This is the year of the great reunification. Throughout the newspaper industry, the Internet and print people are being bound together into one organization. It is dangerous, but I'm pushing hard for it.

It's dangerous because we could lose any ability to innovate, especially in the area of content. Clayton Christensen has documented how successful organizations fail because they kill innovation. It's not that people are bad or stupid -- the organizations strangle on their own history of success.

Newsrooms are factories, assembly-line systems for producing news products. They're not designed for product development and they're highly risk-averse. They're lashed to a hungry monster called "the newspaper" and it demands to be fed, right now. We've all heard it: "I don't have time for that -- I have a newspaper to get out." That sort of thing.

So why is unification necessary? It's not to help the Internet -- it's to help print. Readership continues to decline. The audience is wandering away. Many print editors continue to be in deep denial that anything is wrong. "Our circulation is still strong ... our loyal readers are still with us ... family newspaper." Market growth and circulation flimflam have masked the problem. Data on readership frequency, especially among younger consumers, point to big trouble.

A shakeup is in order. To succeed, our newsrooms themselves must change, and this may be our best opportunity to do it. We need to move while we still have the strength to move.

The Internet has created a new conversation space where we can reconnect our journalism processes with our audience's reality. The best online journalists have figured this out. The best onliners are the ones who have discovered the new role of journalism: facilitating conversations, listening and leading, adding value by participation, sharing control while earning respect.

A few years ago I was in Zurich, Switzerland, for an invitation-only think-tank session. There were two dozen of us representing U.S. and European media companies. Dr. Peter Kruse, who specializes in using computer software to extract insights from the minds of business executives, wired us all into a network in a meeting room in the stock exchange building, and set to work squeezing our brains.

Two days later, one thing was overwhelmingly clear: In order to for our media companies to gain the perspective and flexibility needed to succeed in this rapidly changing world, it was imperative that entrepreneurial risk-takers from the online divisions ascend to senior roles in their companies.

One newspaper that gets this is the Guardian, which has admitted it may have just installed the last presses it will ever own. Emily Bell, editor of Guardian Unlimited, is now executive editor of the newspaper.

Print editors can do it. Two print guys I absolutely trust are Kyle Poplin and Rob Holquist of Bluffton Today. For them, the goal is sustaining "a community in conversation with itself" with professional journalism playing an integral role. The Web and print products are just tools to get there, and listening is as important as writing.

But I have seen other cases in which onliners were pushed aside (and even out the door) when a newsroom seized control of a Web operation. If concerns about power and office politics determine the outcome, the result is two giant steps backward. We can't have that when it's critically important to be leaping ahead.

Tim Redmond of the San Francisco Bay Guardian questions Craig Newmark's community-building schtick and says:

"When Craig comes to town (and he's coming to just about every town in the nation soon), the existing community institutions – say, the locally owned weekly newspaper – have a very hard time competing. In many ways, he's like a Wal-Mart – yeah, landlords get cheaper real estate ads, and consumers find some bargains, but the money all goes out of town. And he puts nothing back into the community: He doesn't, for example, hire reporters or serve as a community watchdog."

Put that together with this. Driving home the other night I heard a statistic on NPR: More than 50 percent of all adult Americans shop at Wal-Mart at least once a week.

(Thanks to Romenesko.)

I'm a sucker for international travel, so I've signed on to speak at the Citygate Forum in Stockholm at the end of April, and at the World Editors Forum in Moscow in June. In both cases I'll be talking about the new, participatory, Web-powered participatory community interaction thing ... and avoiding the baggage-laden "citizen journalism." And I won't mention "witness contributors."

I've never been to either city. I expect Moscow to be infinitely more challenging. I've never met anyone from a Scandinavian country who didn't speak better English than some of my neighbors. Moscow, on the other hand, uses an alphabet that at this point makes less sense to me than 中国文本.

Я надеюсь выучить быстро. And I intend to get lost in the subways, which are legendary for their splendor.

I'm having to reach into my pocket for the Moscow trip, so I'm available for consulting gigs along the way.

There's an ongoing conversation in online news circles about identity and community. Vin Crosbie's distinction between anonymity and pseudonymity is a good one. I think there actually are five identity models that I've experienced:

1. Real, verified, published names. I first encountered this when working with Ziff-Davis Interchange. Under the Interchange model, publishers (such as Star Tribune Online and the Washington Post Digital Ink) operated their own paid-access services charged on credit cards, so the names were genuine. The discussion quality was first-class and behavior was sterling.
2. Real names required but not verified. When we moved the Star Tribune's online operation to the Web, we transported the existing discussion culture and rules -- but we had no method for enforcing the real-name rule. Periodically we'd have incidents, but overall the conversational quality level was maintained. (The biggest incident came when Salon booted a long list of troublemakers, who discovered the Star Tribune was running similar software. It was like an plague of locusts, but the local culture eventually prevailed.)
3. Pseudonyms allowed, tied to unpublished real names. This is the model we selected for BlufftonToday.com, and I think it's an excellent compromise. Our goal was to get broad participation, and this model helps protect participants from offline harassment and stalkers. The site has been extraordinarily successful with women in that hard-to-reach 24-40 segment. Most participants use pseudonyms (some even blog using the identity of their pets), but some prefer to display their real names. Staffers use real names.
4. Pseudonyms allowed with complete anonymity. This is the model that was in place at most Morris newspapers when I arrived, and the model that existed at Cox when I was there. There is some "reputation management" effect even with pseudonyms, but overall those systems tend to be dominated by a small number of users, generally men, who often are aggressive and occasionally abusive in their behavior.
5. Completely open systems -- post under any name you want (or in Slashdot's case as "Anonymous Coward"). In my experience this almost always leads to rampant abuse. There are ways of applying community moderation (Slashdot's system is an example) that pushes morons and trolls into the background, but I generally wouldn't recommend this model to anyone seeking to build local community. In addition to the interpersonal abuse problem, open systems recently have been overrun by spam.

I think identity has a powerful affect on the quality of conversation, but it is not by any means the only powerful factor. Clear goals, clear rules, visible staff participation and leadership, and consistent oversight/management are equally important factors that have nothing to do with technology and are all too frequently overlooked. I have seen many well-led anonymous systems with both high participation and good behavior.

There is one other model that I occasionally encounter: enforced pre-publication review. I don't know of a single site that has been able to build a positive interactive environment while requiring contributors to submit their postings for editorial review before they are published. The model simply doesn't work. I still occasionally encounter a dinosaur editor who thinks it's a good idea. I usually manage to bring him around with some legal liability arguments. What really bothers me about the whole idea is the disrespect and distrust of the community that it reveals.