News production in the ‘post-broadcasting’ era: BBC Scotland’s move towards convergence

Case study framework and methodology

The UK PSB system cornerstone, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), has been considered one of the most representative examples concerning both the successful reinvention of European PSB and the widespread debates over its mission, regulation and even interest (Barnett, 2006; Ferrell and Hujanen, 2003; Nissen, 2006; Steemers, 1999, 2004; and others). In the last decade, the challenges arising out of the BBC’s move towards a new scenario have also been related to the growing semi-autonomous status of broadcasting within the corporation. In 2003, the legislative framework of the new Communications Act extended the BBC’s production to the whole of the UK, establishing a number of quotas and targets regarding ‘out-of-London’ production (non-network programmes), apart from original production (network programmes) and independent production (BBC, 2004a: 76). At that time, the BBC as a whole found itself under pressure to continue serving nations and regions, as well as to be as efficient as ever, even more so in a global and digital media domain where the role, funding and function of the PSB was in the eye of the storm. Accordingly, the BBC started moving more of its commissioning outside of London and committed itself to increasing total expenditure in the Nations and Regions to more than 35 percent (£1b) in the following Charter period (2007–16), giving special value to the network programmes produced in BBC Scotland, the largest of the corporation’s Nations and Regions (BBC, 2004b).

BBC Scotland has around 1250 staff working in numerous production centres that cover the entirety of Scotland – Glasgow, Aberdeen, Inverness, Dundee, Edinburgh, Selkirk, Dumfries, Stornoway, Orkney, and Shetland. This extensive coverage and its operations in television, radio and online make it the main Scottish broadcaster with no direct competitors. ¹ In radio, BBC Scotland runs BBC Radio Scotland and the Gaelic radio service Radio nan Gaidheal (1984), while in television it operates the Gaelic digital service BBC Alba (2008) – in partnership with MG Alba, apart from producing ‘non-network’ and ‘network’ programmes. On the web, it is responsible for bbc.co.uk/Scotland and the BBC educational service Bitesize.

On a technological level, BBC Scotland’s new main headquarters on the banks of the River Clyde, at Pacific Quay (PQ) in Glasgow, can be considered one of the biggest and most advanced production centres within the BBC. This state-of-the-art building, opened in September 2007, is the result of a mammoth £188m investment project planned at the end of the nineties. It covers 34,000m² and includes High Definition production and post-production facilities – three television studios, six radio studios, and an all-digital library. This project permitted BBC Scotland to migrate to one of the first fully digital integrated systems for multiplatform production within the BBC. Apart from this content facility, the project also provided a high-speed link between Glasgow’s main headquarters and other BBC Scotland news centres across the country. These developments have been important too on a pan-BBC scale. Indeed, the BBC department in Salford Quays (Manchester) benefited from these improvements at PQ.

In spring 2007, coinciding with the relocation of BBC Scotland staff to the new PQ building, discussion of the convenience of a more indigenous production became a top priority, when Ofcom’s report on the communications market in Scotland showed that the country’s share of UK network production had fallen from 6 percent in 2004 to 3 percent in 2006 (Schlesinger, 2008: 155). In the third Scottish parliamentary election after Devolution, held on 3 May 2007, the Scottish National Party (SNP) emerged as the largest party for the first time and this change in Scottish politics boosted government interest in responding to the debates widely heard since the Scotland Act 1998 on increasing the influence of Scotland over its broadcasting services. The response was the creation of the Scottish Broadcasting Commission (SBC), in charge of outlining a concrete strategic way forward for broadcasting as a cultural and creative industry related to ‘Scottish identity and collectiveness’ (Meech and Kilborn, 1992: 245). At the heart of this debate was the issue of the convenience of a public service broadcaster (BBC Scotland) with more control over the Scottish news agenda, a discussion largely symbolized at the ‘Scottish Six’ debate (Schlesinger, 1998). In a certain sense, this debate led the semi-autonomous status of broadcasting to become an epitome of Scotland’s constitutional position in the UK.

