THE DAILY TELEGRAPHS MOVES TO ITS NEW OFFICES

1882: This was the new building of The Daily Telegraph in Fleet Street.

The Telegraph moved to Docklands from Fleet Street in 1987 and to One Canada Square in Canary Wharf in 1991.

Its former Fleet Street building is now occupied by the investment bank Goldman Sachs.

The publisher of The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph is planning to move next Monday from Docklands, its home for 18 years, to state-of-the-art offices in Victoria Plaza on Buckingham Palace Road.

The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian report about the big move:

The Victoria Plaza office development, close to Whitehall and Westminster, has been bought by Press Holdings Group, the publishing business controlled by Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay, the owners of the Telegraph Group.

At the same time, the company announced it will be changing its name to Telegraph Media Group.

"These changes are a clear sign that our business is moving forward in a positive and dynamic way,'' said group chief executive Murdoch MacLennan.

"The new name will reflect the modern, competitive and diverse nature of our business and the variety of products - from papers to Podcasts - that we have to offer.

''The move to a state-of-the-art office in the middle of London will put us right at the centre of the action for business, commerce and politics. 2006 is going to be an exceptionally exciting year for the Telegraph."

Victoria Plaza boasts approximately 230,000 sq.ft of office space. The Telegraph will occupy about half of that - two floors - with the remainder made available for rent.

For the first time the entire Telegraph editorial staff will be housed on a single floor, spanning 65,000 sq.ft. It is the former trading floor of stockbroker Salomon Smith Barney, which is now part of the world's largest bank Citigroup.

Rupert Murdoch's News International started the Fleet Street exodus by switching his titles - which include The Sun and The Times - to a heavily fortified plant in Wapping in 1986.

One of our consultants, Mike Fairhead, was there.

Reuters was the last major media group to leave Fleet Street earlier this year, when it relocated to Canary Wharf from its Grade One listed headquarters of 66 years.

In the gleaming glass and concrete complex, the newsdesk will be abandoned for a "news hub", subeditors replaced by "production journalists", and writers expected to deliver not just one finely honed story for the next day's broadsheet but web stories throughout the day, podcasts and potentially vodcasts too.

Telegraph executives charged with moving from Canary Wharf want the exodus to coincide with a new way of working, one that will break down any barrier between "old" and "new" media in a fully integrated newsroom.

It is a relocation being watched with keen interest by other newspapers, including this one, which are also grappling with the issue of how to deliver their journalism to global audiences across a range of platforms from newsprint to pdfs to iPods. And, of course, how to make money in the process.

Lewis is promising an "unheard-of training programme" to integrate all those elements into a coherent whole where "content" is delivered at five "touchpoints" throughout the day.

Extensive research has shown, he claims, just what Telegraph readers want - text in the morning whether on the web, on mobiles or in print, video at lunchtime, audio in the afternoon, "click and carry" pdf documents for the commute home and communities based around shared interests in the evening.

At the heart of the debate is whether all these elements are best delivered by specialists or reporters can be retrained to multi-task.

The Telegraph has put its eggs firmly in the latter basket: "We don't want them and us any more. We want one Telegraph to ensure the highest quality content," says Lewis.

Telegraph staff are to be given five days' training to introduce them to 38 different "multimedia bits" from podcasts to mobile headlines.

A video journalist is to be appointed shortly.

Newspaper executives are wary of breaking down the financial details, saying only that they run into "many millions".

Yet, just two years ago the group announced a £150m investment in printing plants.

At the end of next month it is expected to announce the terms of its printing contracts.

The new media world is working out to be quite an expensive one.

Last week, when MediaGuardian was treated to a tour of the Victoria HQ, it still bore the signs of a massive refurbishment programme.

Blue carpet had been laid across the entire 67,000 sq ft space but there were no desks or chairs.

The curvaceous reception area with its not yet operational escalators will lead up to a proposed cafe area.

The group will occupy two floors, with commercial departments and meeting rooms overlooking the main news area, while renting out the rest.

The plan is for most senior editors to sit in a central "hub" in the middle of a room understood to offer the biggest open-plan space in London.

They will be surrounded by "product" heads in charge of areas such as online, video and audio and "content heads" - more typically known as heads of departments such as business, foreign and sport.

The rationale is that far from being made up of Luddite retired colonels, the Telegraph's core readership is actually more active, richer and more web-savvy than most.

The papers, owned by the Barclay brothers, commissioned research into when and how their readers want news.

Lewis believes that the Telegraph's typical readers - older and wealthier - offer the paper a great opportunity as they sign up for broadband services and spend more time online.

Back at Canary Wharf, while "acting" editor John Bryant is generally well thought of for soothing frayed nerves in the wake of the tumultuous Barclays takeover, subsequent changes and the arrival of a swathe of new executives and senior editorial staff, last week's announcements seemed to many less a brave new world and more the same old song.

The recent departures of two popular members of the "old guard", deputy editor Neil Darbyshire and foreign editor Alan Philps, further destabilised staff still raw from cuts 18 months ago that led to one in six journalists losing their jobs and further emphasised the "top-heavy" nature of the newsroom.

All the big beasts hired during the frenzy that followed the Barclays takeover - Jeff Randall, Simon Heffer, Lawrence Seer - are still around and drawing equally big salaries.

In his last email to staff, Philps summed up the mood: "The end of 15 years at the paper came suddenly, leaving me full of sadness and not a little confused.

The past three years have been difficult ones, with changes of editor, budgetary battles and uncertainty about the future direction of the paper."

Just two days after the relocation had been announced, a letter went out to staff informing them of 133 job cuts across the group, including 54 in editorial.

Meanwhile, the National Union of Journalists was voting to ballot members for industrial action.

"We realise that changes are necessary in some areas because of what is happening in the industry, but none of this makes it acceptable for a highly profitable enterprise like the Telegraph to alienate and ignore staff in this way," said NUJ national newspaper organiser Barry Fitzpatrick.

"Management have behaved in an extremely underhand manner and we continue to have no faith that they intend to consult meaningfully."

Former Telegraph managing director Hugo Drayton, who played an integral part in the early development of the paper's web operations but left in the regime change that followed the Barclays takeover, said the problem was less one of modernisation than of morale: "At that place, it's so low.

In the light of that, the management challenge is whether they can keep the show on the road.

I think they've signed up to a kind of press release politics and that's dangerous."

While most journalists on the papers recognise the need to adapt to the digital landscape and the rapidly changing media consumption habits of younger readers, there is little consensus on the best way forward and little faith that those higher up the chain of command can deliver.

Lewis has never run a web operation before.

By making the brave move to Victoria, the Telegraph is hoping to leapfrog its rivals, turbocharge its metamorphosis from newspaper to digital brand and cement its future.

To do so, it will have to take staff and readers with it.

From next Monday, the first Telegraph journalists to move into the newspaper's new home will have a window into the digital future.

Staff - from cartoonist Matt at one end to Sunday Telegraph editor Patience Wheatcroft at the other - along one side of the enormous editorial floor will be able to signal across the street to those in the London headquarters of web giant Google.

The Daioly Telegraph reports here about its new facilities.