Last night saw the first meet-up for Manchester-based bloggers in a long time.  Hosted by the Manchester Evening News, it was a chance for us to get a look around the offices of the main local newspaper in the area and see how they’re adapting to a world where many predict that “Heritage Media” will soon die out.

The Manchester Evening News has been the main source of local news in the Greater Manchester for 140 years.  During our tour we heard how homing pigeons used to be charged with the task of carrying the latest score from local football games back to the paper’s offices, while on election night a man would hang off the side of the building updating the latest poll results on a results board for passers-by to see.

Obviously, things move on and with jobcuts and falling circulations across the newspaper industry how is the M.E.N. adapting to these changes?  Probably the smartest move has been to bring Channel M (the local TV channel, also owned by Guardian Media Group) into the same open-plan office as the print and online newsdesks.  This allows the Editors to choose the most effective medium for any particular story.  While a group of Firemen aping around on Youtube might not look that great in print, it’s a fantastic story for TV and online.

Sharing resources also gives print, TV and online the opportunity to time the publication of stories in a way that benefits all three.  If they have a big exclusive, online and TV may wait until the story gets published in the newspaper. This means rival papers can’t poach the story and kill the M.E.N’s morning exclusive.

There are big plans to improve their new media offering in the future.  There’ll be a dedicated Twitter feed for news updates from the Labour Party conference this weekend, bloggers are to be worked with more closely  and there’s talk of using live streaming video from the Nokia N95s that some reporters are now armed with for suitable stories.  Let’s just hope they don’t follow the lead the Rocky Mountain News and go that little bit too far!

The future of journalism is far from certain.  As the difference between a journalist and blogger increasingly seems to be little more than whether you carry an NUJ card or not, many are disillusioned about the future. Express Newspapers are doing away with as many subeditors as they can and letting journalists input copy directly onto the page, blog style. If written news media just becomes a mass of opinion-led blogs where will the fact-checking and journalistic integrity go?

Just take a look at this email Roy Greenslade has received from someone at the Daily Telegraph for a flavour of the way many are feeling in the industry right now.  Still, I came away from the M.E.N.’s offices last night with a feeling of optimism for the future of those news outlets that can adapt properly to the new landscape.

You can find other bloggers’ posts about the event here, here and here.  More will undoubtedly follow soon.