The establishment of the SBC brought an immediate response (SBC, 2008: 40). On 20 September 2007, at the opening of BBC Scotland’s new HQ, the BBC’s Director-General Mark Thompson recognized the need to increase network television production in Scotland to a level more consistent with the Scottish share of the UK population – close to 9 percent (Thompson, 2007). The Scottish First Minister also took the occasion to recall that, apart from a ‘shiny new building’, BBC Scotland required ‘programme content to match’, since its new headquarters matched the great opportunities from emerging international markets, the internet, digitalization and convergence (Salmond, 2007). The SBC’s Final Report, Platform for Success, collected more than 20 recommendations for developing Scottish broadcasting, by producing more high-quality creative content within a fast-growing digital media sector: ‘This is a historic opportunity and we firmly believe that Scotland stands on the threshold of something special’ (SBC, 2008: 3). Given the capacity of BBC Scotland’s new studios at PQ, the Commission recommended that this broadcaster should provide better news coverage of the devolved nation, and a future service more fully aligned with the needs and wishes of Scottish viewers. ² To this end, the SBC did not advocate the devolution of broadcasting, but it recommended ways in which the BBC could move to facilitate a greater portrayal of Scotland on the UK network, as well as more ambitious non-network production in the nation, designed for Scottish audiences, in order to strengthen the broadcasting role in securing cultural expression and cohesion.

Bearing in mind this particular Scottish politico-communicative context, and allowing for the pioneering use of digital technologies made by BBC Scotland at its main base in Glasgow, research was conducted to explore potential newsroom convergence-related developments within this organization. As previously explained, there are many operational patterns for a convergent newsroom and this research aimed to describe BBC Scotland’s current option, providing further confirmation of the way convergence is challenging the understanding of news production in established broadcast organizations and, more concretely, among public broadcasters. In this respect, the study considered two concrete variables: (1) the relationship among editors and journalists of radio, television and online, and (2) the degree of multi-skilling, in terms of multi-tasking and reporting across media. Specifically, the research aimed to analyse changes in newsroom structure, workflow and organization (RQ1), as well as the journalists’ reaction to these changes (RQ2) and the management’s perceptions of the process (RQ3). These questions approach key areas of technological, managerial, organizational and journalistic convergence and they were analysed by conducting in-depth semi-structured interviews on the newsroom floor with managerial and journalistic staff (N = 7). ³ Interview questions considered issues including the use of digital infrastructures, cooperation across media boundaries for news production, staff profile, daily work and challenges arising when combining different journalistic cultures. The research results have been interpreted in the light of the case study context, that is, the concrete opportunities and challenges that BBC Scotland faces in the current scenario, as both a multimedia and regional-national public broadcaster influenced by a particular politico-communicative state of affairs.

Findings

The move to the PQ headquarters led BBC Scotland to put into practice a long-planned holistic convergent philosophy, exceeding mere technological adjustment. Actually, PQ’s open-plan interior was purpose-designed to promote group-effort and to provide more personal contact, including plenty of flexible areas for programming, meeting and casual discussion in its central stairwell. Inside and outside the newsroom, convergence was thus understood as an opportunity in terms of synergies and collaborative working among different media and programme teams.

Convergence was also understood as an opportunity to promote business partnerships with the independent media sector (Creative Scotland) and the Gaelic Media Service (MG Alba), the Scottish government’s organization responsible for Gaelic broadcasting. To date, however, BBC Scotland’s most outstanding joint venture has been with the private broadcaster Scottish Television (STV). The synergy with STV started in 2009 after a six-month pilot project, and it goes beyond specific productions, sometimes affecting daily routines, in terms of swapping materials and even human resources, as one manager explains: ‘If there are two press conferences at the same time, we can send our respective journalists and later share gathering materials and information. The scene of BBC Scotland working closely with a straight commercial rival would have been unthinkable before the move to PQ, but working in a cooperative way is effective for both broadcasters and, therefore, it is of advantage to the audiences’. The partnership with STV was initially met with scepticism among news teams, but it has worked productively, as it does not affect respective styles or editorial aims. This partnership is also revealing about BBC Scotland’s interest in being an active contributor to the development of the broadcasting sector in Scotland (Scotland’s Television Broadcast and Production Working Group, 2010; Creative Scotland, 2011).

