THE ART OF MANAGING MORALE

BY BRENT CUNNINGHAM

Who said you should be happy?
Do your work.
-- Colette

 

When Susan Whitall returned to work in 1998 at The Detroit News after a bitter, one-and-a-half year strike, her clunky wooden desk -- a relic from the long-dead Detroit Times -- was gone, replaced by a sleek new cubicle and ergonomically sound seat. "That made a big difference," says Whitall, a feature writer who joined the Gannett-owned News in 1983. "It comes down to simple things, like a good chair."

If morale at the News is better since the strike -- and it would be hard for it to be any worse -- then maybe new chairs helped. But as Whitall talks, it becomes clear that deeper, less visible changes are at the root of her improved relationship with her paper. Management, she says, is less punitive. "It was very much us versus them," she says of the pre-strike newsroom. "You knew that even if you busted your butt and got a great story, if you weren't 'in' with management that story would never make it in the paper. It was very discouraging." In those days, Whitall needed a good swim each night after work to blow off steam. Now, Whitall says she gets more feedback from the top (like the e-mail from the publisher praising her column about the loss of a department store that was a Detroit institution). There are occasional off-site meetings at local restaurants, these days, and insider tours of places like the Detroit Institute of Art. Whitall says the tour was a good way to cultivate sources and find story ideas. "In some ways, things are a lot better now," she says.

Colette's admonishment notwithstanding, morale does matter in the newsroom. Happy reporters are generally more motivated, more loyal, more inspired than unhappy ones. Good morale can be the difference between a reporter who is out working her beat, and one who is waiting to be told what to do. "Reporters like to say that bad morale doesn't hurt their work, but I think it does, subtly," says a young reporter in Alabama who, like many interviewed for this story, preferred anonymity. "You don't make the extra call. You don't put the extra effort in to tighten up that lead." Morale matters at the macro level, too, and lately it has been under pressure. Cutbacks, layoffs, and buyouts have engendered bitterness and fear, and resurrected the debate over a media industry that sometimes seems to have lost its bearings. In 1996 Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, described the industry's spiritual crisis as "the lack of any affirmative vision, something inspiring that journalists can work toward or believe in." The hordes who left newspapers during the dot-com boom were not enticed by money alone, but also by workplace cultures that catered more to their individual needs. For a decade now, we have been buffeted with surveys that show younger reporters are less committed to the idea of journalism as a calling, a lifelong pursuit. In April, a survey released by the American Society of Newspaper Editors showed 54 percent of respondents weren't sure they would stay in the business. And a new cjr survey (page 37) shows that a wide majority of journalists see bad morale as a serious challenge. Morale problems in journalism are real, and they matter.

Still, "morale" is a squishy term, often applied too broadly. Newsroom consultants avoid using it because, they say, morale is merely a symptom. "When papers ask me to come deal with a 'morale problem,' I tell them I am glad to talk about their problems and some possible solutions, but 'morale' is a word we aren't going to use," says Sharon L. Peters, a veteran reporter and editor who got a Ph.D. and now studies newsrooms. It is difficult to characterize the general morale of a newsroom, which is, of course, a mercurial hodge-podge of individual morales. "On nearly every survey, newsroom morale is listed as one of the top one or two problems," says Peters. "However, when you ask those same reporters how they feel about the quality of the work they do, about their relationship with their boss, everything is hunky-dory. Honestly, I'm mystified by the whole morale thing, at least from a research perspective."

Morale is a barometer, ticking up and down in response to a complex and shifting array of professional and personal factors. Its connection to the quality of the journalism depends on the underlying causes. Whitall's new chair, for example, made her happy, but the improved communication with her editors is more important to the quality of work she does.

PROBLEM?
WHAT PROBLEM?

Managing morale, then, is akin to reading tea leaves. For example, the comfortable notion that there are no happy reporters, that we are all underpaid, overworked, chronically grumpy wretches who have taken vows of misery and poverty in the pursuit of a higher calling, is a mix of fact and fiction. But it is less connected to this question of morale than people think. Complaining is part of the culture of a newsroom, but it may or may not indicate a morale problem. "If we walk into a newsroom and people aren't grumbling, then that's a problem," says Pete Meyer, a consultant who has been studying newsrooms for twenty-five years. "It means they are so angry and suspicious they won't say anything publicly."

Discerning a real problem amid the din of grumbles is something of an art form. "It's just something you sense, something you feel when you walk through the joint," says Gil Thelen, executive editor at The Tampa Tribune. There are more obvious signs, too. When morale sinks, Thelen says, ideas grow stale, themes are recycled, and the newspaper feels "like something you've read before."

