Berliner finally arrived late on Sunday night. I took this picture during the photocall at the new, hanger-like London print plant that evening, just as the whine of the presses was increasing after they achieved "saleable copy". It was a wonderful sound.

Indeed, the whole place is impressive, built in record time, and the papers its producing are wonderful - crisp, clear pages with top-notch clarity and colour (especially today). A full page Apple iPod ad that appeared in today’s edition looked like a magazine page, rather than a newspaper. Other papers looked dowdy by comparison.

The reaction on the web has been enormous: great dissections of the design, mostly favourable. Less about the journalism, but I guess the changes there may be more subtle, and seen only over time or during particular events. I’ll be wrapping up some of the online reaction tomorrow on the editors’ blog.

My first direct print involvement with the new Berliner doesn’t come until later in the month, when we produce the first Berliner edition of Business Sense (nee Business Solutions), the monthly tech/small business section I still edit. Great changes afoot there.

Online, things have gone well. That editors’ blog we built for the event has been a success, with Victor Keegan doing a remarkable job blogging the first day of production on Sunday. And the paper’s decision to reinstate the Doonesbury cartoon strip was forced after an outcry expressed, at least in part, in the blog’s comments.

But the biggest bit of work for me was our multimedia report, which set out to explain the changes through interviews with leading Guardian figures and a tour of the new print plant. The video-heavy report took up a large chunk of my August during production, and presented me with one hell of a learning curve. Suffice to say: video’s a very different thing to text, from hiring the right people and microphones and filming in the right formats (and getting it on to our Macs) to editing and rendering and spelling the captions correctly.

It wouldn’t have been possible without great help from our friends in Guardian Film, and the talented Flash artists Yan Walton and Will Beeston. I learnt a huge amount, although it was all still a something of a culture shock for a former print journalist whose NCTJ exams - sat on typewriter but barely 13 years ago - now feel like they took place in another age.

Of course, they did. But, now the multimedia duck is broken, I’m hoping we’ll be doing much more soon. The power of Flash and video to tell a story is huge, and I suspect we’ve only scratched the surface of its potential.

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