Here's what students on the Task Force recommended:
- First, the newsroom would be partly collaborative. Students decided to start on the road to convergence by combining such areas as sports, features and entertainment. Television reporters and producers would work side by side with newspaper and radio staffers.
- Second, only three of the legacy media would begin working collaboratively. The Burr magazine staff decided to continue operating independently.
- Third, the newsroom model would revolve around a new position the students called "the assignment manager." It would be that person's responsibility to perform news triage, to get stories assigned to the right reporters, regardless of medium. What wasn’t clear was who this multimedia-savvy, platform-agnostic student would be.
- Fourth, the move to a converged newsroom would revolve around a new Web site that needed to be created and receive priority attention from the newspaper, television and radio operations. It would be a product of some yet-unknown shared newsgathering system. A Web Editor position would be created, equal in stature to the newspaper managing editor and television news director.
It was a good report. Many of the things students recommended, many of the convergence issues they talked about, mirrored situations in the real world.
Some key issues were left untouched in order to get the process started. The students brought them up, but because of time constraints, we told them not to worry about them at that point in early 2007. Thus, they didn't talk about how the Web site would get original content; or who would take control in the newsroom when a major story broke; or how pay scales for staffers would be handled. That allowed the students to finish their report on time. But, failing to resolve those issues early on has slowed down the move to convergence.
Over the summer of 2007, a subset of the task force worked hard with Zake to create the new web site -- KentNewsNet.com -- and get it operating, no small task in itself.
The newsroom took shape over the next few months. The rough sketches students had come up with in February and March were translated into configurations on a white board. And, then, finally, into the actual placement of desks, first with slips of paper marking future occupants, then with computers and phones, and then with students.
But, of course, the story can’t end here