Charles Apple | American Copy Editors Society

New media consultant Robb Montgomery writes today of his latest project: A multimedia newsroom + training center of the future.

It’s being built this fall in Tbilisi, Georgia — northeast of Turkey — and it will open next month. The center is funded with U.S. tax dollars via USAID, which aims to assist emerging democracies. In this case, by encouraging a free press. Robb does quite a lot of work these days with USAID.

What makes this “newsroom of the future” different from all the “circular desk in the middle” models we’ve seen lately: It’s designed for maximum flexibility. In fact, nearly everything is sacrificed for utility and flexibility. Robb — on the right, below — and his colleagues have designed this place like he would a good tabloid page template.

Robb writes:

This new media training center is a lifetime in the making. All of my experiences as a journalist, technologist, teacher, and consultant have been rolled into this project.

I am so happy it is turning out to be the kind of place where the next generation of journalists will cut their teeth.

The major talking points here:

• The place will be equipped with everything journalists need to produce content for print, online, broadcast and mobile.

• The whole space is essentially a stage. Things like sight lines and sound have been thought out.

This and the next two pictures are architect’s renderings.
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• The whole space is also instantly reconfigurable. All the furniture, sound booths, partitions and whatnot can be moved around depending on the needs of a journalist or a project.

• Even the everyday tables and chairs are easily portable. It’s easy for multiple folks to pull up a plush cube and have an instant meeting.

Robb writes:

It became clear that all of the computers and electronic newsgathering gear had to be mobile. That meant no dedicated studio, no TV control room, no fixed interior walls, wheels on every piece of furniture and many other unconventional approaches.

Many of our solutions just aren’t commercially available in Georgia so we are hiring teams of local furniture makers and craftspeople to build the environmental furniture, rolling walls, cafe space and equipment lockers.

This makes a lot of sense. Newsrooms today are what evolved from the days of mainframes and terminals and, before that, teletypes, Royal typewriters and gluepots.

Most of the “newsroom of the future” solutions I see simply takes the online desk out of the backroom they were stuck in back in the late 1990s and puts it in the middle of the newsroom. Better. But still, its an outmoded way of working.

Any smart journalist knows that the real work isn’t done in a newsroom. It’s done out in the field. So her real tools these days are her laptop, her camera and her wits. There’s simply no longer a need to tie her down to a desktop computer. And for her to walk across the newsroom when she’s collaborating with colleagues.

A newsroom is for meeting and planning. Even editing, and producing video and multimedia presentations is increasingly being moved out of a newsroom. It won’t be much longer before a classic newsroom will make about as much sense as an Amazon store down at the local strip mall.

Mobility. Flexibility. Adaptability. And yeah, this looks a hell of a lot cheaper than some of the other newsroom remodeling work I’ve seen.

I think my old buddy Robb might really be onto something here. He says he’ll write more about this when the center opens next month.

Find his blog post here and his Flickr set here.

A 1990 graduate of Eastern Illinois University, Robb spent a year as a news artist at the Sun-Sentinel of Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. and nearly three years as art director of the Sun-Sentinel’s XS magazine before moving to the Chicago Tribune in 1993 as an art director. In 1997, He moved to Sun Publications, a chain of Copley newspapers in suburban Chicago and then again to the Chicago Sun-Times in 2001. He created VisualEditors.com in 2004 and became a full-time consultant in 2005, specializing in new media workshops. He’s currently working on Breaking the News, a feature-length documentary “covering this disruptive period in journalism.”

Find Robb’s web site here and his Twitter feed here.

Find the IREX Georgia Facebook page here and its Twitter feed here.