Organising for online
Scott Rosenberg has some very, very wise words about the future for online newsrooms in a world where online revenue is never going to be anything like as great as offline revenue was before the Internet:
Scott Rosenberg's Wordyard:After Times Select: how do you support a big newsroom online?:
We know that the old newspaper business is on the way out. (We don't know how fast but we know where things are heading.) We knew how to pay for newsrooms under the old business. But we still don't have much of a clue how to take a newspaper-scale newsroom and support it on the Web.
Given all this, I think it's important not to sugarcoat things. Even a well-managed transition from print to Web will diminish newspapers and shrink newsrooms. It's understandable that newspaper workers are fearful: their jobs are indeed on the line.
If their profession has a future - and of course it does - the answers for how to support that future are unlikely to come from the sort of old-line newsroom management that gave us Times Select and so many other ill-fated big media schemes on the Web. It will come instead from some of the thousand and one little experiments in the Web journalism business that are flowering today.
Indeed. My old boss Simon Waldman has written eloquently and frequently on the problem facing newspapers in the transition to online, that problem essentially being: how do we manage decline on the newspaper while turning up the volume online without slashing and burning a talented workforce whose huge value also carries a huge price? And all the while in the context of newspaper revenues declining, yes, but still being hugely significant and in almost all cases dramatically greater than online revenues.
There's no simple answer to this, although I like Rosenberg's nod towards a "thousand and one little experiements in the Web journalism business." FWIW, my take on this is that newspaper businesses have to organise themselves to make the most of their editorial expertise in an online environment. And that means asking hard, practical questions like: what resource do I need to allow a talented editor to get something live in the online world as quickly as they can offline? And: how do I get print journalists to think in the 3D terms of the web rather than the 2D terms of print? And: how can journalists talk like client-side developers, and how can client-side developers talk like journalists? All of which is why people like Ben Hammersley are so interesting - watching what they do is like imagining how journalists could be a decade from now.
