The United States' largest daily USA Today has announced it will merge its print and online newsrooms. As part of this convergence Kinsey Willson, the current editor of USAToday.com, will join John Hillkirk as a second executive editor for the merged operation. Willson and Hillkirk will oversee daily news production and content, reporting to chief editor Ken Paulson.

Paulson said the following about the choice to converge: "The goal in combining the two newsrooms is to create a single 24-hour news organization that will inform and engage readers on multiple platforms … That means going beyond arm's-length collaboration."

No jobs wil be lost through the initiative, which is planned to take place in stages, in order to enable staff to become "more familiar with the demands of publishing to multiple platforms."

The convergence will begin in areas where collaboration between the two news operations has already taken place, Wilson says: "We will start by looking at areas such as travel, entertainment and breaking news, where we already have a good history of collaboration, and see how we can integrate our operations more effectively. We'll build from there."

The paper's president and publisher Craig Moon state that the decision on the newsroom merge had been made in "response to the growing importance of the Internet as a vehicle for news delivery."

Source: cyberjournalist.net