Atlanta-Journal Constitution re-organizes for a 24/7 world
February 16, 2007There was a massive re-organization announced yesterday at the Atlanta Journal Constitution. They’ll have a news-gathering department, whose job is to generate news content without regard for the eventual platform where it gets presented. Then there will be two departments aimed at creating that presentation from the content–one a print edition and one the digital online edition.
I don’t know how the back-office operation works at the AJC but I wonder if it doesn’t already have a similar org structure. That is, the content gets stored in some kind of a central database from which it can be exported into the page layout system for the printing press or into HTML templates for the Web site.
If they don’t have a content database like that they probably will move to it. It makes production of the end product much simpler if they can share the common content database. And so the people organization will mirror the way the data is organized.
Is that a good thing? I don’t think you’d want the police organized that way. One department handling homicides by gun vs. homicides by knife. Doesn’t matter how the homicide was perpetrated, it’s still a homicide. You want a single department with a single set of experiences and body of knowledge processing those cases.
But I think this split might make sense for a news organization. One department dealing with the core news gathering operation and then leave it up to the other departments to decide how best to present that news on their separate print and online platforms.
I guess we’ll see.