I spent some time last week reading research on how news organizations are trying to fix the perpetual tension between their product teams and newsrooms.

The series covered The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, Zetland, and several others. Each one is experimenting with different organizational approaches to get these traditionally warring factions to work together: cross-functional steering groups; liaison roles embedded in both teams; priority panels meeting bi-weekly; and entire organizational restructures.

And as I read through case after case, I kept noticing the same gap.

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What they're solving (and what they're avoiding)

Zetland(a Danish media company) dissolved its department silos completely. Now they have cross-functional "steering groups" where the CEO, Editor-in-Chief, and Head of Product make decisions together in the same room.

That's a bold move. But what happens when those three people fundamentally disagree on priorities? How do you actually navigate the conversation when the Editor-in-Chief's traditional editorial authority conflicts with the new shared decision-making model?

Or worse... what if the CEO and Head of Product team up and overrule the Editor-in-Chief? I've seen this happen. Product and the CEO may not actually understand media, they're making bad calls, and the Editor-in-Chief is right. But nobody's listening because the structure doesn't address who has authority over what.

The Philadelphia Inquirercreated a "priority panel" of senior leaders from product, newsroom, marketing, sales, finance, legal, and systems, who meet every two weeks to adapt roadmaps to shifting priorities transparently.

My experience with this: when no one is in charge, then no one is in charge. This always goes one of two ways.

Either decisions take forever because you're trying to educate too many people on context they don't have, and it's not actually their job to make product decisions, so they don't have the frameworks, disciplines, and tools to help make these decisions well and quickly.

Or the few people who really know what they're doing end up making all the decisions, and everyone else rubber-stamps them.

Neither is good. Decisions can't be made well by committee. Monthly or quarterly reviews for alignment? Sure. But bi-weekly decision-making by a panel means you're either moving too slow or pretending more people are deciding than actually are.

The i Paperintroduced a new engagement metric to shift both product and editorial focus from acquisition to post-conversion engagement.

This is actually a smart move—a shared metric can align teams. But the article mentions this "was met with at least some suspicion from the newsroom initially" and then... nothing. The case study never addresses how they actually worked through that suspicion, and my guess is that's because they didn't.

This pattern is repeated in every single case study.

They present structural solutions—new org charts, new meeting cadences, new metrics, new roles—and assume that once you implement the structure, people will just figure out how to work within it.

The work being avoiding

When you reorganize to "fix" a conflict, you might be solving part of the problem. Unclear reporting structures can definitely make things worse. Bad processes create unnecessary friction.

But organizational design is just one contributor to the conflict. It's not the whole problem.

It's like moving a struggling employee to a different department. You haven't solved anything. You've just relocated the problem and hoped the new context will fix it.

The human dynamics don't disappear because you drew new boxes on an org chart.

• Someone's still suspicious of the new metric because they think it's going to be used to judge their work unfairly.

• Someone's still losing power in the new structure and resenting it.

• Someone else should probably have more authority than they're getting, but nobody wants to acknowledge that directly.

Those things need to be addressed. Not with better process, but with actual conversations.

Contributors, not villains

Stone and Heen point out in Difficult Conversations (inexplicably discounted by 65% at the time of this writing!)that every conflict has contributors, not a single person at fault.

When your cross-functional team keeps spinning its wheels, the instinct is to ask "who's being difficult?"

Wrong question.

Better questions:

• What's each person optimizing for that creates tension with others?

• What are they afraid of that's making them dig in?

• What systems or processes are making this harder than it needs to be?

• Who's contributing to the communication breakdown, and how?

• What needs to happen for everyone to feel heard while still making progress?

Notice that those questions don't assume anyone is wrong or bad at their job. They assume this is a complex situation with multiple contributors.

Solving it means working with all of them, not just rearranging the furniture.

The path forward

Next time you're tempted to solve a team conflict with reorganization, pause.

Ask: Is this structural problem actually causing the conflict, or are we reorganizing to avoid dealing with the people?

Maybe you do need clearer roles. Maybe the reporting structure is genuinely broken. Fix that.

But also recognize that implementing the new structure is going to surface human dynamics you'll need to navigate:

• Someone's going to be suspicious of the change

• Someone's going to lose the authority they've had for years

• Someone's going to resist because it threatens their identity

• Someone's going to quietly undermine it because they weren't consulted

You can anticipate these reactions and work with them, or you can pretend the org chart will solve everything and then act surprised when people don't magically fall in line.

Try this:

Think about one organizational change you've made recently to "fix" a conflict.

Now ask yourself: What human dynamics did we avoid addressing by reorganizing instead?

If you can name them, you've just identified the actual work.

Hit reply and tell me what you think. I'm curious whether this pattern shows up in your teams.

Cheers,

Matthew Stublefield

P.S. The full research series is worth reading if you work in news, product, or any cross-functional environment :newsproduct.org/blog/if-the-product-is-news. The case studies show what structural collaboration can look like. Just pay attention to what's between the lines because that's where the real work lives.