The first afternoon panel at the International Online Journalism Symposium at UT Austin in Texas sought to answer the question: Is newsroom integration working?

The response from Anthony Moor, Deputy Managing Editor/Interactive, Dallas Morning News was a blunt “No”.

He highlighted two reasons for this. Firstly, what the newspaper is asking journalists to do is significantly different from what they are used to doing. So there is a skills gap and training has had limited success.

But there is also a huge cultural gap to overcome. Moor said journalists and editors still consider themselves as “owners” of a product – the daily newspaper – rather than as audience owners.

Since most of the revenue comes from the print, time-based product, that tends to be where people focus their attention, explained Moor.

The paper tried integrating the online team as digital evangelists to lead the conversion in the newsroom, but that didn’t work.

Instead, Moor said the newspaper is trying to shift the focus of journalists from the time-based print product to a focus on producing news throughout the day for their audiences.

One way the Dallas Morning News is trying to do this is through beat blogs. These would become the place for content and community.

The print takeover

Former Executive Editor of the WashingtonPost.com Jim Brady also gave a “No” but qualified it by saying that it depends on how the integration of newsrooms is managed.

In his view, the merger of print and digital newsrooms tend to be like the merger of Germany and Poland in 1939.

What tends to happen is a print takeover. But Brady argued that the integration of newsrooms should take place if a news outlet considers the web as a medium in its own right.

Brady said that a merger would only work if you allowed the website to maintain enough autonomy so that it can push the boundaries, with digital people in positions that can affect real change.

He admitted that he left the Post as he was concerned that the autonomy of the website would disappear under the weight of the print newsroom.

The Yes man

By contrast, Sewell Chan, Bureau Chief of City Room Blog at the New York Times, gave a “Yes”.

From a journalistic perspective, integration has worked at the Times.

But he went on to say that integration isn’t the main issue in the newsroom, but rather the talk was about business models.

Chan explained how meetings on stories focus not just on what should be done for the paper, but also discussions around the best multimedia way to cover a story.

One practical example of integration in action at the Times is the huge number of blogs.  The paper has 70, maybe too many joked Chan.

The early adopters tended to be political reporters, rather than necessarily younger journalists.

A different medium

Torry Pedersen, Chief Executive Officer, VG Group from Norway, joined the No camp. He argued that integration might make sense for a small newsroom, but not for a large, national publication.

He compared integrating newsrooms like having one Olympic skier who is a world champion in one discipline compete in another discipline. Print and the internet are different mediums, different disciplines.

Pedersen also compared online and newspapers to a waterfall and bottled water.  The net is like a waterfall – raw, unlimited, real-time, continuous flow of news.

Whereas a newspaper is like bottled water, with limited space, distilled, refined and contained.

Online is the big now, whereas the newspaper is the authoritative version of the news, he argued.

If you merge the newsrooms, warned Pedersen, the newspaper will get the upper hand and slow online development.

Rather than integration, online and print newsrooms should be best friends, but keep themselves separate.

The broadcast perspective

The final panel speaker, Jonathan Dube, Vice President at ABCNews.com offered the view from a broadcast news outlet.

For him, integration is working at ABCNews. He cited the example of Brian Ross and The Blotter, saying it is regarded as a programme, rather than just as an add-on to broadcast activities.