Topic: Wishing myself luck - wondering what might happen.

I work for a newspaper. Circulation : 50,000. My 17-county region that we market to has around 500,000 people in it, with around 50,000 of them tuning into our web sites each month (mainly the paper's site). Anyway, it is possible that we are about to buy a neighboring newspaper with similar numbers, thus doubling *everything* available to our web department in terms of content, advertisers, etc.

We're a pretty small team handling this, but this is a really kick-ass opportunity to utterly lock down the internet media resources in our market. If there are eyeballs to be grabbed, then we will grab the majority of them.

I'm just rambling because I've never been in a situation like this and it's all kind of fly-by-wire. It's likely that we'll pick up two or three more employees, bringing our team to 7 or 8. That doesn't take into account the journalists, editors, photographers, etc. that sling content to us daily.

So... what would you do if you were me? Or if you owned the company that's purchasing this other paper?

Hmm, my biggest worries would be the whole "culture clash" thing. Their journalists might have their own special way of doing things, and not appreciate your "flawed" way, heh. The web team will be new hires, so that won't be a problem I'd guess. Are you going to maintain the name and masthead from the other paper, or merge them into one? You might need seperate templates for each site, and let them work off the same body of content, could be a fun challenge.


Your pal, -doc-

The two papers will likely retain their identity. Our biggest bonus will be the GoTriCities effort, which is a Friday entertainment insert that is online as well.. We will circulate that too in the other paper. I may not play as large a role in development (redevelopment, actually) of the other paper's site, though I am hoping that they both use a similar template with standardized database interaction. The other paper is not very wired and we will be responsible fore determining how to best utilize their assets in this regard.

oooh, how exciting ...

i second what Doc says ... i was lucky that the only merger i was ever involved in was for the better. the culture in the new company was heaps more conducive to creativity that ours was ... the actual take over went really smoothly, mostly because the team assigned to handle it was super-organized and everybody knew exactly what was going on every step of the way (and the daily strategics meetings were a fun break from everyday work)..

All the best

SUN
//then there was job shifting, raises and promotions ...//