Trinity Mirror's 'newsroom 3.0 model' to focus on digital

Last week Trinity Mirror announced plans for "significant changes to its publishing operations" across its regional newsrooms, with a "greater emphasis on the production of digital content".

This includes a proposed "newsroom 3.0" model, which it plans to roll out across all its regional newsrooms pending consultation.

Th publisher hopes the introduction of a new workflow will enable it to become a "fully-fledged, digitally-focused news operation", as editorial director Neil Benson said in the original announcement.

This follows the trial of "a new emphasis on breaking news" at two Trinity Mirror regional newsrooms last year, with the launch of daily liveblogs at the Daily Post in North Wales and Manchester Evening News.

Journalism.co.uk understands this daily liveblog experiment to be linked to the proposed newsroom 3.0 model.

In its announcement last week Trinity Mirror shared some of the features of the proposed changes, which also include "closer working between the national and regional titles", as well as "a much enhanced focus in the regional titles on the curation of community content" through an initiative called Content Direct.

According to the further details on the proposal shared with staff, Content Direct will range from "detailed articles commissioned from local experts through to grassroots pictures and information from clubs, societies and individuals". New non-journalism roles will be created to focus on the curation.

As well as a new content creation workflow, the plans also include a new production workflow, "based on minimising the number of touches from origination to publishing, both print and online".

This will include the use of "a standard set of five newspaper design templates".

"The new templates will ensure that modern, high-quality design is built into every one of our newspapers, releasing our local teams to focus on content creation".

The company would plan on rolling this new production workflow out starting this year and into early 2014.

Impacts of the new model could include a change to some regional multimedia journalist shift times, with an earlier start to the day for some to cover breaking news as well as traffic and travel updates before the commute.

Trinity Mirror outlined to staff a typical day based on the new workflow, which sees a breaking news team of four starting at 6.30am. Initial jobs would include setting up a daily liveblog on Storify and finding the latest updates on social media.

Last week the publisher announced that the proposals would see the loss of around 40 editorial positions, with consultation now underway.

Trinity Mirror said at the time that "the company hopes to achieve any redundancies by voluntary means as well as redeploying staff, where possible, to newly-created roles under the new publishing operation."

"These new editorial positions include digital roles in some regional newsrooms to support the rapid expansion of Trinity Mirror's digital ambitions, including the rollout of e-editions," the publisher added.

It is understood that these new roles include a story editor who would be "responsible for looking after the same story in all its forms – digital and print".

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