Paton is the recently named head of the Journal-Register newspaper group, and when I saw him speak at last month’s International Symposium on Online Journalism in Austin, Texas, he drew a big round of applause, from an admittedly news- and tech-geeky audience.

The nut graf was something like this. J-R is aggressively adopting a strategy of digital first for its newsrooms. To (horribly) paraphrase, the digital stuff is “easy stuff” and if you can’t do the easy stuff well, you can’t do the harder stuff — print — effectively.

(There was a lot more to his presentation, including this nugget: as well as issuing Flip video cameras to the newsroom, J-R issued them to ad sales staff to shoot pre-roll and other ads. The cameras have paid for themselves.)

Paul Godfrey, the man who will head the new chain, is apparently already on-board. He’s quoted in a Victoria Times-Colonist article as saying:

“We’re going to have to do business a little bit differently. Newspapers are in a transition to the digital world . . . and the chain will be digital-first newspapers.”

The Canwest newspapers I’m most familiar with, the Vancouver Sun and the Province, have already moved toward online first, although online augmentation of print best describes their approach.

It will be interesting to watch what happens with the Canwest papers and any digital-first strategy, given a couple of hurdles that newspapers everywhere, it seems, are struggling with.

One is putting digital first in a process designed to efficiently deal with a couple of deadlines a day and the production of a single, fixed product. That’s an issue of mind-set and of internal processes and organization. I recall Paton saying that the day’s print issue would become the final product of the day’s online reporting. That’s a big switch.

Another — and this is particularly relevant to Canwest — is division of labour. Paton spoke of a newsroom where three people are doing 10 things, not 10 people each doing one of the 10. That may reflect a couple of realities, which include the financial hit newspapers are continuing to take and the efficiencies that multimedia reporting can create. Please note the use of the word “can.” Simply asking one person to do more than one job is not in any way efficient.

Division of labour is a huge issue with Canadian newspapers, which are by and large unionized, with rules and regs that define who does what, and who can do what, again premised on a process that is aimed squarely at a single product at the end of the day.

It’s those challenges — the reinvention of process and target, and who does what — that, I suspect, will be the big ones as Canwest moves to Godfrey’s “digital-first newspapers.”

That’s great news. Relieved of the debt that dragged Canwest into oblivion, the money-making newspaper division will have a chance to carry on. Even better news comes in the early words of Paul Godfrey, who will head the new company. He has said that all pension obligations and the like are intact, that all full-time employees have jobs, and so do “substantially all” of part-timers.

All this is great news for the newspapers and the people who put them together.

But I have some concerns.

One is that the money-losing National Post is going to be a continuing drain on the chain. It has rarely made money in its 10 or so years, and the general trends among newspapers (falling circulation, disrupted advertising and overwhelming competition for attention), aren’t in its favour.

Another is the plan of the new company to go public. The health of publicly-held companies depends on keeping shareholders happy. In the newspaper biz, that’s meant focussing on quarterly results and high levels of profit. The first interferes with longer-term planning; the second is something most folks don’t think we’ll see again in most forms of mass media. It is possible, however, for the chain to focus on investor returns by concentrating on titles that generate high levels of profit (such as newspapers with local monopolies) and cutting others adrift.

Canwest’s secured creditors come out of the deal happy, because they get their money back. The new owners include some who bought Canwest debt at a deep discount (reports as as little as 30 cents on the dollar), which might make it tempting to get out with a healthy profit if there’s a successful IPO (or to get out quickly if the IPO falls flatish.

While the news is good, for now, it wouldn’t surprise me if there aren’t more ownership changes coming for some of the newspapers that make up the chain.

Three brass bands and belly dancers brought the southeastern European spring festival Ederlezi to Vancouver Friday night, giving me chance to do some shooting. This was in the way of a test of both a new 55-250 Canon lens and my newish Canon T2i. Photos were shot RAW, using the P mode, and are untouched other the default conversion settings in Aperture 3. I’m really happy with Canon’s lowlight abilities: at 6400 ISO, the results are great for web publication, and I was able to shoot, in rather dismal light, at 1/30-1/60 of a second.

A note about the audio: I forgot to take my recorder along and wound up grabbing the sound on my iPhone, which is why it is a little less than stellar.