Not nearly as much drama as we have

This session, Merging Newsrooms, Managing Drama, offered some insights on the convergence struggles of other news shops – specifically, the BBC, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Gannett.

At Gannett, with the exception of USA Today, their newsrooms have always been merged, so the sturm und drang of us v. them never got a chance to get going.

At the BBC, they have 1,000 journalists and $500 million of guaranteed income every year and the difficulty of merging radio, TV and online.

In Philly, the issue is two print newsrooms – the Inquirer and the Daily News – sharing a Web site put out by a third entity, Philly.com.

The Inquirer guy, Chris Krewson, the shop’s executive editor for online news, was very amusing. He said much of his job was “ego surfing,” which certainly sounds familiar, eh?

Like us, Philadelphia does not have “voicey, attitudey” blogs, but newsbreaking blogs.

A few lessons:

- The Beeb: Moving the chairs was a crucial element in the reorganization. (Something we have got to do.)

- Philly: Shades of our pre-merger era, the papers share photo, copy and news desks, along with a Web site. Copy editors all write two headlines, one for print and one for online, and are being trained in writing headlines that work well for search optimization.,

- Gannett: Can’t sequester the web. Online guys cannot be considered second-class citizens.

The exec from Gannett, Anne Saul, News Systems Editor, and I chatted later and agreed: The issues of convergence are really unique from shop to shop, from place to place, with cultures and issues and personalities all creating their own little issues (or baggage, if you will).

One thing unique to us: The Newsroom is the agent of change, not the online crew, which is really the opposite of the way it is in most other news organizations.