I was comfortable with that description as I began work on my presentation. The Web site at my own newspaper, The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash., strives to integrate with the larger newsroom. Our site (http://www. tribnet.com) was born in the newsroom and was the first at a McClatchy newspaper. It was among the first 10 newspaper sites in the United States. Its offerings are robust for a medium-sized daily: We offer our full news product, complete classifieds, some display ads, our archives, national/international and special-interest material from our big sister site (http://www.nando.net) and syndicated material. A handful of people in marketing are working to build the business. The news content is posted by a highly automated process supervised by one person, the webmaster, who is a newsroom editor. He works hard to involve other newsroom teams in Web-work, with some success.

And our operation fits the non-mold of other McClatchy papers. There are about a dozen McClatchy newspaper sites. They were mostly home-grown and developed independently. A few were developed with strong support from nando.net and most now have some dependence on nando for content or development support. Many McClatchy sites, including ours, stand alone as business units within their newspapers. Often they are run jointly by news and marketing departments.

The longer I contemplated the notion of newsroom synergy for the panel, though, the more I found myself asking "Why?" The reasons have mostly to do with differences in culture, technology and organization. In each area one is presented with a clear choice: what’s good for the newsroom goose may be deadly for the online gander.

Culture clash

Differences between the online and newspaper worlds are most apparent in culture. Where online is experimental and advertiser-friendly, newsrooms tend to have hard-wired work processes and suspicion of the business imperative. Users approach and interact with each medium differently. Because of that, online and print prepare and present information differently.

The inviolable wall between news and advertising at most newspapers is regarded as an impediment by Web designers. In the cyberworld, a user wants to move effortlessly from, say, a restaurant review to a menu to ordering takeout. And advertisers want their ads to pop up next to related copy. The offering of menus and maps, handling customer/advertiser transactions, and the selling of advertising adjacency, may all be offered by the Web site. Such thinking, considered essential in the entrepreneurial online world, would be scandalous at most newspapers.

There also is a cultural difference in the user’s perception of each product. Print is about reading news, says Nancy Bruner, director of new media for The Seattle Times. Online is about doing things. Our customers don’t go to our site to read, they go there to do: download, talk, buy, search, and then get out. It’s a very different business.

Then there’s the approach to deadlines. One of the biggest changes in moving to the online world is the transition from updating your material once a day to changing it constantly. The county reporter’s life is tuned to working on a story so that he can finish and leave at 7:30 p.m. That doesn’t work in the online world.

Writing journalists are drawn to newspapers because of what they do and how they do it: use the narrative form to tell compelling stories that have the power to nudge the world a little.

A good webmaster’s job is quite another thing. Her sole task is to solve a customer’s problem: to present the right information solution to any customer in the right way at the right time. Newspaper stories can be thought of as a line, either straight or circuitous, but generally having a beginning and an end with a single way of getting from the former to the latter. Online information, conversely, is three-dimensional, a database cube for instance. The user can start from any point and go to any point within the cube, or bounce from datapoint A to Q to F in a distinctly unpredictable pattern.

Another distinction is the editor’s point of view. In newspapers, the stories are often about people doing something, said Scott Whiteside, director of strategy and technology/new media for Cox Enterprises. On the Web, the story is much more likely to be for the people interested in something.

The final, and biggest, cultural hurdle between newsrooms and the online world, though, is control. Editors control newspapers. The online world cedes control to the user: All the news you want, the way you want it, when you want it.

Technological imperative

Technology drives many, perhaps most, of the cultural distinctions between print and online.

Newspapers adopted their present form (big, gray, homogeneous) as an outgrowth of the development of the high-speed press. There was a time when small presses produced inexpensive papers that served limited audiences and presented a narrow point of view. The big presses changed everything.

Though they were very expensive, Whiteside said, they worked best with huge press runs. That meant homogenization of content to attract the widest possible audience.

Among other things, that led to the objectivity standard and the bundling of products that were otherwise illogically placed with one another. It was the all-things-to-all-people model, Whiteside said.

The same economics led to once-a-day deadlines because it was too expensive to send trucks out delivering multiple daily editions. Web economics free the publisher both from the press and the delivery trucks. And that makes for a very different medium.

Separate Web products are possible for football fans and fashion followers, autos on one site and international news on another.

In the online world you have three mental models you must satisfy, said Seattle’s Bruner:

• The passive viewer, who’s just browsing through.
• The very active model ("I know what I’m looking for. I search. I get out.").
• The P/A person. They come in for a search and stay to browse.

Jan Even, executive producer of Microsoft’s Seattle Sidewalk Web site, said the technological restrictions of newspapers (ink on paper, limited page count, delivered once a day) mean they can’t always deliver information when a reader wants it.

The paper is totally oriented to the "browsing mentality," Even said, not to the "searching mentality." Some newspaper people assume that browsing is the way to organize a site, but it’s a no-brainer that it’s not.

Finally, there’s design. Newspapers can afford to be designed purely to appeal to the eye, limited only by space. Web sites must be functional first, and are limited by screen size and download time. The time crunch is so severe that Even edits Web pages with a stopwatch. More than six seconds to load and words must be trimmed, photos cropped or eliminated. Designing for print means melding type and art; for the Web it’s words plus technology (user interface, visuals, audio, links, functionality). On top of that users can customize the look and feel of the information they receive, bypassing the design.

Organization and integration

So, bearing in mind these cultural and technological differences, how should we organize our fledgling online businesses? What is the appropriate role for the newsroom to play in its development? It depends on an honest assessment of what you want to accomplish.

If your interest is purely defensive, if you’re doing it because your competitors or peers are, if you want to get your newsroom thinking in some new ways, then by all means let it be run from the newsroom. Limited resources may also force some small newspapers to keep the Web product in-house.

But if you really want a thriving, money-making product, then free it from the newsroom. It’s a different business, with a different set of imperatives.

Look at your online competitors. The successful ones may be backed by big organizations, but their successful Web components are flexible, small, focused organizations that devour the relevant market data and keep refining their success strategy.

If you want to win, let go. And get over it.

Zeeck is executive editor of The News Tribune, Tacoma, Wash.