These changes literally stretch from the tone of voice and language (“which will horrify people who worked in newspapers 20 years ago!”), to management of newsrooms, photography and graphics.

Gone are the days where “people sat around in a cigar haze of reactionary self-satisfaction until the Internet came along and drove everybody into a panic … (Newsrooms) are now places of restless creativity, full of people who always think they can find a way to do things better.  They’re usually right”, claimed Landman. 

Creativity is the central motivation for newsroom integration. That does not imply or guarantee that the integration model, about which many are justifiably skeptical, is the right one.  What is does mean, however, is that there is a belief that the collective brains, experience and journalistic values, which are the soul of what newspaper people are, will now merely be expressed on new platforms. 

A complete new language took hold at The New York Times.  Reporters now blog and podcast. They wrestle with verticals and topics pages.  Information architects infiltrate the newsroom, together with software developers.  Landman jokingly quipped: “Our executive editor, Bill Keller, told us it was OK to start talking like web people. We’re now allowed to call the result of our sacred labors “content.” You even hear people from the newspaper utter the word “monetize”.

Physically, everybody is closer now, and web producers, for example, are sitting on all the major news desks.  The newsroom is gigantic, and more than 1,400 people are combined in a space that includes web production, software development, product management and web design alongside the usual newspaper functions. The name of the game, basically, is intellectual connection.

At the risk of sounding glib, Landman stressed the fact that the integration is resulting in a depth to the journalism and reporting, which obviously goes to the heart of the profession.  He proceeded to motivate this by means of a case study on an Iraq story, which was produced simultaneously on various levels and across the multimedia landscape.  Landman briefly referred to the dynamic “City Room”, where more personal sensibility is brought to the local news, and which involves plenty of interactive conversations with readers and other news sources.

Landman remarked that The Topic Page team, for example, is different. And fun!  This team is headed by an editor from the newspaper and a search specialist from the web. They have a steering committee of producers and editors representing major news desks. The New York Times’s business desk was likewise re-organized and integrated, and multi-skilled reporters are preparing content for multimedia.  One interesting trend is to let news stories “unfold on blogs rather than delivering everything in a finished, inverted-pyramid package”.      

Landman explicitly said that he does not want to suggest that all this talk about change may make him sound glib.  The bottom line is rather that change should be embraced fully, and not only be addressed.

What is vital now, is “to manage the huge new demands multi-platform, multimedia journalism places on everyone, without commensurate compensation, except the long-term reward of knowing that we are securing the future of The New York Times”. 

With it will come a certain amount of friction resulting from the modern-day marriage between two cultures.  There is also anxiety and frustration about this reconciliation between two former worlds.  These feelings just need to be managed continuously.

All people, especially newspaper people, have a natural yearning for clarity of mission, clear lines of authority, and deadlines. Landman said that they have thus built up a system of rules and an organizational chart that have served the traditional newsroom and printed newspaper well. “But when it comes to digital journalism, we are making a lot of this up as we go, and we have to be willing to accept that the rules may not be so clear cut in the digital realm as they are in print, and the enforcement cannot be dogmatic”. 

The name of the new game is to be comfortable with ambiguity and improvisation, and the top dogs need to lead this revolution of change.  And enjoy all the fun you can have at the same time, was his valuable advice.