Print, digital and TV in a single newsroom

When The New York Times announced that it would create a separate, centralized group of editors and designers to focus on producing its daily print product, those at the German publishing giant Axel Springer’s Die Welt took particular notice of the change:
Die Welt likes to tout its online-to-print focus. It was among the earliest German publications to move toward digital subscriptions, launching a metered paywall that allowed 20 free articles per month. Two years ago, it upended the physical architecture as well as the workflow of its newsroom. A group of a dozen editors, photo editors, and designers constructs the print daily. That team doesn’t (and isn’t allowed to) assign stories. Instead, it draws exclusively from the stories that have already been published online. (Meanwhile, the Sunday paper Welt am Sonntag does still contain longer investigations and features exclusive to the print product.)
Welt has a staff of about 400, and most of the reporters and other staff don’t sit in the cavernous, open, and very quiet space on the ground floor of Axel Springer’s Berlin headquarters. The main restructured newsroom is more of a production center for its various channels — mobile, tablet, online, daily print, and Sunday print — all requiring varying degrees of speediness.
“When you get breaking news, you immediately think about how to present the story in the best way in the shortest time,” said Die Welt’s editor-in-chief Jan-Eric Peters, who has held that role since 2002. Meanwhile, “in a print newspaper, the thinking is, what can we do so that the story is still interesting the next day?”
In 2013, Axel Springer acquired 24-hour German news channel N24, and this past summer, it merged N24’s editorial team with the Welt group. N24 is also changing its name to Welt, so that all of the company’s “quality journalistic offerings” come from the same brand. (Axel Springer also owns the top-selling tabloid Bild, which has slightly different editorial aims.)
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