What emerged from 2007 onwards was a stated philosophy that there is no distinction between print and online and that publishing would be fully integrated into a seven-day multimedia news operation.

Restructuring the newsroom for multi-channel delivery proved a massive cultural challenge, but one the newspaper’s leadership was prepared to embrace. Buying television assets through partnership and joint venture gave the newspaper a lead into TV, which after the restructure grew to include creating a television studio within the newspaper that could fuel basic interviews and commentary for the web.

The brief to journalists became focusing on how they can cover a story across all media, and the skills base was broadened with more staff who were bloggers and communities editors employed and brought in.

The summer of 2006 proved a turning point. The website redesign in May launched a wider page layout and greater prominence for multimedia content (both audio and video) and journalists’ blogs.

Architecture and soul
However the big changes were in the fabric of the building itself. Architecture played little part in newspapers until the wave of dotcom integrations. Departments traditionally operated in near isolation with editorial teams divided by walls and commercial departments divided by floors. In contrast to television - where building design was always subservient to the product, newspaper offices had become me-too cube farms, increasingly soulless, and doing nothing to enhance the media group’s outputs. Although the networks had opened up long before, the mindsets remained closed.

That’s why the new physical structure of the news rooms that emerged after 2000 reached far further than simply providing an open environment to work in. The Telegraph’s editorial desk layout of a giant hub and departmental spokes was grounded on the flow of information. Like a city trading floor where the immediate communication of knowledge is mission critical, editors found stories and ideas moving much faster. Their teams could start to deliver rolling news from their own sources rather than reworking the Reuters wire the way they had five years before.

At the centre, a giant command desk where section editors could instantly be in news conference. When the architecture of the building grows form the product great things can happen, and that’s exactly how the Telegraph regained the innovation to push itself to the leading edge of new content creation.

Cultural change
Journalists had to be retrained, sub editors taught how to prepare copy for the web, multimedia producers woven into the culture, and new managing editor roles created. The rich cross-referencing of the web within the newspaper finally began and Telegraph Television content launched and proved credible.

The scale of change made Mathew Watkins - Group Ad Director – tell us that “the whole philosophy of the company had to shift”. Listening to editor Will Lewis describe how "the digital revolution is about putting the customer first" was a quantum leap from the stance of his predecessor. Chief Executive Murdoch McLennan described how "people are demanding their media in a different way”.

Key performance indicators
This scale of change in the culture of media groups is exceptional. But the corporate results justify the engagement:

• Combined reach: 14.8m people per year
• 8.5m people have 'ever read' the newspaper
• 8.46m people have ‘ever visited’ the website
• 1996: 8.1m touched by The Telegraph in a year
• 2007: 14.8m touched by The Telegraph in a year

The model that emerges is about treating the web as a first for news. The team publish scoops on the web and use video and PR releases to support the packages. There are great examples of this from the first year: the defection of senior media executive Michael Grade to the broadcaster ITV broke on Telegraph TV.

That’s why the model created a massive uplift in brand exposure for The Telegraph across media channels. Commercially it built a buzz and energy in the brand that created major spikes in traffic around the breaking of exclusives – in the case of the Grade story that boost lasted three days.

The commercial model
Focussing on news generated more content and more page traffic. But this came at a price: it shifted The Telegraph’s focus away from the classified verticals into an editorial product that would go head to head with broadcast media. This focus on news and core content was about producing enhanced editorial, going far beyond print. There was strong integration of editorial columnists on the web, and together this was intended to fuel traffic.

In terms of advertising sales the new structure and offices gave The Telegraph strong talking points and the promise of a stepchange. Set against the background of a relatively stagnant national newspaper sector, this proved a strong story to take to market.

Their trade marketing campaigns helped educate advertisers and agencies, building discussion about the brand and its location. With echoes of the CNN studio tours in Atlanta, key clients became visitors to a celebrity media building. These trade marketing tours took advertisers and agencies around the building in a way that created a shift in their perceptions. For a newspaper suffering from an older demographic and a softening brand image, this was a generational shift in the chemistry.

"Telegraph TV is getting massive transaction and we're getting real heavyweight advertising support from the car companies and the IT sector”, explained Mathew Watkins, Group Ad Director. He told us how the model shifted and how this created new advertising products.

Marketing a relaunched online newspaper
The Telegraph broadened its reader acquisition toolkit. Regular email alerts were combined with the powerful TV content itself to drive new traffic. Audiences climbed steadily and started to claw back some of the lead built up by rivals over the previous three years.

Strategy evaluation
The Telegraph’s transformation from broadsheet newspaper to rolling news broadcaster is compelling, but not without strategic weaknesses. The focus on news content puts the brand head to head with the BBC and that massive sustained competition from a state broadcaster will prove an uneasy fight.

Brilliance in news does not guarantee commercial success, and with no network of strong content vertical sites to maintain jobs, motors and travel revenue, the newspaper’s resilience is exposed in the medium term.

Advertising sales will be restricted by the limitations of the product and in spite of the trailblazing content, dominance in any vertical will be unlikely from here on without acquisition. Television content is exciting for marketers, but compared to YouTube or MTV, the inventory is limited. This will be one of the fundamental challenges for the newspaper sector unless there is meaningful integration with broadcast media partners. Their dabbling in podcasts? "Nice idea, not much money”, explained Watkins.

However The Telegraph is acutely aware of the migration of their sector towards direct response and lead generation. Alongside the early days of Telegraph.co.uk, Development Director Tony Coad was nurturing a groundbreaking lead generation direct marketing business. The diversification into ‘third revenue streams’ (beyond cover price and advertising) has a long history in the business and Watkins’ reading is of a four step model:

The adsales model:
Awareness > Interest > Research > Purchase

He sees the future as being about a closer relationship to sales. "To be successful, media groups have to get stronger at driving purchase, We may be strong on awareness and we've always known that, but newspapers have been weak on driving purchase."