By Sabrina Valle
Reporter, O Globo
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Hosted by The Washington Post

"I really don't know whether we'll be printing The Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care." - Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., chairman of The New York Times in an interview early in 2007.

Journalism is going through a radical change all over the world with the rise of new media, and this is especially true for newspapers.

Papers are becoming a small part of how people consume information and the business model that has financed print for generations—advertising—is no longer effective. Readership has been migrating to other media such as Internet, while circulation and ad revenue is simply fleeing out of the business. Media companies are, therefore, forced to change everything from content to staff profiles, as well as the financial strategy behind them.

Having the opportunity to see from the inside how American newsrooms are reacting to this pivotal point was a unique opportunity not only as an employee of a Brazilian newspaper trying to find its way among the changes, but also as a young professional trying to define a career path.

I took many lessons from my visits to The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and my experience at The Washington Post. I would divide them into two main areas: how the newsrooms are reorganizing themselves (new procedures, skills, teams, priorities and content) and how, personally, the professionals have to reorganize themselves internally to deal with new forms of distributing information.

All newsrooms are reacting in different ways about the same issues. For some companies the new brand is called "hyperlocal coverage". The Washington Post for instance is investing in a community level journalism, with a strong Internet role, as a way to boost advertising, while papers like The Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times have closed foreign bureaus.

The New York Times’ steps toward print and online integration are being closely observed from newspaper companies all over the world. I spoke with a lot of journalists from various vehicles during my fellowship. Despite the rivalry between The Post and The Times, even Washington Post journalists admit that its main competitor does a much better job online.

I had the chance to visit The New York Times (NYT) at a turning point for the company–a week before the newsroom moved out from its historical building to a new and modern building in order to merge its print and online operations. I visited both buildings and talked to a lot of people about their new model of journalism.

By learning more about The Post, Times and other newsrooms I visited or read about during my fellowship, I was able to compare their experiences and observe the ones that are more successful and that could be adapted to Infoglobo (the head company for O Globo and O Globo Online) in Brazil.

One experience I could compare was how the companies decided to produce their videos for the web. I will elaborate more on video, since its development is one of the main needs for O Globo Online.

In my opinion, The NYT has the best strategy. The way it organizes itself is more efficient, which means they have more videos than other newspaper's websites.

First of all, the paper has an exclusive department for video, whose functioning is not very different from the photo department. The reporter who wants to have a video with his or her story calls the video department and asks for a videographer. They act like a team, just like a reporter/photographer team. The video department has 20 people, all with some kind of TV background. Fourteen have their own cameras and do everything from scripting, to taping and editing. Others have basically management positions.

Besides having professionals specialized in video, the paper encourages other members of the staff to shoot video as well. This is especially strong among photographers, who are already visual professionals. Many of them are now pressing the record button instead of the shoot button.

There are also eight reporters who have their own cameras and who do their reporting and taping by themselves (editing is still done in NY). Most of them are overseas correspondents, who cannot easily have a video partner with just a call. The paper also has a couple of cameras to lend to reporters occasionally and will increase this number until the end of the year because of the elections coverage.

The New York Times encourages reporters to do video, but in general they don't expect good writers to also become good videographers, like other newsrooms do.

The Times doesn't expect that all the staff will suddenly learn how to see visually, but they expect people to think visually—so that they can make suggestions, ask for somebody else's help or remember to take their cell phones with camera out of the pocket in an unexpected breaking news event. The Times has organized itself in a flexible way to take advantage of the best skills of the staff, realizing that their journalists have different profiles and skills.

The Washington Post's strategy is not as practical or flexible. Their videographers are focused on "documentary" videos, and not on the short videos that go along with the paper’s stories. Because they work in different cities, people from the .com and the paper don't even know each other. In general, print reporters must tape video by themselves. Since it is not easy to think about shot angles and conduct interviews at the same time, Post reporters miss a lot of video opportunities.

Video is just one of the topics related to web journalism I learned as an Alfred Friendly Fellow. Other topics observed would include strategies to maintain accuracy and credibility when reporting for the Internet which I consider an unreliable environment, how to handle breaking news and ethical decisions regarding the web. The visit to Bloomberg's newsroom was a good surprise. As a newspaper and Internet journalist, at first I thought I wouldn't profit much from a model based on wires and TV. But even though their wires/TV business model is very different from that of a newspaper/website company, the role of the professionals is not.

Bloomberg's professionals are a great example of multimedia journalism for companies trying to build up new profile of employees amidst environment of media convergence.

Bloomberg reporters are extremely dynamic and have to be versatile with different media. The same professional can write breaking news for financial brokers, long stories to be published on newspapers, audio interviews for the wires and video for both TV and wires. For video, some write their own scripts, make the video interviews, edit the videos and send text versions to the wire service.

For this reason these multimedia reporters show to employees of papers/website which new skills are feasible to be added to their own, without falling in the pejorative stereotype of the multimedia reporter carrying so many technology devices that he is not able to use any of them properly.

They prove that it is possible to report for different media at the same time without compromising content quality. But, indeed, they show that being able to report for different media at the same time may require a higher level of qualification. Bloomberg only employs the best professionals in the business and it is known for paying the highest salaries too.

And if Bloomberg teaches a lot about the profile of multimedia professionals, The Wall Street Journal taught me about coverage strategy. The company has a wire service (Dow Jones Newswire), a print version and a website. It is probably the best example of a newspaper making money with Internet. One specific detail of their model stands out in comparison with O Globo: the paper content is completely different from that of the wires and the website.

There is little difference in content between O Globo’s print and online version. The paper still has a lot of breaking news in its pages, even though most of them could have been consumed the day before for free over the Internet, on the radio and on TV.

You don’t find these raw stories in The Wall Street Journal print version. The Dow Jones Newswire and the WSJ.com publish breaking news, and the paper adds in-depth information and analysis that make it worthwhile to be read the following day.

O Globo sends various reporters for the same press briefing to do basically the same story. One from the paper, one from the web, another one for its low-income paper (Extra) and a fourth from the radio (CBN). A reporter from the Journal would never attend a press briefing. The Newswire reporter would, but the print reporter is focused on the bigger picture, as it should be if the paper is to have value and to be purchased and read each day.

After the visits to these newsrooms and my experience at The Post I can clearly identify some procedures of my company back home that are not productive.

Some of them would require an amount of investment that I cannot count on. For instance, it is obvious that O Globo's website needs to have more revision and editing on the stories to avoid mistakes (usually there's no revision or editing by a second person). But there is no other way to do it without hiring more people, which is not an option. Redefining the roles of reporters and trying to avoid overlap are good and feasible options on the other hand.

Providing information about how newsrooms in the U.S. are reorganizing themselves and which skills reporters have to develop–if any–to deal with multimedia could help O Globo to develop its strategy in a more effective way. On a personal level, it certainly helps me to decide what kind of skills I want to focus on to develop in my career.