Terminal decline of the office?

The Daily Telegraph's fully integrated newsroom may be roughly the size of the Faisal mosque, but the BBC's rival leaves it for dead

The Daily Telegraph's fully integrated, wholly converged, all-singing-and-podcasting newsroom may be roughly the size of the Faisal mosque, but the BBC's rival leaves it for dead. Think the open deck of an ocean liner steering deep into Shepherd's Bush, with terminals as far as the eye can see. And don't dare mention the Titanic.

This month, when they've all finally moved, when BBC.com and BBC.co.uk sit alongside the radio news, the TV news, Five Live, BBC World and the rest of the gang, then the wonders of integration will be complete.

They'll be part of a diligently co-ordinated team which, theoretically, knows what it's doing. They'll work to a common news agenda which imposes consistent judgment. They'll meet at news conferences, share wisdom, pluck exclusive tales out of their own little boxes and promote them network-wide. The webmasters will be able to order interviews, pictures and blogs. Editors across this huge arena will have access to the emails of instant public opinion. Convergence theory has never had it so good.

But don't mock too easily, because in truth there's not much to mock here. Peter Horrocks, head of newsroom and its 1,000 warriors (with another 2,500 or so in news teams around the world) seems to have toiled prodigiously to get this daunting 93-ring circus on the road. Has any viewer or listener, these past few weeks, glimpsed the churn and the chaos just off camera? It's been a largely non-rocky revolution, contrived with dogged professionalism.

So far, so good then. But there is a niggling question or two. Does the corporation know who's really in charge minute by minute - and when will it stop changing its mind? This QE2 of a newsroom won't be here too long. It's moving back to Langham Place in a year or four, while Five Live is moving to Manchester. But more than desks and carpets may be shifting here. Add a dash of philosophy to the mix.

Big names in the bigger revolution on the web can actually come very small indeed. Craigslist, the California-based classified ad miracle netting nine billion page views a month, employs only 24 people. Perez Hilton, queen of the celebrity bloggers who sometimes tops four million unique users a day, started his sniping from an LA coffee shop. There's no rule that says you need the office acreage of an ocean liner to succeed. In fact, some American papers are beginning to think that you barely need an office at all.

Call it the 'rise of the mojos', reporters with backpacks (including video camera, audio recorders and laptops) who roam continuously, working from cafes or the back of their cars. One biggish paper in Florida has just equipped all its 44 reporters with backpacks and turned them loose. And Keith Woods, dean at media think-tank the Poynter Institute, told Editor and Publisher magazine the other day that since 'most editing, ad placement, layout, and design are done on computers anyway, it's conceivable that the newsroom as it exists today could be eliminated, with folks working from home, their auto or even the local Starbucks'.

Think small and scattered rather than vast and co-ordinated? It's the kind of twist you might expect from a revolution that never stops spinning in a world where the individual with phone and laptop rules OK.

Not everybody agrees, of course. Not the Telegraph. Not the BBC. Not the mighty New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, which now calls itself a 'news factory'. And no one, either, who thinks that human contact - gossiping, rubbing shoulders, sparking ideas - is the creative staple of office life.

When in debt, slash the news

The real death of newspapers? See America's great pending morgue (the Tribune Company of Chicago) where its real-estate dealer of a new owner, Sam Zell, is finally seeing that his journals can't make enough money in a recession to pay off the mountain of debt he's saddled them with.

Zell's answer: cut out 500 news pages across the group instantly, make dozens of redundancies, and in particular begin sacking reporters who don't churn out enough stories. Los Angeles Tribune journalists each produce 51 pages of news a year, while their opposite numbers on the Hartford Courant manage 300 (according to an accounting nobody seems to understand).

And when, unamazingly, this gambit delivers no goods, what will Sam do next? He could follow US News and World Report's owners and cut frequency of publishing. If the World Report can move from weekly to fortnightly, there must be scope for a weekly daily. Or perhaps he should just give up the ghost and admit that owning mobile-home sites isn't exactly the perfect grounding for managing some of America's ex-finest papers. Who needs to worry about the net when good, old-fashioned human crassness can take you to Zell and back?

Today's manners

Perhaps it's the sweeter, softer touch of Evan Davis, but Today is becoming an amazingly fragrant bower of gentility - featuring some phrases you never thought to hear again. Take last Monday at 7.20 as Adam Shaw did the business interview. Quote: 'I'm so sorry to interrupt you ...' I'm so sorry, I almost fell out of bed.

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