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For more than a decade there's been a deep division in newspaper journalism between the "onliners" and the .. well, let's face it, we all called them Luddites. Dinosaurs. People who just don't get it.

But times change.

All across the country there are efforts to move online publishing responsibility and authority into the core news organization.

It is a move fraught with peril. I've previously warned of the many ways that this can go wrong. But I have become convinced of the following:

It's not optional. We have to do it. We're coming up on the Picard inflection points. It's not economically feasible to run entirely separate online and print organizations.

They're ready to change. By and large, the "print" people have moved beyond the state of denial that has held them trapped for all these years. That doesn't mean they have the skills. They're a long way from really understanding the Internet. And there are some who pretty far behind the curve. But most want to move ahead.

We have a serious respect problem. Onliners often have an acute sense of being disrespected that can veer into a full-scale inferiority complex. Here's the thing: It works the other way, too. Print folks not only feel overwhelmed and undertrained, they also feel that their existing skills and their core values are not respected by onliners. Constantly hammering that they "just don't get it" makes things worse, not better.

Change hurts. The "five stages of grief" may apply:

1. Denial: "It can't be happening."
2. Anger: "Why me? It's not fair."
3. Bargaining: "Just let me live to see my children graduate."
4. Depression: "I'm so sad, why bother with anything?"
5. Acceptance: "It's going to be OK."

Managers need to be aware and supportive as staff members go through these stages. And it's important to know that the Luddites, the ones who fear change, may not be the ones you expect.

One day I was doing some consulting and sat down with a new media director to talk about how he might work to make his website more complimentary and less directly competitive with his newspaper.

Develop the interactive community, I said.

But that takes time and people that I don't have, he said.

Stop putting all your time into cutting and pasting newspaper stories onto the web, I said. Your limits are real, but you can reallocate. Make your website an interactive center of the community. Lead discussions instead of trying to duplicate the newspaper. Let print be best at what it does, and use the Internet for its interactive strengths.

But my news guy won't like it, he said. The news guy signed up to put news stories online, not run bulletin boards. He'll quit.

I've thought about that interaction often recently.

Across the country, there are moves to integrate online and print departments. Reporters and photographers are being asked -- finally! -- to recognize that they have multimedia responsibilities. Newsrooms are being renamed "information centers" and asked to accept responsibilities for non-news information, utility data, "evergreen" resources. And online "divisions" are disappearing.

Not surprisingly, some people don't like this. But the pushback isn't always from some mossback from the print side who's still acting like it's 1987. Sometimes it's from the online side.

Middle managers everywhere naturally resist anything that might diminish their power bases. It shouldn't be surprising that onliners, too, can become agents of stasis rather than agents of change. We need to be on guard against that.

Not all change is good, and it's appropriate to speak out, to raise issues that need attention. But we need to make sure that we're raising issues that are real and not merely looking for ways to protect our positions of power or independence. Let's not become the new roadblock.

I just wrote a note to an NAA mailing list on the topic of organizational structure that is a bit more radical than positions I've previously taken.

Like pretty much everybody who's spent a lot of time on the New Media side of the Great Divide, I've been leery of organizational integration. Why? Because Luddite values are deeply ingrained in traditional newspaper operational groups, and those values will lead us to defeat. Equally deeply ingrained: Utter denial that those Luddite characteristics exist. It's a dangerous combination.

But this is the 21st century, and if we continue to put up with Luddite behaviors, we're cooked anyway.

It's time to restructure, and clean house of the obstructionists.

What happens if you delete your online department? Is the core organization ready to face the future? It's had more than a decade to get ready. Now or never, guys.

The next five years are the make-or-break opportunity for newspapers.

If you continue to tolerate behaviors that suggest the Internet -- the only growth opportunity you have -- is a sideline, then you're going to break, not make.

Perhaps your former online department leaders should be running your new integrated groups.

One of the overlooked aspects of the NewspaperNext Blueprint for Change is a new definition of the "core business:" anything that follows the traditional content and advertising model. This includes special sections, most niche products and Internet publishing, in that nearly everything newspapers do on the Internet amounts to nothing more than an "online newspaper."

Where we need separation is in an area where only a few newspapers are effectively working: innovation. Observing people and businesses. Figuring out what they're trying to do that doesn't work very well. Testing ideas and iterating in a fast-failure, fast-learning cycle.

You can't do that very well in an operationally focused group. Innovation is best firewalled from the core organization, the way IBM set up its personal computer division in the early 1980s.

Writing for editorsweblog.org, Rory Satran makes "A Case for Measured Integration" of print and online newsrooms.

This is a complex issue, and one full of opportunities to fail. Many of us (legitimately) fear seeing online efforts placed under the thumb of luddite or inept print editors, and yes, there are plenty of those still in power in American newsrooms. Web news is not "just another edition" and there's a very real danger of unlearning the hard lessons we've learned in more than a decade of Internet publishing. I've seen those lessons tossed right out the door -- along with online editors who were perceived as threatening to the power base of print editors.

But those issues are merely common stupidity and can be dealt with. What is more dangerous is shifting to a production-efficiency focus at a time when we desperately need to break out of the "online newspaper" trap.

Several years ago in his doctoral dissertation for the Harvard Business School, Clark Gilbert documented a tremendous performance advantage held by newspaper online departments that were organizationally separate from print. This separation made possible quick decisionmaking, rule-breaking thinking, and direct accountability for results.

I believe we are not finished defining online news, and we need to be careful not to lose the agility of a separate online operation as we seek efficiencies. Print editors will argue that they're innovative, forward-thinking and fast-moving, but I've consistently found an order of magnitude of difference in those definitions.

More importantly, we've hardly even begun making process outside of the "news" concept in local information and community interaction.

Newsrooms are not designed to address product-development and innovation issues in such areas; newsrooms are production factories.

So we should be careful to make separate, protected places in our organizations for such work. Good intentions are not enough.

I am not making an argument against integration. In fact, I think production processes need to be integrated and "newspapers" need to become multiplatform organizations managing a portfolio of products.

What I think has to be separate is the process of innovation outside the "news" core. This is where the NewspaperNext project comes into play. The N2 definition of core versus noncore -- which is not drawn on lines of product technology -- should help us understand when and how to integrate, and when not do so.