2009: The year the newsdesk died?

Seeing as this is the first post of the year it might as well be a dangerous one.

Bloggers and media commentators spent so much of 2008 hand-wringing over the future of the news industry and  journalism that some of the thought-provoking suggestions of things that could be done to improve the situation were often drowned out in a sea of doom and gloom.

But maybe,  just maybe, this means that 2009 will be the year of the dangerous thinker, the year when radical solutions get air time.

Take these hopes for the year from  from Save the Media blogger Gina Chen who describes a sweeping away of the current newsroom structures

Along with nine other very constructive hopes for the new year, Gina makes point 8 Cut through the bureaucracy of the newsroom.

” …as a story slips through the assembly process, each person in the line shares only a bit of ownership. What if we turned that on in its head and used a more collaborative approach. A writer — who may be an editor or a reporter — gathers facts and writes a piece and is involved in the headline and the layout. A series of editors still read the piece, but those editors may also write stories that go though the same process. I guess what I’m saying is a lot of talent gets wasted waiting for the stories to show up in rim.”

She doesn’t propose that any of  the actual processes – researching, contact-building, writing, copytasting, fact-checking, subbing etc – are dropped, just that the old hierarchical structure is scrapped in a move to a more modern, collaborative management approach.

Taken together with the advice to think of the newsroom as an online environment which may (or may not) have a print edition, this re-think call is a timely one.

With the recent rash of news organisations dropping print editions in favour of the cheaper distribution option of online-only, will newsrooms this year be looking more closely at their own infer-structure? Think the previously unthinkable?

After all, doesn’t the standard structure have as as much to do with the legacy of unionised job demarkation as anything else – drawn up at  a time when the web-first publishing cycles would have been as alien a concept as telecommunications that didn’t require operators to make connections?

For example, the web world has proved over and over that people can organise themselves and collaborate to produce content without any organisation to put such formal structures in place. This can be as true for reporters/photographers planning the day’s diary as it is for activists planning a global campaign.

Getting people across the newsroom involved in all steps of the process rather than just a  few could not only lead to a faster, leaner story cycle but also more creative and transparent newsgathering.

As Gina says: “A copy editor could blog; an editor could write; a reporter could suggest a headline. Our journalistic boat is sinking, and we need everyone baling out the water.”