What makes a great newsroom?

Big question that.

I started wondering during a recent tour of the stunning new BBC W1 building conducted by the affable Andy Griffee, the BBC Director of W1.

The new newsroom is certainly shaping up, and the first journalists should arrive towards the end of the year. In 18 months, there will be more than 5,000 BBC staff there, including journalists from BBC Radio, TV and Online, serving World Service, Domestic and Foreign News and Current Affairs. The Director-General and the Director of News, too.

Much of the BBC's journalism will be under one roof for the first time. Currently, there is just one huge space - enough for 19 London double-decker buses, we were told - where the nerve centre, the multimedia newsroom, will be, with some more empty spaces above it and off it: for editing, graphics, correspondents, back-up staff and bosses' lairs.

How will the elegant building translate into the news epicentre of the world's most respected broadcaster? And what news will it be broadcasting in the uncertain future? Those are the real questions.

The raw material will come from platforms that are multiplying by the minute: fibre-optic lines, mobile, video, audio, Twitter and Facebook, and whatever replaces them. The panoply of sources and how they are accessed is hard to conceive, and harder to manage. A veritable tsunami of information will have to be turned into journalism which an audience understands.

Who better to do that than an army of well-trained journalists? It's for them to make the calls on the validity and importance of stories and how they should be covered, at what length and by whom. 

Any news organisation, however sophisticated, will only be as good as the talent it employs. Broadcast journalism is now a hot-desk trade, and future journalists will be expected to be multi-skilled: adept at video, audio, online and text.

Newsgathering, the 'back-office functions', will be much more rationalised across the whole Corporation in the new W1 world. Nation shall speak peace to nation; programme to programme; and newsroom to newsroom. All will be one, at last. 

But the BBC must watch that there is not too much branding and homogeneity in the output because of that big tent. Audiences appreciate subtlety and variety. Rationalise the input, but make sure the output is geared to different audiences.

The new W1 Broadcasting House has spectacular views down Regent Street and over the West End rooftops. It bodes well for the future of BBC journalism worldwide. But, most of all, this big hole will need adequate public service funding plus clear directions of travel from above. 

Andy Griffee and the builders have provided the tools. It's now down to others to use them to the maximum broadcasting effect.

John Mair is a senior lecturer in journalism at Coventry University and a former BBC Current Affairs producer.