A panel at the International Online Journalism Symposium at UT Austin in April 2009 was asked whether newsroom integration was working. Four of the five speakers said no.
Anthony Moor, deputy managing editor for interactive at the Dallas Morning News, was the bluntest. Integration asked journalists for work quite different from what they knew, and training had made little headway against that skills gap. The cultural gap was larger: reporters and editors still thought of themselves as owners of a product, the daily paper, rather than of an audience, and print was where the revenue and the attention stayed. Using the online team as digital evangelists had failed; the paper was instead pushing journalists towards news produced through the day, with beat blogs as the place for content and community.
Jim Brady, formerly executive editor of washingtonpost.com, also said no, but blamed the handling. In his view such mergers resembled the merger of Germany and Poland in 1939: what normally happened was a print takeover. Integration was worth doing only where a newsroom treated the web as a medium in its own right, with enough autonomy to push boundaries. He had left the Post fearing that autonomy would vanish under the print newsroom’s weight.
Sewell Chan of the New York Times was the one yes: story meetings covered multimedia treatment as well as the paper, and the Times ran 70 blogs. Torry Pedersen of Norway’s VG Group compared the net to a waterfall and the newspaper to bottled water, warning that a merger would let print slow online development.