What isn't quite in place yet is the new editorial structure to go alongside the more visible changes. Rather than having three newsdesks, with three sets of reporters, there will be one, to cover the Birmingham Post, Birmingham Mail and Sunday Mercury.

So instead of a Post reporter writing a Post story, you have a BPM Media reporter - the business' new name - writing a story which could end up in any of the papers. They send it to newsdesk, and the news editors decide where to put it.

The aim is to make better use of economies of scale, so that staff are able to get more done by avoiding duplication. To put it another way, each paper now has more staff than it used to - albeit shared with the rest of the business - and should be able to do a better job of reporting the news.

I'd been under the impression that Birmingham was the first Trinity Mirror operation to go down this road, but I'm told by a friend on the Western Mail that they've already done something similar in Wales.

In any case, this is the way of the future for the company - not something we've been told, just my prediction - so colleagues in Liverpool and Newcastle might want to pay attention!

                   

(Edit: And also see MarkMedia's site for more debate).

Jo Geary has prompted a debate on her blog with a post lamenting the fact that "journalists don't know their own business".

She writes: "After all, if we don't understand how our market is created, nor how we best make money out of it, then I would argue we know little about serving it properly."

She argues that the National Union of Journalists should adopt "a pro-active policy of educating members and providing them with access to financial information on their companies".

I wrote a comment, which I re-post here (as it was really far too long to be a comment). It's partly a response to other comments from Jo's readers, which included suggestions that journalists should learn about search engine optimisation - how to get a high ranking in Google - and the usual NUJ bashing.

By the way, the profit margin on Trinity Mirror's regionals (such as the ones I work for) was 21 per cent in the last financial year, significantly down from 25.6 per cent previously, but actually pretty good by the standards of most businesses, surely?

There are two issues here. One is how the internet changes the way they do their jobs, which is basically to gather and pass on information and ideas. Jeff Jarvis' blog gives one very simple and clear example - it could now mean providing links, in some cases.

The second issue, which is separate, is how we create a business model which pays our wages.

Good journalism which makes the best use of all the media available to us (I mean that one brand, such as the newspaper I work for, uses various media, with print being one of them) does not necessarily pay the bills in today's world.

Teaching journalists about search engine optimisation and ‘social media', or improving their work in other ways, won't change that - will it?

                   

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One of my favourite stories of recent days didn't quite make the grade in the Birmingham Post and got chopped down to 100 words or so - and can't even be found on the website.

That may very well be the fate it deserves, but by the power of the Interweb I present it here anyway, as I liked it. The MP concerned told the House of Commons that this was "serious monkey business".

Personally I'd love a monkey as a pet. Does this make me a bad person?

                   

Details of an interesting new website arrive in my in-box - www.journoworld.co.uk, which aims to explain how to become a journalist and what to do once you get a job.

I like the way the first article on the topic of being a journalist is titled "dealing with newsdesks".

Hints include not telling your news editor about a story, because if they learn about something too far in advance of it actually being printed they will get bored of it, and ditch it for something newer.

Shocking stuff, although not the first time I've heard that theory.

                   

When I read this letter from a Daily Telegraph journalist lamenting the state of the newspaper industry (following a link from Jo Geary), I suspected they'd receive a pretty negative response.

Their complaint was that newspapers weren't interested in recruiting quality staff - and paying them accordingly - or giving them the time they needed to do a decent job of finding out what's going on and telling people what's going on.

An uncharitable interpretation of their comments would be that they were asking for more money and less work, which rarely endears you to anyone.

But they had also criticised the focus on "social media", ie blogs and stuff, and the general emphasis on the internet.

For example, they wrote:

... it's becoming all too clear at the Telegraph, whose online business plan seems to be centred on chasing hits through Google by rehashing and rewriting stories that people are already interested in. Facts are no longer the currency they used to be.

This is a bit of a no-no in the industry at the moment (far better to say you are wildly enthusiastic about social media and complain that nobody else is).

But I was still a bit surprised by this response from Justin Williams, Assistant Editor at the Telegraph Media Group, who said:

Funny thing that - writing about things that people are interested in. It would be a ... er ... radical editor who went to his bosses and said that his reporters would, henceforth, only write about things that people weren't interested in.

Well, yes, news should be interesting. I think the point being made, however, was that newspapers were basing their strategy on search engine optimisation and getting into the most-read clusters on Google News "by rehashing and rewriting stories" that are already out there.

                   

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