Beyond these developments, the key department for observing BBC Scotland’s operational convergence is News and Current Affairs (NCA), which forms part of the corporation’s News Group executive division. This is one of the chief departments of BBC Scotland, together with Television, Radio, Gaelic, Children, Drama, Specialist-Factual and Sports. The number of staff working for NCA across the whole of BBC Scotland’s news centres is around 250, while in PQ central headquarters the number is 160. In this main news centre, NCA has five editors − News-gathering, Radio Programmes, Reporting Scotland, Newsnight Scotland-political programmes and Online. This department provides content for the BBC Scotland Radio morning programme (Good Morning Scotland) and all-day-through bulletins (Radio Scotland News). It also runs news content for BBC network TV current affairs programmes and the Global News division, as well as for BBC Scotland non-network programmes, such as Reporting Scotland ⁴ (BBC 1), BBC Scotland Investigates (BBC 1), The Politics Show Scotland (BBC 1) and Newsnight Scotland (BBC 2). It is also responsible for the Scottish news website bbc.co.uk/news/Scotland. ⁵

The move to the PQ headquarters changed the previous newsroom organization by grouping together formerly distinct radio, television and media newsrooms in the same physical space. This restructuring was prompted by a necessary change in the managerial approach, due to the growth of online services during that period and the budgeting constraints. As one of the informants explains, in the previous newsroom there had been a more single-medium approach, because ‘online hardly existed and it was a new venture’. By the end of the first decade of the new millennium, however, the web had already shown itself to be not only a supporting platform for on-air programming, but also a stand-alone medium that was joining television and radio as a critical part. This context led BBC Scotland’s newsroom to adopt a new working style and develop further cooperation across the three media. Similarly, the economic factor has been a significant consideration, and from the managerial point of view convergence has been a great opportunity to get more for less, making people work differently: ‘The five-year continuous saving plan (2007–12) and saving requirements established by Delivering Quality First meant at that time, as well as what it means at this very moment, we had to look to significant savings until the end of the current Charter by 2016/17.’ ⁶ In this respect, interviewees consider positively the rationalization of resources that convergence has entailed, for instance when covering events: ‘A decade ago it was not unusual to have a radio and a television crew in the same press conference. Today the public perception is much better and we are concerned about spending public money covering stories.’

The current newsroom structure thus aims to obtain the maximum value of outputs for given value of inputs, by making the most of hi-tech and human resources. The linchpin of this cost-effective technology is a single management system built around the ‘Digital Library’, an Ardome asset solution that has functioned as a pilot for other BBC centres. This system permits the ingest process to be used for news production and content editing for all platforms − radio (VCS), television (Avid) and online (CMS – Content Manager System), improving and reducing transcodes for web publishing. This asset-centred approach reduces the medium-specific approach, by gathering all non-edited and edited input materials in a single massive file database and making them accessible to everyone in the newsroom, irrespective of the final distribution channel. The Digital Library meant the first step for achieving the news management’s viewpoint of BBC Scotland as a ‘multimedia content provider’.

Exploitation of cost-effective technology has entailed a ground-breaking changeover in daily practice, as journalists are the ones in charge of using the production infrastructure and taking full advantage of it. Nevertheless, technology is just a catalyst for convergence. Beyond coming to terms with new facilities and tools, the main challenge has been changing the staff’s behaviour, encouraging them to adopt new skills, as well as to become more aware of the needs of other colleagues working for a different medium. Management has therefore tried to instil the multiple-medium approach facilitated by technology in newsroom practice, in order to take the most advantage of the restructuring of the work space and the physical proximity of the staff: ‘It has been about people, because we can make the technology do whatever we want, but it is about people thinking of each other.’ In this regard, BBC Scotland’s newsroom convergence project has essentially been a process of changing mindsets and perceptions of the journalists’ work and the role of each medium, given that, in the convergent scenario, media do not compete but collaborate to obtain the most advantage from each platform’s qualities. Encouraging this mutual awareness has been an intricate task, since the journalists working for television, radio and online evidence professional rhythms and styles that collide in day-by-day practice, as well as cultures and identities that sometimes even compete.

