Combining metro and business desks

At least two metropolitan newspapers owned by Gannett Co. are combining their business staff with their metro staff and putting both under one editor.

The two newspapers are the Honolulu Advertiser and the Indianapolis Star.

At the Advertiser, according to a story in Saturday’s paper, “Business Editor David Butts is promoted to local news editor and will oversee a combined desk of metro and business reporters to provide more local news online and in print.”

Meanwhile, at the Star, Steve Berta, the assistant managing editor of business, will also oversee a combined business and metro desk. The metro editor at the Star left several months ago.

As to how the combined desks will work together, Berta said, “I’ll let you know when we work out the details” in an e-mail.

Dennis Ryerson, the editor of the Star, told me in an e-mail that “Our metro and business desks have been working together for some time.  If metro has a story and needs help, they may seek help from business, and vice versa. Also, we have a health reporter in metro, and a business of health reporter in business.  By combining those, and adding yet another health writer in features, we will be able to bundle a critical mass onto a team that should result in deeper health coverage.

“We have a business writer covering business issues in the legislature.  It makes sense to us to combine that person into the unit that covers political and other issues in the legislature.

“There are several other such issues we hope to resolve. We will end up with a better variety of coverage teams and, we hope, stronger leadership of those teams.

“There is one thing that we must not do, and that is diminish our business coverage.  Steve Berta has done a very good job for us, improving our coverage.  We are much, much more local.  We have a strong business columnist.  We have improved our coverage of commercial real estate, and of bio sciences.  We have a subscriber business e-mail newsletter.  We must continue those things.

“This is NOT a consumption of business by metro.  It’s a merger into a new unit we are calling ‘Public Service.'”

Of course, questions remain, such as whether business reporters whose expertise is in writing earnings stories and reading SEC filings will now be asked to cover nighttime city council meetings and vice versa for the city reporters.

This is exactly the kind of action toward business desks that I feared when many papers like the Star announced at the beginning of last year that they were cutting stock listings from their business section. If it’s easy to cut the business section once, then it’s easy to cut there again.