MediaTel's 'Electronic Trading Debate' heard about developments with advertising systems for broadcast media but wanted to know what stage the national press had reached in developing more efficient workflows?

Steve Bottomley, business services director at News International said, "NI is one year into a three year transformation programme to change the way they worked so as to release sales people from administrative tasks and release traders from managing day to day insertions".

Bottomley said he was bemused why it's taken press so long to make any progress on this issue. Broadcast had started their journey 15 years ago; he was there! "We need to do the same in print but we do have a lot of legacy problems to solve", he admitted.

Bottomley continued by saying that "it is a myth that agency income streams are seen as a block on any development in this area". Business that has been queried and uninvoiced business is believed to help agency cash flow and is termed 'grey money'. Bottomley said, "this will be eradicated eventually".

Bottomley was asked if the national press were together on this issue?

"The aim is to co-operate. NI does have its own agenda which is not unreasonable. The timeline on this needs to be shorter. The challenging part is changing culture and physically getting off our backsides" stated Bottomley.

News International's ambition is to have a solution ready for the start of 2014 but it will work on an industry solution if this is progressed.