Separate, unequal, and ‘glorious’

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In 2011, I attended an advertising conference that seemed like a rather workaday affair, until we were treated to a Mick Jagger–jumps-on-the-stage kind of moment: Clay Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor famed for his work on innovation, showed up.

He told media executives to stop trying to create new products within their old structures, which were naturally inclined to quash innovation. His comments reflected a piece he cowrote a year later: “Projects that are inconsistent with a company’s existing profit model will naturally be accorded the lowest priority or, worse yet, face hostility from the legacy business.… What’s most important is that a disruptive start-up not be placed at the mercy of the old organization—which might see the upstart as a competitive threat and attempt to have it shut down or cause it to fail.”

Christensen nailed the key issue, then and now: newsroom managers must figure out if their current staff is equipped—intellectually, emotionally, technologically—to handle the pace of change in the business.

This is at the core of recent moves at the Washington Post, which is beset by plummeting readership and revenue. A recent upheaval at the top ranks came with a warning from its owner, Jeff Bezos: “The world is evolving rapidly, and we do need to change as a business.” The remedy devised by the Post’s new publisher, Will Lewis, is a new, if so far ill-defined, “third newsroom.” It will be designed to operate separately from the main newsroom and will serve up “service and social media journalism” for readers who “feel traditional news is not for them.”

That sounds reasonable. But a skunkworks often leaves a bad odor. Internecine battles can stymie innovation. Journalists and producers stake out their ground and don’t budge. And dual staffs are expensive. Mark Thompson, who took over a troubled CNN after a lauded eight years as New York Times chief executive, recently announced that the network’s “separate tribes of TV and digital, international and domestic” newsrooms would soon be merged into “a single global multimedia editorial operation.” Related to that: CNN would cut around a hundred jobs.

So which is it? Create a new unit to forge the future, or build from within to ensure cost control and acceptance from your core staff?

I lived through this myself, having served as managing editor of WSJ.com in the early 2000s, after five years wrangling long-form stories on the print side’s Page One desk. The Online Journal had already amassed a (then unheard-of) half million subscribers by the time I got there, and it was mostly governed by executives who weren’t beholden to the legacy print operation. Then, shortly after I started at WSJ.com, the 9/11 attacks forced us to evacuate the Journal’s Lower Manhattan headquarters, sending our online group to a forlorn back office in New Jersey for a year, and then an office in New York’s trendy SoHo neighborhood for another year. 

During those years, and several that followed, our staff of around sixty were largely left on our own to decide which stories would top the homepage, how frequently news events would be updated, and what features we could devise and publish without a finger-wagging executive telling us why we don’t do that here. We were encouraged to leverage the credibility and content of the legacy Journal without a lot of the strictures.

And let me tell you, it was glorious. We introduced video, blogs, podcasts—whatever we could that would take advantage of digital platforms. That included the “Parsing the Fed” examination of subtle word changes that presaged big shifts in monetary policy; offbeat features like “What’s Your Workout?” and the NewsHound quiz; and regular columns by print reporters covering industries like cars and airlines, enabling them to expand their reach and develop their online voice. Whatever we did, it seemed to work. The Online Journal surpassed a million subscribers by 2007. 

And then the fun and games ended. WSJ’s legacy editors wanted more say over the high-growth part of the business. Print reporters were wising up to the fact that their audience was moving online. And our dot-com staff had to acknowledge that a merger made sense, since the core newsroom’s journalism was still the main reason for people to subscribe. 

That merger got underway more than fifteen years ago, but as the turmoil at the Post and CNN show, this issue hasn’t gone away, particularly for bigger companies. Most small news organizations don’t have the luxury of creating separate entities to execute new ideas. Many digital-only news sites have innovation built into their DNA, and the very idea of a split would seem odd.

So is it a problem, or an opportunity? It depends on how you frame it.

For Martin Nisenholtz, who helped launch the New York Times’ digital efforts in the mid-1990s, a separate operation was especially important when dealing with competitors. During most of Nisenholtz’s reign at the Times, the site was free, and the strategy focused on traffic, since ads were the primary revenue source. “The company made the decision to create a separate organization, to develop its own culture within that organization,” Nisenholtz recalls now. “That organization would compete not with printed newspapers, but with CNN.com and Yahoo News.… We couldn’t have cared less about the Chicago Tribune or the Los Angeles Times.”

The Times’ online staff was initially in a separate building, several blocks from the mother ship. It would move back under the same roof, as presaged in a 2005 memo from Nisenholtz and then–executive editor Bill Keller: “By integrating the newsrooms we plan to diminish and eventually eliminate the difference between newspaper journalists and Web journalists,” they vowed. 

Even so, the digital staff pushed its own ethos of experimentation, from speeding up real-time news coverage to inviting readers to submit photos from Grateful Dead concerts. The staff developed a swagger, often to the consternation of print colleagues. And their relentless focus on traffic didn’t sit well with some print colleagues. Jim Roberts was at the Times for twenty-six years, including a role leading the digital newsroom while the ad market collapsed amid the 2008 financial crisis. “At that time, digital was free,” Roberts told me. “And I remember one encounter that I had with a colleague in the print newsroom. It was aggressive! He said, ‘Why are you trying to kill the New York Times?’”

It wasn’t just the news side that saw a problem. Vivian Schiller, who served as general manager of the Times’ website, recalls “a tremendous amount of resentment and suspicion going both ways. It was clear the digital people thought newspaper people didn’t understand anything about digital, which by the way was true. And the newspaper people felt digital people didn’t understand ‘our values.’” That could slow things down. For some print journalists, Schiller noted, “digital integration” consisted of offering an enterprise story, after which they would “come up with ideas like, ‘Just add four pictures.’ It was ridiculous.”

