The consensus around the InterWeb seems to be that the Dallas Morning News has breached a sacred institution with its reorganization. It’s extreme to say that the move is a sign that the paper will become a “glorified Greensheet,” as the Huffington Post claims. The most interesting commentary came from Jim Barnett at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, who writes, “as I thought about it a little more, it occurred to me that this is really just another case of the dead-tree news business trying to catch up to what’s going on in the online world.”
At some point in the management structure of all newspapers, an editor reports to someone whose primary concern is generating revenue. That’s usually the publisher, and the publisher more often than not is a former sales manager. All that’s different in what the Morning News is doing is that they’re pushing that publisher-editor relationship down to lower levels of the org chart.
They’re moving away from the idea that The Dallas Morning News is one monolithic newspaper. With a general manager focused on its success, Sports Day essentially becomes its own newspaper. Same thing for other sections affected. I know from my own experience working on niche products of the Morning News that it can be terribly frustrating to work to improve your brand-new section, make it appealing to readers, only to find that there’s no sales manager focused solely on selling your efforts to advertisers.
The hope is that each piece of the conglomerate of smaller products that eventually supplant the pile of paper we’re used to seeing each day exhibits more agility than would the mother-ship continuing to operate entirely as one. I don’t think the good editors and writers of the Morning News are going to stand by and let advertisers buy their way into the news pages. I don’t think the good readers of the Morning News would stand for that. The greater fear should be that the niche products of the paper become so agile that they too quickly bend themselves to the minute-by-minute whims of readers, which is why outfits like the Nieman lab are again pushing the idea of a nonprofit model if “serious journalism” is to survive.
