Cutting up the newsroom

Provocateur and former newspaperman Jeff Jarvis explores new ways of organizing our newsrooms to better serve the various platforms we're publishing on:

[I want to] explore the idea of breaking up a newsroom into two companies around two separate functions: gathering and packaging (that is, reporting and editing), each freed to work independently. That last bit is the important change: this means they can work with anyone. We separated them before by medium: print v. digital. But the public isn’t looking at the world that way, only the owners of media did. News is news. That’s why they are being merged back together. But when they are remerged, old roles, old models, old processes, and old politics tend to win out. Print is bigger and older and so it wins. And the organization doesn’t truly change.

Jeff isn't the first to suggest this, of course.  It's what Gannett's tried to do with hits info centers to some degree -- separating out the newsgathering role from the production role.

Check it out at: Cutting up the newsroom