In London's news industry, you're nobody if you don't have a new newsroom and a reorganisation to go with it. The Telegraph started the trend with its hub-and-spoke floor plan and its decisive job changes for almost everyone. The Guardian is moving into its new HQ in the autumn and has been holding lots of staff meetings aiming for consensus. So, I asked Peter Horrocks, head of the BBC's recently reshuffled newsroom, which was more the corporation's style? Somewhere in between, he said. Given the cuts in the BBC licence fee and budget, the reorganisation had to be quick and purposeful - it began in October and will conclude in June. But as it's the Beeb, meetings and consensus are also valued.
Horrocks gave me a tour of his space at Television Centre and explained the logic behind his new structure, on a day when he was manning the BBC News multimedia desk. He is making all his top managers rotate in that chair to immerse them in the demands of news in any medium. Next to the multimedia desk is a hub that manages content from BBC News resources - standard stuff - though now its contributors are organised by topic rather than medium (the TV science reporter works alongside the online science writer).
But in the corner is something I think every newsroom will soon have: a media wire, which in Horrocks' words is a tasting operation that ingests and assesses content from all over to feed to any product and medium. There is a separate user-generated-content hub that does likewise with amateur content. (I'd argue these two will have to merge, as the line between professional and amateur, reporter and witness continues to blur.) This curatorial function, editing the world, is critical in a news ecology that pushes us to do what we do best and link to the rest.
Then there is Horrocks' new-media on-demand production unit, which will create, not just repackage, content for the internet. We agreed that creating new forms of news narrative - making appropriate use of all media within a story, rather than creating separate media versions of each story - is one of the most innovative frontiers for journalists today.
But Horrocks believes there will still be specialists with unique skills and knowledge: TV folks know speed, radio people understand the needs of different audiences, and online people work in depth. Perhaps, but I wonder whether this separation will prove to be a legacy of the BBC's products. As media mix - with for example, video used not just to make TV stories, but to illustrate a text story with pictures that move and talk - will we still be able to define a clear difference between one medium and the next?
Upstairs, desks were still being rearranged for the BBC's global news hub. Moving the online newsroom into what was the old broadcast newsroom, they have crammed many people into the space (but not radio, nor the other two-thirds of BBC News that do not report to Horrocks: news gathering and programmes such as Panorama and Today). As we stood there, one of many tours of the space was being held for online employees.
"They keep asking who's won," Horrocks said - did TV take over because they are in TV's space under a TV person? It had better not be that simple. If newsroom reorganisation - at any news operation - is about nothing more than shuffling desks, then it might as well be an exercise carried out on the deck of the Titanic. Later, Horrocks gave the real answer: "We've had to blow up BBC News to totally remake it."
· Jeff Jarvis is a journalism professor at the City University of New York and blogs at buzzmachine.com