It’s not difficult to see why journalists and others reacted with alarm Thursday when they learned that section editors at The Dallas Morning News would start reporting to sales managers.
The news, first published by the Dallas Observer, came from a memo sent Wednesday to Morning News employees by Editor Bob Mong and Cyndy Carr, senior vice president of sales, outlining what they called a “business/news integration.”
New “general managers” would lead 11 “business and content segments” that would include parts of the newsroom.
It seemed as though the venerated wall between the news and business sides of the operation had been smashed in part of what Belo called a “bold strategy.”
But Mong and others involved in the new direction, at least at the Morning News, suggest that a different line deserved more attention: “We are proceeding … in the same way our News leadership and our Publisher have worked collaboratively for years,” the announcement said.
“To me, this is nothing new for the newspaper,” Executive Sports Editor Bob Yates said in a phone interview. “Editors of the paper report to the publisher. It’s the same pattern.”
Anyone who thinks advertising will influence news copy is “so far off-base. That’s not going to happen at all,” said Rich Alfano by phone. Alfano starts Monday as a general manager at the Morning News. His responsibilities include the sports department, as well as health care and education.
Alfano said the newspaper industry is arriving late to the integration concept. At 51, he has spent more than 20 years in the media, mostly with consumer magazines. As president of Golf magazine in the late 1990s, he supervised the editor, the publisher for advertising sales and the general manager of the Web site.
“Other media went to these strategies many years ago,” Alfano said. “I had overall long-term strategic responsibility for the business.” His job, which he envisioned replicating at the Morning News, was to keep the editors happy while “developing long-term growth for the advertising side. It was more of a process of getting different sides of the business to be in synch with each other.”
Similarly, Tracy Martin Taylor is the GM for the Morning News’ entertainment and travel/luxury “segments.” Taylor is already in the publisher’s role at Quick, the paper’s free entertainment tabloid.
For newsroom journalists, the issue of salespeople’s presence in a newsroom’s chain of command might not be put to rest so easily. As the idea took shape over the last year, newsroom staffers discussed it, their supervisors said. They asked the questions a journalist would.
Who decides conflicts between advertisers and journalists? Whose values prevail?
Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at Poynter, said the editor-publisher relationship works well “when you have two people who are respectful and understand the other’s responsibilities and (who) listen well.”
“I’d be looking for training for both the section editors and the general managers,” McBride told me by phone. “The section editors will need to understand more about how the business side works. And business people will need to understand the principles of independent journalism.”
Bob Steele, Nelson Poynter Scholar for Journalism Values, said he worries about competing values between news and sales forces.
Steele said he does not subscribe to a “Chinese wall” analogy between the news and business sides, but rather uses a picket-fence analogy.
“You can talk over the picket fence. If there’s a gate, you can go back and forth,” he said. But ultimately, each side returns home “and honors the values on the journalism side or the business side of the fence. Both can be legitimate, but they are in tension with each other.”
Morning News Publisher and CEO Jim Moroney told the Observer, “Just [because] a business person has an editorial person reporting to him or her doesn’t mean our content is now for sale or that the salespeople, the business people, the publisher will dictate to the newsroom what content they choose to publish or not.”
It’s about coordinating the elements that produce, market and support the journalism, others at the Morning News say.
Yates, the sports editor, said that under the new arrangement, “There could be opportunities that are addressed because they go straight to the general manager.”
“What if we wanted to do a special section on an upcoming event? A big golf tournament? There’s no reason” to do so “if it’s not generating revenue. It would be good if the sports editor, the general manager and others involved could sit down around the table and decide whether they think this is a product for which they can get revenue. It’s a question of commitment. A general manager sort of acts as a champion of the idea.”
While the section editors like Yates report to the general managers, the organizational chart also includes a dotted line from the section editors to Managing Editor George Rodrigue and to Mong.
Mong will remain “deeply involved” in content issues, he told me by phone. The company also has to be more financially stable, he said. “We’ve got more stability than we had a few years ago,” he said, and this plan, he suggested, would solidify it.
