The session on merging newsrooms at the Online News Association conference in September 2008 was packed, which was itself a finding — convergence was in front of nearly every news organisation at once. Lee Banville, editor of the Online NewsHour, moderated it as a group therapy session, and Peter Horrocks, head of the BBC’s Multimedia Newsroom, took up the theme by casting himself as the chief therapist.
The BBC had integrated its radio, television and online newsrooms just over a year earlier, driven partly by cost pressure and partly by the recognition that audiences had become multimedia news consumers. Horrocks described the wariness that came with it, and one detail that says most about how the merger was experienced: there was extended argument about who had won, with each medium convinced one of the others had.
He conceded the extra load on journalists, and asking people to write continuously for the web was the clearest example of it. He also thought the BBC had an easier run than most, because the broadcast side was already used to working in continuous news. His overall verdict was that moving to an integrated operation had benefited the BBC’s journalism.
Asked afterwards about his biggest mistake, Horrocks said he had not spent enough time explaining the change or given people enough time to understand it. His reasoning was practical rather than sentimental: things go wrong in any newsroom, and when they do, journalists who never understood the new arrangement simply revert to the old way of working.