The New York Times plans to integrate its traditional print newsroom with its online newsroom, top management said Tuesday.
Staffers from the print side and from NYTimes.com will start collaborating on coverage much more frequently than they do now, said Bill Keller, executive editor of the Times, and Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president for digital operations for the New York Times Co., in a memorandum to employees.
"By integrating the newsrooms we plan to diminish and eventually eliminate the difference between newspaper journalists and Web journalists," they said. No staff reductions are planned as part of the integration, which will take shape in the coming months.
The print and online newsrooms are in separate buildings in Manhattan. The newspaper plans to integrate the two operations under one roof when the Times' new 52-story headquarters opens in Times Square in 2007.
The Times has long operated what it calls a continuous news desk, helping to get stories written by print reporters published as soon as possible on the Web site. In an interview, Mr. Keller said he wants the online component to become more fundamental. "You want somebody at every desk who is thinking at the beginning of coverage about the Web," he said, noting that some sections of the paper, such as the science desk, have been more aggressive than others in working with the Web operation.
As part of the change, print editors will take greater responsibility for Web content. Jonathan Landman, who assumes the role of deputy managing editor for digital journalism later this month, will oversee the integration project. Mr. Landman has been an assistant managing editor at the paper. Editorial staffers at NYTimes.com will continue to report to Leonard M. Apcar, who will remain editor in chief of the Web site.
Mr. Keller said he expects editors at the newspaper to work closely with producers at NYTimes.com and "feel ownership of the coverage in the Web as well as the newspaper." Otherwise, he said, "they don't really have any incentive to try and make it better."
It is not clear yet how the integration will look, Mr. Keller said, but a key component will be to publish more of "what we do in a compelling way" on the Internet, such as more Web-only articles as well as more graphics and Times-generated video. Some Times photographers and photo editors, he said, "have been champing at the bit to make video a natural part of their work."
He said the Times also may add more content from other news organizations to its Web site as part of the change. The paper does not want to become a news aggregation site similar to the news sites of Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc., but the paper wants to "guide readers to other interesting things on the Web," Mr. Keller said.
Barry Lipton, president of the Newspaper Guild of New York, which represents editorial staffers at both the Times and NYTimes.com, said Times management is making a "constructive move." But he said the Guild has requested a meeting with Times management because of questions raised by the planned integration. For example, he said, staffers in the online newsroom work under a separate contract that contains a clause providing "that there should be no migration of Times newsroom work to" the online edition. That clause was originally designed to protect print workers, who tend to be paid more than their online counterparts. At the time, "we were concerned they would try to reassign work to the lower-paid unit." Now, he said, "it's obviously going to be at the core of discussion."
Said Mr. Keller: "We are going to be very careful not to let this become a way of migrating high-paid editors' work to lower-paid workers. We will obviously work with Guild representatives to assure them that that is not going to happen."
The Guild represents about 30 editorial staffers at NYTimes.com under a five-year contract that expires in 2008, Mr. Lipton said. The Guild represents more than 1,000 editorial staffers at the paper under an eight-year contract that expires in 2011.
The Times' move "makes sense," said Vin Crosbie, managing partner of Digital Deliverance LLC, an online publishing consultancy in Greenwich, Conn. "Nowadays, organizations like the New York Times have to report [the news] in the various ways people want to see it, whether it's print or online or TV. It doesn't make sense to have separate newsrooms anymore."
Next month, the Times plans to restrict access to the online versions of many of its most popular columns. Readers will either need to maintain a print subscription to the Times, or pay a fee of $50 a year.
