If you were asked what movie best sums up your work environment, what would you say?

When that question was posed to participants, they said their work situations can range from a clip from Cinderella to a romp through the film Frankenstein.

One person lamented that she felt like a character in the musical, Oliver: always looking for a handout and receiving only crumbs. Another participant compared his work life to a scene from The Stunt Man.

Still another participant said he had taken the words of Mel Gibson's Braveheart to heart: "You may take our lives, but you'll never take our freedom."

The road to an online news operation that runs as smoothly as an established print operation has been long. Many thought the Holy Grail would be a complete integration of the web operation into the core news operation, Paul says.

But as participants attest, integration seems far off. They say they are thought of as step children, people who play with computers, or surf the web all day.

Paul says part of the problem is that clear missions have not been established.

Consider these questions:

• Do you know what your mission statement is?
  
• Do you know what the newspaper's mission statement is?
  
• Do the two coincide?
• Will you have to wait until the year 2000 to revise the mission or are you more nimble?

According to a 1997 survey, Newspaper Publishing and the World Wide Web, online staffs said mission statements need to be clear, but in most cases, they were not, Paul says.

Paul says, mission statements are an important strategy for staying on task, and s he uses basketball to make her point.

In basketball, she says, the rules are clear:

• The point of the game is clear.
• There is equipment.
• There are rules.
• You know who the stars are and why they are stars.
• Each team has a playing stategy.
• You can identify excellent performance.

How many of these items do you think you know about your online organization? How many of these items are known in the print operation?

Paul encourages online organizations to develop a mission statement and strategies for integration.

Paul cautions that if you don't have a mission statement, you may end up all over the place, diluting your purpose.

"You might have the point, but you don't have the strategy."