Digital Deep Dive

At Montreal’s La Presse, the newsroom has been revolutionized around its primary daily product: a tablet app called La Presse+. Reporters, designers and videographers work in teams to find the best way to tell a story that grabs the audience’s attention, although that comes with a price of longer production times. In part five, the final installment of this Digital Deep Dive, NetNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp looks at how La Presse+ is at the vanguard of multimedia journalism. (Photo by Edouard Plante Frechette). You can read all the stories here.

Montreal’s La Presse spent $36 million building a tablet app that it sees as its path to future sustainability as a mass medium. Paying for it required the help of its powerful labor union, whose concessions were translated into a deep reinvestment in the paper. In part three of this five-part Digital Deep Dive, NetNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp explores how La Presse paid for this highly risky bet on its future. You can read the entire series here.

In reinventing its primary product as a tablet app, Montreal’s La Presse needed to recapture the engagement times newspapers once routinely commanded with readers. In part two of this five-part Digital Deep Dive, NetNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp examines the research and design process that resulted in La Presse+, a revolutionary app on which the paper has gambled its future. You can read the entire series here.

Montreal’s La Presse has broken away from the newspaper pack in charting a course for its future, investing $36 million on a tablet app that it has positioned as its primary product and, ultimately, its main source of revenue. In part one of a five-part Digital Deep Dive, NetNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp explores the iconoclastic vision of Guy Crevier, its publisher, and the remarkable engagement and revenue results the app has achieved in its first two years on the market.

While redesigning all of its newspapers and digital products, The McClatchy Co. is also in the midst of a major corporate overhaul. NetNewsCheck Editor Michael Depp examines its foundational changes in audience operations, data management and advertising, and how the addition of teams for digital revenue and video, along with newsroom changes and a new rewards program, are positioning the company to move past its legacy losses toward a digitally-centric future.