Ladies and Gents, the AJC reorg list

You could check Utopia, Ohio.

 

This shit isn't new. In the early 1990s it was called "newspaper without walls." Here's what happens. The people who decided to do it will declare it a great success even though you have people tripping over each other and the office politics gets even worse. And the fact that there's no competing newspaper hides the fact that we're even later on covering news as it happens than we used to be. Eventually the fad dies and we go back to city editors and business sections.

 

Wouldn't you say the role of the Internet and a 24-hour-newsroom might alter the course this go around moreso than in the 1990s?

 

No, I still believe the most efficient way to organize a newsroom is to divide us according to areas of expertise.

Back when most cities still had No. 2 papers, I interviewed at the smaller papers in two-paper towns and you could almost predict that at some point they'd say, "We have a smaller staff, but we are faster on our feet." And there is some truth in that, a large newsroom is a cumbersome beast, it's so big and unweildy that people who want to hide from work can do so. You tear down the walls between departments with good intentions -- killing the little fiefdoms -- but what you wind up with is something even more cumbersome, people bumping into each other, people covering shit that they're not qualified to cover, editors making ridiculous judgments on news value based on ignorance, especially when it comes to sports BTW. I don't know how many news meetings you've been to, but some really uninformed stuff gets put out there by newsies who have no clue about our culture. An example being a newsie who said we ought to be more diverse in our coverage of gays in sports, that our sports section is homophobic, and I had to say, that'd be swell, but most of the gay athletes DON'T WANT IT KNOWN, those who come out are the rare exception, that's just the culture of a locker room, it isn't that sports journalists are trying to hide the fact that there are gays in sports. On most papers there is a problem of glass offices trying to make blanket rules for coverage that encompass every department, even though what's a good idea for one department is bad idea for another. This only gets magnified when you do away with specializing.

 

I don't see Mike Knobler's name on that list either.
Is Mike still at the AJC ?
He used to cover colleges and Tech, specifically

 

He's still there -- has a story on the AJC's site today about a Tech player being drafted.

 

This is only the beginning.

 

Frank, I hope you don't mean *literally* divide us.

We've begun an integration where the web folks are physically being placed into the print newsroom, still maintaining their specialties. Speaking for Sports, I can tell you that this has been huge - we can bounce ideas off each other, be in much closer proximity as far as breaking news, planning, etc. The print folks are actually getting excited about the possibilities on the web.

When you separate the web and print folks, it just adds to that idea that the website is their problem and the print folks can just concentrate on the paper. And that's not where this industry is headed.

 

Integrating print and Web staff makes sense. What I don't get is the decision to have the same editors supervise, say, sports and Metro and business people. that seems nuts.

 

Yeah, that's what I'm saying.