How can the newsroom management structure be reinvented?
Bryan Murley led the discussion. He began by urging participants to break from the old way of relegating Web journalists/journalism to the back of the newsroom and the back of the news planning process. Today, the Web staff and the Web manager need to be part of the story planning process from the beginning. They need to know what’s happening from the start because they’re likely going to be the first to publish the story. Bryan introduced Chris Carroll of InsideVandy, Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Chris talked about integrating the disparate media organizations on campus, including the campus yearbook. The decision was made to create InsideVandy as a Web publishing platform under which everything could fall and everything could be unified. The various media groups remain self-oriented but still use the common platform. Group members also discussed the importance of organizing the structure around the story ie. with a formal approach based on idea generation, communication about
