By Michelle Zenarosa
University of Maryland 

Overnight it seems, the print medium was declared dead. Deep ripples of change have caused newsrooms to suddenly reinvent themselves, note top editors, leaving reporters and editors not only frightened, but scrambling to create new and basic definitions of what a news story is. 
According to a group of industry leaders from the New York Times, the Atlanta-Journal Constitution and The Gainesville Sun speaking at the AASFE 2007 Conference workshop “How To Blow Up our Staff”, mapping out new structures for newsrooms is the just the beginning of the process.

Not only is the physical landscape of the newsroom is changing, they said, but so is the mental landscape. Reporters have already crossed over and now editors are being asked to be more multi-dimensional than ever before.

The group, which included the A-JC features editor Michael Gray, the Times’ senior managing editor Susan Edgerly and the Sun features editor Lillian Guevara-Castro, agreed that a simple quick fix just isn’t going to cut it. If the newspaper is to survive, a serious long-term plan must be put into place that fundamentally reorganizes the structure of the traditional newsroom. But what does plan look like? And more importantly, what does success for the newspaper look like?

For some newsrooms, like the Times, that meant consolidating both print and web departments into one entire collaborative staff that sat a features editor next to a photo editor and across from a metro editor, etc. For others, like the A-JC, that meant creating two separate entities that allowed the other to focus specifically on own particular medium.

But they agreed despite all the anxiety and extra work that came with convergence, there is at least one positive common string that all evolving newsrooms are experiencing: opportunity. Thinking across platforms brings in new ways to tell stories and new readers as well as generating profit to ensure survival.

In the constant search of answers and energy, one thing is for sure: the future is now and we’re only just catching up.

Some leadership strategies news organizations have used to talk about change in their newsrooms:

• During the initial reorganization of a newsroom, meet daily to track progress of what does and doesn’t work.
• Talk the staff through it and let them react and discover their own place on the Web.
• Talk to the people who hold the purse strings and try to provide monetary bonuses to people whose jobs are morphing.
• Keep passion about what you’re doing and keep in mind it’s the content that matters, not where your work is displayed!