Meanwhile, executives on the print side came to believe that “the digital newsroom had become a fiefdom,” as Adam Nagourney noted in his recent book The Times. It was “sovereign and overseen by editors resistant to meddling from superiors who did not really understand this new world.” Digital editors like Roberts “were just as powerful as their counterparts running the print newspaper.… They decided what stories should go on the homepage and how long they should stay there.” 

That couldn’t last forever. As the site’s business side moved from an advertiser- to a subscriber-first model, a merger would become critical. And, as Schiller notes, “trust began to build over time. It was, in hindsight, the only way it could have gone.” But there wouldn’t be room for some of the digital stalwarts, including Roberts, who took a buyout. 

The Washington Post took the separate route a step further, establishing its digital newsroom across the Potomac River, in Arlington. There were financial reasons, since Virginia is a right-to-work state, but structural ones as well. It was important to be “birthing this new thing outside the purview of the paper, which did not know what the Web was, and more importantly, didn’t care,” recalls Jim Brady, a former executive editor of the site and now vice president of journalism at the Knight Foundation.

Under Brady’s leadership, the site was known for pioneering videos and blogs at a time when other outlets were still posting PDFs of their print editions. The staff was “able to experiment like crazy without anybody at the paper being able to say, ‘I’m not comfortable with that,’ because they didn’t know enough to be comfortable or not comfortable. That was really freeing, and it allowed WashingtonPost.com to develop this culture of innovation and ‘Let’s try anything.’”

And then, as at the Times, Brady says, “there’s a point where that doesn’t work anymore. There’s a point where everybody agrees [the Web] is an important thing.” Without a merger, “your responsibility and your decision-making gets bifurcated, which is going to slow you down.”

As the Post’s merger ensued, Brady, like Roberts at the Times, was out the door. A few months later, Brady appeared at a conference in Austin, where he was asked to reflect on how new and legacy staffs should be combined. “I think, conceptually, merging newsrooms is the right thing,” he told the crowd. And then he added, “A lot of newsrooms have merged the same way Germany and Poland merged in 1939.… The newspaper has taken over the website, and the website staffers have become third/fourth-class citizens. Their voice is sort of drowned out by the mere fact that they are outnumbered…by folks on the print side.”

Even digital-only newsrooms can face this dilemma, and the same resolution. In 2011, Politico launched its Pro edition, designed to offer microscopically detailed news about legislation and policy to an elite, high-paying audience. Politico executives knew they couldn’t rely on their existing reporters, many of whom were hired for their ability to churn out juicy tidbits and scoops about politics for a free site. So, as cofounder Jim VandeHei said at the time, they established Politico Pro “as an entirely separate entity, with new staff from top to bottom, because we don’t want to do anything that would weaken our existing site.” In the process, they hired reporters who would be eager to sort through arcane regulatory filings and sit through hours-long subcommittee hearings to generate the kind of news that a cable-industry lobbyist would die for. 

Starting the Pro newsroom as its own unit made sense at the time, recalls Matthew Kaminski, Politico’s former top editor: “When you’re trying to innovate, you’re trying to innovate quickly. You do want to protect it, because you want to be something different.” 

And Pro worked, reportedly generating around half the company’s $200 million in revenue when Politico was sold to Axel Springer. But even so, there was inefficiency and duplication company-wide, so editors merged the Pro staff and a few other discrete units into an all-encompassing newsroom they named “One Politico.” Kaminski and three colleagues announced in a 2020 memo that “we’ll group people together based on what they do—not on which business unit their team was initially created to support. So, for example, there will be Pro subscribers…but no more Pro reporters or editors.” It was, they said, “the most far-reaching editorial reimagination we’ve pushed through at Politico since birth in 2007.”

Dueling newsrooms can also backfire on the careers of the people who run them. Just ask Lewis, the Post chief executive who is pioneering that “third newsroom.” In 2009, while running The Telegraph news operations in the UK, Lewis was put in charge of a new digital unit “designed to capitalize on cutting edge ideas, driving new revenue streams.” Less than six months later, he was out of a job amid a dispute over his department’s unclear business prospects and the question of whether it would be “a separate, entrepreneurial outfit, or a hybrid part of the Telegraph empire.” 

Split newsrooms work until they don’t. For news organizations that can afford the costs and attract the talent, they can incubate ideas and execute them deftly, without the bureaucratic wrangling that legacy staffs often impose. But if they’re successful—as Politico Pro was, and as the sites at the Times, Post, and Journal were—the main company will reabsorb them, like the burying beetles that eat their young to ensure the species will survive.

You might think that those of us who led these satellite operations would be bitter about the mergers. But I don’t feel that way about my WSJ experience, nor do other managers I’ve spoken with. Says the Times’ Roberts: “As hard as it was to leave, and as difficult as some of those moments were toward the end, I achieved most of what I set out to do. And there were plenty of people in the newsroom who were capable of carrying it on.”

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Bill Grueskin is on the faculty at Columbia Journalism School. He has previously worked as founding editor of a newspaper on the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation, city editor of the Miami Herald, deputy managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, and an executive editor at Bloomberg News. He is a graduate of Stanford University (Classics) and Johns Hopkins’s School of Advanced International Studies (US Foreign Policy and International Economics).