@ ONA: Changes And Challenges Of the Merged Mewsroom

Made it to the ASNE-ONA seminar on Digitizing The Print Newsroom at Gannett headquarters, startling a few people who didn’t expect the pre-conference workshop to be covered. Thanks to organizers from both orgs for making it work. Between the print newsroom and an academic track, about 90 people are here. trying to find the right paths into the future. As usual, the group is divided a bit into our regular readers (who knew via today’s newsletter I might show up) and people who don’t have a clue about what we do. Over the last two years, I’ve realized that as online revenue becomes more important, that latter group gets smaller. That was the case, too, at Advertising Week; it’s a pattern we see often and is one of the ways I gauge the changes in the areas we cover.
Merged and converged: The first session of the morning was a good illustration of those changes — and the remaining challenges. The print group crowded into a conference room to hear several editorial execs talk about the ways digital has become part of their newsrooms. The days of separate web and prnt staffs are ceding as newsrooms move toward merged staffs and responsibilities. Everytime a questioner mention web staff, for instance, David Ledford, vp/news, executive editor, Delaware News Journal, constantly reminded the room, “I don’t have a web staff. Everybody works for the same insitutution.” He said of his veteran staffers from print: “I haven’t had a single one of them say I want to die on this hill. … they want to evolve.” Then again when a staffer suggested being compensated more for doing multi-platform work, they were told “If you don’t do it, you probably aren’t going to get paid at all.”

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