As management recognizes, it has been necessary to handle the rejection factor. Junior journalists have been more flexible and open-minded about adopting new skills, and adjustment has been more natural for them. In contrast, styles of functioning rooted in radio and television made it difficult even before the move, as the prospect of PQ instinctively gave rise to certain reservations, even fears, especially among the more senior and experienced staff, who were opposed to doing a job different from that in which they were skilled and reputable:

Most of the people who found change difficult found that what they were doing was very good. But we never are as good as we think we are, because as soon as you think you are really good, it means you do not get opportunities to get better. ⁷

These threats and attitudes of reluctance were also accompanied by a climate of change in the department due to various cuts to jobs and programme budgets across the whole BBC. In fact, according to the Delivering Quality First for Scotland report (BBC, 2011), budget reductions will lead to the cutting of between 100 and 120 posts between 2012/13 and 2016/17. As said in the same document, BBC Scotland has a track record of operating efficiently, having been successful in reducing spend through investment in new technology and new ways of working which are represented by PQ: ‘We can build on that experience and exploit that technology, aiming for collaborative and effective ways of working across all our departments.’

To deal with the fear factor, management placed emphasis on the psychological aspects, motivating journalists by appealing to professional improvement and success:

Some found it difficult because they were trained at a different time, when there was more money and when the only thing that mattered was perfect pictures, perfect sound. It has been necessary to understand that there are other things that are important too, like being more agile in a world that is moving more and more quickly.

Even before the move, BBC Scotland carried out internal communication sessions aimed at explaining the rationale behind the change and the organization’s commitment to convergence as part of its mission. When the staff moved to PQ the change was put into practice and there was in-house training that covered the full range of tasks (Digital Library managing, audio and video recording, editing, etc.). The training was led by BBC Scotland’s human resources department and BBC Training and Development (BBC Academy). This preparation has continued over time to refresh skills or to train new journalists. This training is very much appreciated by junior journalists, as for the most part they find multi-skilling good for their careers.

As has occurred in other organizations, implementation of convergence in the newsroom at BBC Scotland has lacked a perfect recipe. This implementation is internally defined as ‘a long process that still continues’, that is, a process showing substantial improvements with respect to the past operation, but that could be better. The snapshot of the current operation shows a convergent logic pretty much accepted among staff, as well as journalists cooperating across media and gradually acquiring the competence required to master different processes, even if this cooperation remains restricted to concrete activities. As explained below, this performance makes it possible to infer quite a reasonable level of integration aimed both at avoiding duplication of efforts and at answering to the needs and functioning of the online medium.

Since day-to-day harmonization and exchange of information and news flows between the three media requires precise managing, the newsroom relies on the help of a ‘news organizer’. This central figure is in permanent contact with the head of news-gathering, the TV and radio programme producers, the online editor and the person responsible for deployment. All of these individuals get together daily in the early morning to discuss the news planning schedule and coverage. Following this, each team carries out its own specific meetings and, at mid morning, programme teams come together to discuss progress. In the afternoon, the Newsnight Scotland team gathers to discuss progress throughout the day and look ahead to the next day. Since these meetings involve staff from radio, television and online, they lead to a greater mutual awareness, making interplay and cooperation easier, beyond increasing the visibility of the online department: ‘When someone is going out to do a short segment for the evening programme, the online editor will know and ask to shoot more additional material for the web if needed’.

The news organizer maintains constant communication with editors during the day, as well as with journalists, no matter whether they are in the field or on the newsroom floor. Apart from setting priorities for reporting and equipment use, he is informed of what is going on and helps to plan the news coverage across platforms. This management strategy facilitates interaction and cooperation of staff members, especially at the news-gathering level, by facilitating information or source-sharing among editors and journalists operating for all of BBC Scotland’s news outlets. As the interviewees point out, talking to each other has been a real challenge, as radio and television news programmes used to be careful not to make known information that was considered somewhat exclusive. This kind of competition existed even with the online medium. Today, even though interviewees admit everybody is a lot more aware of everybody else, and about sharing information and talking to each other, daily routines and time pressures can make it difficult, whereupon the news organizer’s activity becomes essential:

When journalists go out, they have assumed the importance of communicating with the newsroom to let online know and to get it straight on the web. They pick up the phone and then talk to the news organizer. They can also shoot pictures to send online and tell them directly the information to build the story up.

