It would seem that new Courant.com editor Naedine Hazell is spreading the online gospel among the dead-tree newsroom population in a big way.

It’s a little ironic that it’s happening now, about five years late, but equally inevitable since there are fewer people in the newsroom than there have been in decades. Cross-training maximizes utility, no?

Among other things, Naedine is empowering folks in photo to make their own photo galleries using Assembler, the main content management tool for the web. She will be training key people on the desk and in graphics to use Assembler, too, which may give them a better understanding of its design limitations, yet its remarkable versatility. (I don’t think the folks in Graphics ever fully grasped how limiting Assembler is when it comes to page layout, etc. It’s the awful price Tribune paid in order to standardize all its websites and make their parts interchangeable.)

I hear the training regime  will be re-visiting SEO (search engine optimization) again , too — a subject that the desk was just beginning to grasp a year ago when the editors started writing different headlines for print and online.

All these are smart moves on Naedine’s part that bring the web and print cultures closer.

More power to her.