Will the Managing Editor Go with the Times?

My local newspaper is The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and it has been re-orging a bunch over the past 18 months. Because I am a communicator who helps share important medical discoveries for my organization, an academic health system, I am concerned that there a fewer reporters with health and medical beats. When you are working in a place that has a reponsibility for sharing discoveries, especially with federal funding supporting a lot of this, the goal is to get the news out to the public about how they are benefitting from advances.

So, keeping up with trends, I read a recent column by Mark Fitzgerald, an Editor and Publisher editor-at-large. He says managing editors may be a middle management phenomenon that may eventually go away. Read an excerpt here and visit his column.

"What, M.E. Worry? Managing Editors May Be On The Way Out: In the rest of corporate America, the middle manager has been an endangered species for the better part of three decades. With so many papers losing them, will the managing editor position soon disappear?

"In some ways the wonder is that the M.E. position has hung around so long. In the rest of corporate America, the middle manager has been an endangered species for the better part of three decades."