In this regard, the preferred strategy is putting it over the radio, then online and finally on television at fixed screening times.

This kind of operation definitely implies a more flexible understanding of work and it has challenged traditional journalistic practices, stimulating a higher degree of multi-skilling, as opposed to specialization in a single task. This is especially noteworthy at the news-gathering level. Camera operators have become ‘broadcast journalist operators’ in charge of shooting pictures, recording audio and editing. As well as journalists, technical staff are also qualified to report and send material back from the field when necessary, thanks to multifaceted devices or fully equipped satellite vehicles. The number of picture editors has thus decreased more than twofold and the picture-editing task remains a specialized assignment for those cases that require thorough editing work. Similarly, for broadcast journalists in the field multi-skilling in news-gathering is a basic expectation and they may do technical work, like shooting images, recording audio or editing. They can also create a piece for radio and television, as well as provide certain kinds of material for the web: ‘If needed, a broadcast operator in the field will report video and audio, but also use the phone for stills to send them to the web.’

The traditional distinction between technical and journalistic staff has thus become increasingly blurred. In this respect, multi-skilling is not a totally new thing in BBC Scotland, but the move to PQ has definitely systematized it in the newsroom’s culture. One of the journalists interviewed exemplifies this progress towards multi-skilling in his account:

A long way back, years ago, I started doing sound, and then doing camera, and then shoot-editing, and then programme producing, and then broadcasting. I started from a very technical background and it has completely changed. It could seem a kind of ‘jumping over the fence’, but indeed there is not another side. It is much more about joining up.

Management makes clear that the old days when staff only worried about one role are simply gone:

It does not matter if in the past staff fitted into a technical or journalism position, we all must be thinking about providing content, because content is what we make, for audiences to view, listen or read. We have fewer barriers than in the past.

Allowing for reporting skills, the overall viewpoint is that all broadcast staff should be able to manage different tools and work across the different platforms, which does not necessarily mean that all journalists must or can do everything on a regular basis. Managers are aware that each platform involves its own production constraints and demands. Reporting across media boundaries ⁸ – that is, one single journalist working on TV, radio and online outputs from scratch – is possible, but only under appropriate circumstances, since it requires time for planning. In this regard, cross-media reporting has to date worked for pre-planned stories – for example, the Scottish general elections in 2011, while the approach is different for breaking stories, as it might be difficult to work on the output even for two media:

The general daily news operation requires being practical and sometimes multimedia work is not realistic. If you are trying to do different things at the same time in the heat of a breaking story, final quality might be at risk.

Therefore, the organization prefers to think of its newsroom practice in terms of ‘flexibility’, estimating, on a case-by-case basis for each news story, what level of multi-skilling is required on the part of journalists carrying out news coverage:

It depends from day to day and from story to story how a journalist is going to work. He or she might be asked one day to do different versions of the story, and the next day, it might not be necessary, as the other media have already done it.

In this respect, management has encouraged staff to embrace a new cross-media thinking in order to increase mutual awareness and dialogue – ‘we must think we do not work any more just for a specific medium or a specific programme, as it used to be. This has been an important change’ – which does not mean that reporting across media is actually practised as a norm. There are still some staff who work solely for radio and for television, as they are more senior or have a highly dedicated role − this is the case for the assistant editors who produce programmes, but in general they are no longer radio or television journalists. It is true that some earlier medium-specific approaches and identities still remain, that professionals still have core skills and that newsroom culture is still programme-oriented, but journalists are more mindful of the existence of other platforms and of the need to be content providers, according to a sense of group-effort.

In the light of this approach, it seems that the main change in the work scheme has been reinforcing and adapting the ‘bi-media’ model developed by the BBC in the 1990s, in order to transform radio and television journalists into ‘broadcast journalists’. These must now think in terms of content and output, leaving aside medium-specific paradigms and bearing in mind a third medium, online. The current model thus goes further and broadcast journalists are expected to provide, if necessary, information for the web (a more or less accurate version of the story, complementary pieces, analysis, blogs, etc.) as well as materials for mobile devices, in order to make the most of a single news story. BBC Scotland has also expanded the use of social media for journalism and several reporters and correspondents now use Twitter and Facebook as channels for delivering news and interacting with audiences.

