organizational structure

For more than a decade there's been a deep division in newspaper journalism between the "onliners" and the .. well, let's face it, we all called them Luddites. Dinosaurs. People who just don't get it.

But times change.

All across the country there are efforts to move online publishing responsibility and authority into the core news organization.

It is a move fraught with peril. I've previously warned of the many ways that this can go wrong. But I have become convinced of the following:

One day I was doing some consulting and sat down with a new media director to talk about how he might work to make his website more complimentary and less directly competitive with his newspaper.

Develop the interactive community, I said.

But that takes time and people that I don't have, he said.

I just wrote a note to an NAA mailing list on the topic of organizational structure that is a bit more radical than positions I've previously taken.

Like pretty much everybody who's spent a lot of time on the New Media side of the Great Divide, I've been leery of organizational integration. Why? Because Luddite values are deeply ingrained in traditional newspaper operational groups, and those values will lead us to defeat. Equally deeply ingrained: Utter denial that those Luddite characteristics exist. It's a dangerous combination.

Writing for editorsweblog.org, Rory Satran makes "A Case for Measured Integration" of print and online newsrooms.