Results of the ethnographies in online newsrooms of half-dozen of countries collected in Making Online News support the journalistic description of the piece posted at Le Monde. Immediacy rules the working routines of online journalism. This is not to say that there is no experimental online journalism and room for multimedia reportages and feature reporting. Steen Steensen is researching this aspect of online news (see Journalism Practice for a content-analysis paper and forthcoming ethnographic results in Journalism and Journalism Studies), where innovation is more intense than in daily breaking news production, but we need to acknowledge that this is the exception to the rule of working routines in online newsrooms.

A recent survey of US online journalists by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism suggests that they are more optimistic regarding the future survival of the profession than their traditional media counterparts. However, they are concerned that Web publishing is loosening the quality standards of the profession and that online media still has not found a clear revenue model. Read a summary of the study at Poynter.org.

The authors based their research on qualitative interviews with a wide range of journalistic positions in the two analyzed newsrooms and a brief two-day observation of the working routines, including news meetings. Researchers approached their object of study with the aim of avoiding “oversimplifying the analysis”. They tried to overcome linear models such as the one by Dailey et al. (2005) or research implying that newsroom convergence is a mere “effect” of technological change (see Garrison and Dupagne, 2006).

The rich description of routines and the evolution of the projects, coupled with the interpretations by the protagonists themselves offer a very detailed explanation of two different approaches to convergence, what the authors label as “integrated model” and “cross-media model”. The authors identify the attitude of the managers and their ability to engage the newsrooms in the process as the key for success. Training and defining the boundaries between collaboration and competition seem the main practical challenges.

Garcí­a Avilés, J.A. and Carvajal, M. (2008) Integrated and Cross-Media Newsroom Convergence: Two Models of Multimedia News Production –The Cases of Novotécnica and La Verdad Multimedia in Spain. Convergence, 14(2), 221-239

See also the review at Infotendencias (in Spanish)