It must also be noted that, away from the online desk there are few journalists familiar with the web publishing system (Content Manager System, CMS) and that web reporting usually requires editorial support from online staff. In the opinion of the online editor most journalists work well across TV and radio, but the online medium requires dedicated staff and some expertise, as it is a completely different way of reporting. Online work requires more than versioning a radio or television story; it requires frequent updating, some publication standards, and an attractive presentation. So, the fact that there are different journalistic identities within the newsroom is not seen as problematic: ‘On a daily basis, I do not think that broadcast journalists could do more than send us back the story.’ The online team thus expresses satisfaction with the current operation and it is particularly positive in seeing the benefits of collaboration and internal communication, especially regarding newsroom flows:

We know who is doing what and if they are expected to send us some material or information, and this is as much as necessary, since it allows us to do our own planning. If we know someone is not going to have time to do something specific for us, it is fine, because then we know we will have to dedicate online staff to it.

For the online team the most important thing is to obtain the information as quickly as possible. In this respect, reporters are more likely than in the past to phone the newsroom, send pictures from their camera phone or a copy of the report to the online team: ‘For the most part, reporters think of online when they are out there, and there are broadcast staff that are very good at serving us.’

The number of journalists working for the online desk is around 15. Since the redesign of the BBC website in 2011, there has been one journalist dedicated to covering each of the local and regional areas that organize the web − Edinburgh, Fife and East; Glasgow and West; Highlands and Islands; NE, Orkney and Shetland; South; Tayside and Central − as well as one journalist for Scottish national news, two people for editing and ‘versioning’ stories, one person for investment, two people for politics and two online editors. This team is also in charge of providing Scottish news for the BBC’s general news website. Apart from versioning radio and television news, providing them with appropriate images, audio or video pieces, suitable links or some extras, the online team develops this news when necessary, as well as producing special features and exclusive online content.

The implementation of the above-described operations has had a clear impact not only on long-established ideas about the role and significance of each media, but also on the journalists’ profiles and identities, involving the professional element in a very particular way. Rather than a simple adjustment of old ways of working to the new equipment, management has encouraged renovated practices that leave behind past demarcations with regard to the staff’s tasks and working medium. It has led the workforce to show a higher degree of multi-skilling, as well as a faster reaction capacity and a greater open-mindedness regarding the needs of the online medium. Even if the goal is not total integration, this change in professionals’ behaviour has been essential to adapt to the current age.

Conclusions and discussion

In the fourth broadcasting revolution, technologies and digital opportunities have driven a convergent philosophy within BBC Scotland, and the PQ headquarters have served as the catalyst for this. Such new thinking has had consequences at the very heart of daily working practices in all parts of this broadcaster’s businesses. In this sense, BBC Scotland’s newsroom convergence must be understood as the result of an all-embracing organizational action plan and budget, implemented by the management with a proactive attitude towards the changing media landscape in terms of audience news consumption patterns and technological evolution. This action plan responded to effectiveness in terms of cost-saving, new technological facilities and time–effort balance. As a 21st-century public service broadcaster committed to audience satisfaction, all its journalists, irrespective of their original media affiliation, are expected to provide the best possible quality news, regardless of the distribution platform, by following the same ethical and tactical practices.

BBC Scotland’s plan has followed the scheme of other European public broadcasters in basic aspects like physical restructuring of the newsroom, aiming to encourage collaboration, news flow and, in general, a more balanced relationship among radio, television and online. Equally, as has happened in other public service broadcasters, news flows have been based on the integration of multimedia assets into a single facility, which has led BBC Scotland to develop itself as a kind of ‘news engine’, along with the tendencies in the audience’s consumption patterns. Likewise, while newsroom grouping and investment in digital facilities have set the basis for a more integrated operation among the different news media outlets, finding a coherent multiplatform cross-media strategy has been more complex than expected. It has been necessary to overcome cultural clashes between journalists with different media backgrounds, which is something also detected in other studies on convergence (Silcock and Keith, 2006; Singer, 2004).

