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January 1998, Vol. 9, No. 1
Reorgs
How computers, on-line and video are changing big U.S. newsrooms
In the computer industry, probably because of its youthfulness, the word "reorganization" is one of the most feared terms to be heard. Frequently, it’s just a pseudonym for "this company is badly broke."
Reporting structures change; workflows change; where you sit and when you go to lunch changes. Inevitably -- at least in the computer biz -- there are fewer workers after the reorganization than before.
But "reorgs" in the newspaper business are less frequent and have less to do with broken companies. People in authority get it in their heads that things must change, and so they do.
When we implemented a newsroom editing system at the San Francisco Examiner 20 years ago this spring, nobody talked about a reorganization. In fact, I was frankly amazed that the system editor (my predecessor) allowed an assistant city editor with no computer experience to develop the newsroom workflow. It was as though the paper was working as hard as it could to overlay the computer onto an existing organization. But maybe that wasn't the right way; maybe we should have reorganized.
Inside, Correspondent L. Carol Christopher talks to executives at three big U.S. dailies -- the Orlando Sentinel in Florida, the San Jose Mercury News in California and the Dallas Morning News in Texas -- about how they have compensated for the new directions they've headed.
In Orlando, the impetus is the paper’s alliance with an all-news cable TV channel; in San Jose, the print newsroom and the newsroom of the pioneering Mercury Center are finally coming together, and in Dallas, the goal was to get responsibility for computers out of the newsroom. Each of these papers had a different problem, but each reacted in the same manner: reorganize.
We can no longer run our newspapers the way we have always run them. We are having to deal with issues today that were only glimmers of problems when I started in daily newspapering, more than 20 years ago.
The key to running a successful newspaper in The Oughts (one phrase we may use to designate the years between 2000 and 2010) will be to measure the needs of the community, measure the needs of the business, measure the abilities of the current technology and build an organization that takes all of that into account.
"Reorgs" will become so commonplace in the newspaper industry that newsletters won't devote so much space to them.
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Also inside, first-time contributor David L. Swint takes a look at how one newspaper web site has dealt with ad banner "inventory." This is a complex problem: In a sophisticated web site, how you display ads -- and to whom -- seems to require a goodly little amount of computer power and smarts.
Swint, who is assistant to the director of the Media Center at the American Press Institute in Reston, Va., tells us about the work done at Vegas Deluxe, the web site of the Las Vegas Sun (a newspaper for which I have done a little consulting) and how the company has adopted NetGravity’s AdServer product.
We also take a look at Real Media’s Open AdStream, NetGravity’s biggest competitor.
Further, I take you on a little trip down hardware lane, in which we review what happens when you skimp on that commodity when trying to implement a pagination solution. Not only do I chat with people who have made some of these mistakes, I relate two pretty funny stories about the lengths to which some papers will go to save a dime -- and in the end, waste money, not save it.
Lastly, we review an unprecedented agreement between Morris Communications Corp. (publishers of 31 U.S. dailies) and SAXoTECH International (the Danish purveyor of editorial front-end systems). Not only has Morris agreed to license the SAXoTECH software for all its papers, but it plans to resell the product through its Stauffer Media Systems subsidiary.
As it dawns, 1998 seems like it will have lots of changes in store for us. Maybe it’s time for a reorg.
-- David M. Cole
See also Hellbox.
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