I am a synergy survivor.
The high church of journalism these days is abuzz with talk about the dangers of synergy–the notion that multimedia giants like Tribune Co. can ask their reporters and editors to contribute not only to the newspaper, but also to television, radio and the Internet.
Skeptics think synergy threatens journalistic purity. They worry that reporters can get distracted, loyalties might get divided, scoops might be lost, and entertainment will triumph over news.
Some worry–more darkly, but without much apparent reason–that synergy might break down the walls that exist between the editorial and business interests of news organizations. It’s vitally important to preserve the “church-and-state” distinctions, but synergy plays no role one way or another.
The synergy skeptics need to chill out.
I have lived with synergy for nearly a decade now, and am journalistically no worse for wear. I may have lost a coffee break here, or cut short a personal phone call there, but I can’t remember any other sacrifices on behalf of synergy.
In fact, in some ways, synergy has made me better.
When newspaper reporters like me take our words off the printed page and apply them in other media, it forces us to look at our stories in different ways.
Appearing on television forces me to look for broader aspects of my stories that will appeal to an audience with a more casual interest in news. Taking phone calls on a radio call-in show makes me directly accountable to listeners in a way that writing a newspaper story rarely does. And rushing a scoop onto the Internet revives competitive instincts that sometimes wear away as we progress in our profession.
The biggest problem with synergy, really, is in poor execution. It’s not with the concept itself.
My first synergy exposure came seven years ago, when I was a reporter at Business Week. For an annual issue profiling star CEOs, the magazine equipped reporters with professional-quality tape recorders, and hoped to transfer the interviews onto CD-ROM. But few of us knew how to work the recorders. Lots of interviews came back garbled. And the CD-ROM project never really worked.
Call it multimedia, interrupted.
Even here at the Tribune–synergy central, if you believe everything that’s been written about us since the merger with Times Mirror Co. was revealed last week–synergy has not gone as far as perhaps it should.
We’ve made lots of strides. Tribune reporters routinely appear on WGN TV and radio and Tribune Co.-owned cable station CLTV. Movie reviews are channeled to the Internet site Metromix.com. Stories from Tribune Interactive sometimes appear in the newspaper. We work hard to move big Tribune scoops quicker to the Internet, often with more in-depth information than the newspaper publishes, such as full-text copies of key public documents.
None of this stretches reporters too far. Lots of it serves Tribune readers, viewers and browsers.
Still, there are other newspapers that do even more. At the San Jose Mercury News–the epicenter of the Internet earthquake–newspaper reporters often publish scoops on the Internet. The idea is to get the news out faster via the Web, and to ask business reporters to come back for the next morning’s paper with more forward-thinking, more analytical coverage.
This all means more work. But the Mercury News is adding dozens more reporters to get it done.
Still, many people believe that cooperation among media will break down reporters’ competitive instincts. Ken Auletta, the author and lead defender of high-church journalism, puts it this way. “Journalism is not teamwork,” he says. “It’s not about teamwork, it’s about challenging people.”
Reporters must continue to protect their independence from people they cover, and from the business interests of the organizations they work for. And if synergy ever threatens that, then it’s moving in the wrong direction.
But if synergy means getting the news out sooner, and smarter, and reaching more people in more ways, then that’s all right.
In fact, that’s why many of us got into journalism in the first place.
