Study up for ONA: A guide to making the most from this session

Staffing and structure: How to best organize your team
Organization charts, talent levels, job scopes. How to balance it all in the new multi-platform universe. Many media organizations are having to teach their staffs on the fly how to balance demands on their time but want staffers want to know, asking, "Where do I fit in the organization?"
Participants: Neil Chase, NYTimes.com (moderator); Nedra Weinstein, Catalyst Consulting Team; Rob Curley, formerly Naples Daily News; recently of washingtonpost.com; Patrick Steigman, ESPN

KEY SOURCES and ARTICLES

• Relevant categories on paidcontent.org:
• Newspapers

SAMPLER: AROUND THE ONLINE WORLD

• In this report from Harvard, the staff at the The Roanoke Times in Virginia  discusses the lessons it learned as it adapted its organization to the digital world.
• In this story on Cyberjournalist, a producer at ABC tells how technology is changing the newsroom and indursty.
• In this webcast from The University of California at Berkley, a panel of editors discusses the opportunities available when traditional journalists switch to an online format
• The Poynter Institute examines a national survey of newsroom training and its effects.

FROM THE ACADEMY
The full versions of these papers, delivered at the August meeting of journalism educators, may be available on the AEJMC site this autumn. You could also contact the authors for more information.

Happy Journalists: Good for Business? A Survey of Business Journalists’ Job Satisfaction and Plans • Qingmiao Hu and Jennifer Greer, Nevada-Reno • This survey of 665 U.S. business journalists about job satisfaction found business journalists moderately satisfied with their jobs. While they are most satisfied with their beats, stories they cover, their autonomy, and their schedules, they are unhappy with advancement opportunities and training. Inadequate on-the-job training was highly related to job dissatisfaction, a novel finding.

The Convergence Conundrum: Choosing Between The Strength of Weak Ties and Jacks of All Trades • Larry Dailey and Donica Mensing, Nevada-Reno • When journalism schools and news organizations use cross-training to implement convergence, they are operating under the assumption that sharing certain technical skills will enable journalists to understand and produce media on a variety of platforms. These efforts reward those who are able to think more like their counterparts in print or broadcast.

Journalism and blogging: A test of a model of occupational competition • Wilson Lowrey and Jenn Mackay, The University of Alabama • Adopting a “systems” framework from the sociology of occupations, this study proposes a model that depicts vulnerabilities of journalism in the face of challenges from blogging, and the conditions under which journalistic practice is likely to change in order to address vulnerabilities.

Content Differences Between Print and Online Newspapers • Jessica Smith, Abilene Christian • This study applies gatekeeping theory and uses content analysis to compare the content of 635 stories in five newspapers with their Web counterparts. It examines whether reporter affiliation or a story’s geographic emphasis has a relationship with the story’s contextual elements. Nearly all stories in the sample appeared on the newspapers’ Web sites, and story content was the same 96% of the time likely to publish additional contextual elements with local stories than more global ones.