Why did the newsroom staff not see the online format as an opportunity?
The USA Today case presents the problems of a planning process and strategies inside a corporation related to performing changes in the organizational structure and teams. USA Today is a newspaper company of Gannett Corporation, that whit the beginning of the digital era started to have problems with their organizational and operational structure. The biggest problem faced by USAT was the integration between their different types of staff: the paper and the online.
USAT faced many problems with the integration, especially because both of the sectors were considered independent, having different organizational structures, which result a challenge on the process of integration.
The reasons of why the newsroom staff didn’t accept the idea of working together was primarily because they believed that the online sector was responsible for their loss of market share. That the Online division was a competitor instead of a partner for them. The fact of both departments appears so different, cause a big problem for Curley’s plan.
Both staff has different ways of work, like the different deadlines, fear of letting breaking news be posted online, where the competitors could reach and present before then, resulting on loss of their readers.
No one of the senior staff was willing to accept the transformation of a traditional business into a full digital business, although they were aware of the changes in the consumer behavior.
It becomes clear that a transformational leadership needed to occur in the company, however, if what could be an interesting option in that case, if the leader does not have these characteristics, could be use a human resources structure to support the shift. Even though, Curley changed human resources VPs, we do not see that these more sensitive profile of professional was able