The UK paper The Guardian carries a couple interesting pieces this week on the British company, The Press Association, or as it is know now, the PA Group.  Essentially, it demonstrates that investment in creative people who can leverage digital technology can make money. 

See ´´The new heart of British journalism´´ and ``Service used by every paper makes only 1% of the money ´´

The new heart of British journalism

A sleepy Yorkshire town has become the hub of an international publishing operation

Martin Wainwright
Tuesday September 20, 2005

Guardian

Twice now, extraordinary things have happened to the sleepy market town of Howden - little more than a village on the rich, flat land where the river Humber is joined by the Yorkshire Ouse. The first time, in the 1920s when the local airfield became the centre of Britain's airship industry, ended abruptly with the loss of the R101 (and the then air minister) in a storm over northern France. The second time is now, and it shows no sign of collapsing at all.

Quietly over a decade, Howden has become one of the biggest centres of journalism in the country. More than 650 staff of the Press Association - well over double the organisation's workforce in London - occupy buildings scattered round the quaint streets, as if an Oxbridge college had dropped in. Editorial trainees are in the Bishop's Manor, a medieval roost with jumbo plasma TV screens in the fireplaces where the Bishops of Durham used to warm up after trekking down from the north-east. Guests from London stay in a redbrick Georgian manor house which looks like something out of Jane Austen.

The high command of PA Sport has the vast, curving top floor of a purpose-built office block which replaced the town's redundant police station and magistrates' court two years ago. From here, among scores of other sports information services, Premier League goals and match analysis are texted live to mobile phones all over the world.

Howden is the main laboratory for PA's expansion from a comprehensive and reliable news-wire into the structural support for newspapers, websites, television, radio and magazines. The guts of the service is produced elsewhere, by reporters at news events, parliament or sports fixtures, but the processing and ever more imaginative marketing go on in Yorkshire.

Tony Watson, PA's editorial director, a multiple award-winner and former editor of the Yorkshire Post, relishes the innovation. Outside his office on the ground floor, reporters' material is slimmed into Teletext bulletins ("An excellent subediting exercise," he says. "The contents have to have exactly the right wordage to fill a line across the screen.") On the next floor up, the same data is repackaged for listings and, with extra content, for breaking-news sections on websites, including the Guardian's. On the top floor it gets reprocessed again for sport.

Another section turns it into mini-bulletins for mobiles, text-only or with pictures. There are initiatives to expand it into digital TV, with a studio just opened and a specialist journalists' training course starting next month. Although PA has always been, and remains, modestly anonymous, its Howden super-office is starting to publish on a scale most editors must envy.

Touring the main building, Watson points out a wall pinned with national and international news pages from British local newspapers. Copy has always been provided for these by PA but now staff at Howden offer story choice and complete page layout too. A couple of those magazines dished out by rail companies are produced here with advertising and printing subcontracted to regional newspaper customers of PA. A canny use of partnerships has been part of the agency's growth. The editorial centre grew out of joint working with now vanished Westminster Press. PA Weather, which now sells its meteorology to road-gritting departments as well as the media, has just taken over the other, Dutch half of the joint operation.

Howden is now full up, says Watson, whose colleague Chris Buckley, managing director of PA Sport, takes over half the middle floor on Saturdays, when football needs 70 extra staff and the listings terminals are briefly unoccupied. There has been criticism about PA pay rates - this month the National Union of Journalists published a survey showing levels as low as £12,000 a year at Howden. But the size of the operation is buoying the flagging local economy, and vacancies are quickly filled.

And now there is India. By November, 50 staff will be backing up the Yorkshire operation in offices in Mangalore, on the south-west coast of India, which are also designed to be a jumping off point for further news and sport packaging overseas. "There's tremendous interest in British sport in Asia," says Watson, describing automated systems in Howden which text or email results, as they happen, in Cantonese, Thai, Mandarin and many other languages. "But there's also a growing number of fixtures locally, which we can handle either for other markets or for the countries involved."

Two recent deals see PA distributing German sports results in Germany and - from this autumn - selling South African premier league reports and results within South Africa. Mr Buckley says: "They're holding the World Cup there in five years' time and Fifa has recommended the data-processing system as a model for the rest of Africa."

After the R101 tragedy in 1930, there was gloom in Howden when glamorous airship designers stopped coming from London. Today, the "Howden Flyer", a direct, two-hour train service from London which stops at the town six times a day to drop off largely PA clients, is only going to get busier.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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