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.
But this is the 21st century, and if we continue to put up with Luddite behaviors, we're cooked anyway.
It's time to restructure, and clean house of the obstructionists.
What happens if you delete your online department? Is the core organization ready to face the future? It's had more than a decade to get ready. Now or never, guys.
The next five years are the make-or-break opportunity for newspapers.
If you continue to tolerate behaviors that suggest the Internet -- the only growth opportunity you have -- is a sideline, then you're going to break, not make.
Perhaps your former online department leaders should be running your new integrated groups.
One of the overlooked aspects of the NewspaperNext Blueprint for Change is a new definition of the "core business:" anything that follows the traditional content and advertising model. This includes special sections, most niche products and Internet publishing, in that nearly everything newspapers do on the Internet amounts to nothing more than an "online newspaper."
Where we need separation is in an area where only a few newspapers are effectively working: innovation. Observing people and businesses. Figuring out what they're trying to do that doesn't work very well. Testing ideas and iterating in a fast-failure, fast-learning cycle.
You can't do that very well in an operationally focused group. Innovation is best firewalled from the core organization, the way IBM set up its personal computer division in the early 1980s.