Even with these correlations, the findings suggest a higher degree of evolution in the case of BBC Scotland. This is partly due to the number of its newsroom staff, which is smaller than in the other cases, and its familiarity with working models that involve more than one specific medium, as the bi-media journalistic approach is distinctive to the BBC. A key point to consider is that BBC Scotland’s newsroom has responded to the challenges of cross-media newsrooms by basing its template on coordination and dialogue between editors and journalists, by means of the ‘news organizer’, who functions as a kind of axis. This coordinated operation has helped to encourage collaborative working and further understanding for other platforms, diminishing the traditional overvaluing of each medium’s work. It has also been decisive for achieving news-gathering convergence and information-sharing, which are two of the basic types of newsroom convergence. Specifically, this model of operation has answered to the needs of the online desk, whose function has gained in visibility inside the newsroom. In fact, coordinated management of the news flow puts special stress on immediacy and flexibility.

This process for change inside the newsroom was clearly planned over the long term and, even with this preparation, it has faced professional challenges and resistances posed by skill renewal and cuts to jobs, which have been understood as a logical consequence of the process of evolution. Restructuring the newsroom has been a ground-breaking shift and, in some aspects, it is still ongoing, since changes in work processes require time to re-stabilize. In relation to this, some issues will require a clear follow-up, such as the communication between management and work floor, the staff’s preparation, and content quality standards concerning uniformity and speed of reporting.

Up to this point, the results indicate that, beyond the technology itself, the process carried out by BBC Scotland in the newsroom has thus introduced a mode of organization that, for managers, editors and journalists, dismantles decades-old work standards and styles. This would contribute to supporting the increasingly widespread idea that convergent processes in media organizations are a technology-related process, very much driven by journalistic practices and the professionals’ behaviour. Besides leading to a re-socialization, the change in BBC Scotland’s newsroom has led to a reassessment of the overall concept of media consumption. This might be one of the key factors that should be taken into consideration, in response to the growing preference of Scottish audiences for online line broadcasting. From a general standpoint, BBC Scotland’s case could help to shed light on which elements may contribute to developing a more integrated operation in those organizations that provide news outputs that vary in their narrative characteristics, timing and purpose, according to the distribution platform. Indeed, this kind of convergent operation is not easy and still involves uncertainty about how to proceed, especially among public broadcasters, whose organizational structures have been traditionally founded on television production. In this regard, it is interesting to note that BBC Scotland’s template has served as a guide for other public service broadcasters, such as the Basque EITB. In the year 2013 this public broadcaster has designed a newsroom coordinator to overcome one of the main obstacles it faced, that is, cooperation and news-flow difficulties (Larrondo et al., 2012).

Last but not least, BBC Scotland’s newsroom performance described here should be considered as just one of the many outcomes and opportunities that digitalization and convergence have brought to this media organization in terms of more extensive and effective production. In the post-Devolution period, the discussion on the exploitation of these opportunities relates to the increase in network production quotas in recent years, and the attainment of percentages that are increasingly consistent with the proportion of the Scottish population in the UK, which underlies the vibrant debate on Scottish broadcasting progress. Even if the movement of production to Scotland has been seen as a positive step for the BBC and for the Scottish creative economy, the current opportunities and quotas regarding non-network production appear more controversial. This might be because BBC Scotland is the main multiplatform broadcaster and substratum of the Scottish public agenda and, by extension, of Scottish distinctiveness. All this is conditioning the role of the BBC as a unitary organization facing multiple 21st-century challenges. The opportunities that convergence has brought for accessing BBC content through the internet offers new insights into the debate. It has also guided the Scottish government’s policy in relation to a hypothetical scenario in which an entirely new Scottish public service broadcaster would serve Scottish audiences according to their interests and needs as citizens. As the Scottish referendum in 2014 approaches, it becomes increasingly important to elucidate the current intricacies of broadcasting in Scotland, regarding the role and model of BBC Scotland.