only newsroom that seems to have reached the last phase (fusion of
structures, making them indistinguishable) is the BBC London Headquarters.

After all, it is not possible to think about democracy without the existence of a free press
and independent journalism companies, which means that they must be economically
viable.

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Interviews for this article

BBC (2016) - IT Managers
O Globo (2016) - Director and Executive Director
La Nación (2015) - General Manager, Chief Editor, Assistant Editor, Digital Editor,
Sports Editor
Reuters (2017) - Assistant Executive Editor

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