Reporters, editors, photographers and artists who want to can look at how their work plays on a page, look at that element's content, design, weight and position relative to other elements on the page, and fine-tune accordingly. Editors can see how much a story needs to be trimmed and go about it intelligently by hunting for widows and trims throughout rather than hacking from the bottom because there isn't time to rewrap type in composing. Reporters can even help trim their own copy - and see on the screen if it fits. Display type such as headlines, cutlines and pullouts can be looked at as a unit rather than as individual elements and can be tweaked. Photos can be quickly sized and cropped and moved around the page.
Artists can look at how color in an illustration or graphic works with other colors on the page.
Designers can move elements and make pages look the way they want them to rather than having to tell someone else and lose something in the translation. When news breaks, stories can be swapped in quickly. The power to make changes is in your hands, not composing's. Readers will benefit from a newspaper that's conceived and executed more as a whole - as a product, not a process. It's not too early to start examining how your newsroom does business now and how you want it to be doing business in the future.