«NYT» konvergiert

Die «New York Times» macht Ernst mit der Konvergenz. In einem internen Memo wurden die Mitarbeiter des Verlagshauses über die geplante Zusammenlegung der Print- und Online-Newsrooms informiert:

«[...] all of us appreciate that one of the biggest long-term challenges facing our craft is to invent a digital journalism and new services for our readers that both live up to our high standards and help carry the cost of a great news-gathering organization. We have concluded that our best chance of meeting that challenge is to integrate the two newsrooms into one. [...]

For quite a few years now, we’ve sworn allegiance to the modern-sounding doctrine of “platform neutrality” — meaning we care only about our journalism, not about whether we transmit it to our audience on paper or via streams of electrons. But in practice most of us have been writing and editing newspaper articles, or taking pictures or making charts and graphs for the newspaper, while a few of us have been taking this work and adapting it for the Web.»

Angestrebt wird aber nicht einfach die örtliche Zusammenlegung der beiden Redaktionen:

«By integrating the newsrooms we plan to diminish and eventually eliminate the difference between newspaper journalists and Web journalists — to reorganize our structures and our minds to make Web journalism, in forms that are both familiar and yet-to-be-invented, as natural to us as writing and editing, and to do all of this without losing the essential qualities that make us The Times. Our readers are moving, and so are we.»

Ein erster Schritt zur Eliminierung der Zweiklassen-Gesellschaft – «richtige» Journalisten oben, Onliner unten.

==> Von den Plänen der «New York Times» berichtet auch das «Wall Street Journal Online».

Update, 10. August 2005: Für die «Online Journalism Review» hat Mark Glaser den Chefredaktor der «New York Times», Bill Keller, und Martin Nisenholtz, zuständig für die Online-Aktivitäten der «NYT», zur Zusammenlegung der Newsrooms befragt.