Matrix Organisation

Confronted by increased internal and external complexity, traditional forms of newswork have reached their limits. Journalistic start-ups, such as Quartz and NZZ.at, form emerging editorial teams around “obsessions” or “phenomena” to gain cross-beat perspectives of complex issues such as climate change, the financial crisis or the refugee crisis. Legacy media experimenting with cross-beat newswork see themselves confronted by challenges arising predominantly from beat structures. Consequently, this paper focuses on an example of cross-beat teamwork at a major Swiss daily newspaper, investigating the journalists’ experiences of working in a particular project. Insights from 13 interviews indicate that a matrix organisation is one way to organise cross-beat topic-focused newswork in larger newsrooms. A matrix organisation combines traditional functional hierarchy (i.e. the beat structure) with a project dimension. Based on insights from organisational studies, I compare the known advantages and disadvantages of a matrix organisation with journalists’ experiences and derive implications for the introduction and design of a matrix organisation in newsrooms.