Another newspaper is moving towards an integrated newsroom, this time in The Netherlands. The process the de Volkskrant, one of Holland’s leading daily quality newspapers started about a year ago and in an interview with journalism.co.uk publisher Pieter Kok explains how it is going.
I particularly like the way he describes the paper, turning the traditional definition on its head: “I like to think of us as an online newspaper that prints an edition once a day.”
This strikes me as the best way to think about a media organisation. The print edition is merely one of many platforms.
As well as having a website, de Volkskrant also offers podcasts and video, aggregates news from other sources via RSS, publishes online an afternoon PDF edition and uses instant messaging for news.
As Kok explains: “The multimedia approach is quite simple, if customers change their approach to news then we change with them
“If you ask a person of 15 years of age or a person of 50 about the news, at the end of the day they know the same amount.
“It is just that the 50-year-old gets it from newspapers and the 15-year-old grabs information from several places, from Messenger, mobile phones, the internet and TV.
“It is not really important how they got it, just that they got it from a trustable source.”
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