Separate, unequal, and ‘glorious’

When split newsrooms work, and when they falter.

newsroom managers must figure out if their current staff is equipped—intellectually, emotionally, technologically—to handle the pace of change in the business.

This is at the core of recent moves at the Washington Post, which is beset by plummeting readership and revenue. A recent upheaval at the top ranks came with a warning from its owner, Jeff Bezos: “The world is evolving rapidly, and we do need to change as a business.” The remedy devised by the Post’s new publisher, Will Lewis, is a new, if so far ill-defined, “third newsroom.” It will be designed to operate separately from the main newsroom and will serve up “service and social media journalism” for readers who “feel traditional news is not for them.”

That sounds reasonable.

dual staffs are expensive. Mark Thompson, who took over a troubled CNN after a lauded eight years as New York Times chief executive, recently announced that the network’s “separate tribes of TV and digital, international and domestic” newsrooms would soon be merged into “a single global multimedia editorial operation.” Related to that: CNN would cut around a hundred jobs.

So which is it? Create a new unit to forge the future, or build from within to ensure cost control and acceptance from your core staff?

So is it a problem, or an opportunity? It depends on how you frame it.

…the Times, Brady says, “there’s a point where that doesn’t work anymore. There’s a point where everybody agrees [the Web] is an important thing.” Without a merger, “your responsibility and your decision-making gets bifurcated, which is going to slow you down.”

Split newsrooms work until they don’t. For news organizations that can afford the costs and attract the talent, they can incubate ideas and execute them deftly, without the bureaucratic wrangling that legacy staffs often impose. But if they’re successful—as Politico Pro was, and as the sites at the Times, Post, and Journal were—the main company will reabsorb them, like the burying beetles that eat their young to ensure the species will survive.

You might think that those of us who led these satellite operations would be bitter about the mergers. But I don’t feel that way about my WSJ experience, nor do other managers I’ve spoken with. Says the Times’ Roberts: “As hard as it was to leave, and as difficult as some of those moments were toward the end, I achieved most of what I set out to do. And there were plenty of people in the newsroom who were capable of carrying it on.”

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