Otterblog

Back after a week of raking and more raking. Glad to see winter trying to arrive.

Many of you have asked about the changes in the Journal’s newsroom management. Carl Crothers, our vice president and executive editor, explained some of the rationale in a column yesterday.

The operations of a newspaper always seem a little quaint and archaic to outsiders, particularly the relationships between the content areas (news and opinions) to each other and to the business side of the house. The lack of coordination seems silly and damaging. Why would you not want to write positive stories about your best advertisers? Why would you not want to have the same people writing and supervising news and opinion?

The first one is pretty easy. It’s about credibility, an important but ephemeral quality that is hard-won but easily lost. If we write puffy stories about our best advertisers, can you believe what we’re saying? And not just on those stories, but throughout the paper?

The News/Editorial split is more difficult. In the old days, this split was nonexistent, particularly in cities with more than one newspaper. Paper X supported these various positions, and those positions affected how stories got written. Paper Y took the other position. Much of this was driven by the newspaper as the property of one person. Its opinions and news reflected the owner’s. Pretty simple. The rise of newspapering as a profession, the loss of multi-newspaper communities, and the move to corporate ownership created a different structure, one that valued moderation and fairness in the news pages and a separation from opinion. The best example of this has been the Wall Street Journal, with its notoriously eloquent and conservative editorial pages, and its news pages that frequently revealed the shortcomings of the policies endorsed on the opinion side.

The idea is a good one. We want the people who are writing opinion pieces to have strong opinions, but we want reporters and the folks who supervise them to not form opinions, but rather to sift and gather facts and let those facts form the basis of balanced stories.

Now, like any system, it’s not perfect. But it works suprisingly well. Our critics may think it’s all a big joke, that the opinion side and the news side are joined together in crusade. But we’re not. This new arrangement will be a little tricker, because Carl, unlike Linda, is my direct supervisor, but we’ll make it work the way we always have—through respect and communication.