Divining what reporters need, what motivates them, almost requires psychoanalysis. Consider the following mix of signals: A reporter in Vancouver is frustrated by editors who play favorites, applying rules unevenly. It depresses her to see "good journalists hung out to dry with crappy assignments just because they've fallen out of favor." She squirrels away her savings so she can quit if it ever happens to her. Sounds bad, right? In the next breath, though, she says she "gets a complete ego boost" when she overhears people discussing her stories on the bus or elsewhere, and is "pretty much resigned to the fact that journalism is the only career" for her. In Detroit, a reporter is irritated by incompetence at her paper. "An editor recently asked me to FOIA some information from a private company," she says. "I had to explain why it could not be done." She feels she has to "babysit" her copy through the process, even if it means staying late, to prevent mistakes from slipping in. Still, she praises those same editors for being "fairly courageous" and giving her the freedom to write what she wants. And while she says she "comes to work happy" every day, she doubts she will be in journalism five years from now. Both reporters say that they deal with their frustrations by focusing on their own development, and worry less about the rest of the newsroom.

The idea of pride in one's work came up often in conversations for this article. No matter what your morale, "you don't want something in the paper with your name on it that isn't any good," says Keith Lawrence, a thirty-year veteran of the Messenger-Inquirer in Owensboro, Kentucky.

How do you keep such disparate souls challenged? How do you give enough guidance to one reporter and enough independence to another? Some editors try all manner of things to buoy morale, from in-house yoga and massage to free sweets and, in one case, a surprise newsroom visit from a gang of Elvis impersonators. "I want to make it a place that's fun to work," says Jim Witt, executive editor of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, who organized the Elvis bit in 1997. "Just paying attention to people is very important. The first thing I do each day is go through the paper and find four or five things we did right, and send e-mails to the people involved. We're always so focused on what we do wrong." Such gimmicks don't impress everyone, and no one is claiming they solve serious morale problems. But what's behind them is a leadership issue too often overlooked in the newsroom hurly-burly: the very human desire for recognition.

LEADERSHIP

Whenever there is a serious morale problem at a newspaper, says Sharon Peters, "it is almost always a leadership thing that is gruesome beyond words." Pete Meyer talks of an editor who hired him to solve his newsroom's "productivity problem." Turns out, Meyer says, that the editor was something of a dictator. His way was the only way, and his reporters were quietly rebelling. Another time, Meyer encountered a group of top editors so cutthroat with one another that the newsroom "was just standing around watching the battle." In that case, some of the editors had to leave before things improved.
Tinkering with time-honored newsroom processes is sure to cause anxiety in the ranks. When Julia Wallace, the new managing editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, set out to help a good paper get better, she began by talking to the staff. Actually, she began by listening to the staff. "It started with them saying 'We want to get better,' but not having a clear idea what that meant," says Wallace, who arrived in Atlanta in January from The Arizona Republic. Now, after months of talking and listening and thinking, what that means is much clearer. Layers of editors have been thinned, beats re-thought, and 20 percent of the staff is applying for 108 new or newly configured newsroom positions. There have been no layoffs, and none are currently planned.

So far, Wallace's approach seems to have been met with cautious optimism by many in the newsroom. "I've been asking people how they feel about it," says Jane Hansen, a nineteen-year veteran of the Journal-Constitution, "and the thing I'm hearing again and again is that they think some good could come of it. There is some nervousness, but also a general feeling they are headed in the right direction." Over the years, Hansen says, most morale problems at the paper came down to reporters feeling like they have no say in their work. "Julia talks about stories bubbling up, so I think that is changing."

"I don't want to sound pollyannaish about this," says Wallace of her bottom-up strategy. "There is clearly some nervousness. But the most important thing is to listen. Communication is key, but it starts with listening."

Communication fosters a sense of collaboration, of a shared mission, and this is clearly an ingredient in good newsroom morale. But there is no single approach. Newsrooms are a stew of the tough and the insecure, the skeptical and the egomaniacal, the driven and the anxious. Reporters want freedom to define their job, but they also want guidance.

THE INSULAR
NEWSROOM

Management training for newsroom editors has been mostly an afterthought. Editors, who typically rise from the reporting ranks, learn to manage by being managed. As a result, newsrooms are insular places where new ideas -- especially those that sound like something from a self-help book -- are met with skepticism if not outright derision.

In the early 1990s, newsrooms began to open a bit. The first wave of Generation X journalists -- the twenty-three to thirty-eight-year-olds who currently make up 80 percent of all new hires in any industry -- joined the field, with their less patient, more transient view of the job. The Internet changed the competitive landscape, too, and the drumbeat for operational efficiency quickened as newspapers became part of sprawling media companies. "All these things came together at a time when newsroom leaders began to realize that maybe they don't have all the answers to what ails their newsrooms," says Sharon Peters.

When The Oregonian dismantled its traditional city desk structure in 1994 and replaced it with a team-based newsroom, Pete Meyer was hired to help guide the transition. The new structure upset career paths for many in the newsroom. "When you flatten the hierarchy, some people feel, well, flattened," says Therese Bottomly, who has spent all eighteen of her newsroom years at The Oregonian. And even with Meyer's studied guidance, Peter Bhatia, the Oregonian's executive editor, says more time should have been spent helping editors adjust. "We were asking them to be coaches, teachers, and mentors as well as editors."

Bottomly's job, like many others in the newsroom, changed radically. She had been the assigning editor on the old city desk, where she had twenty-two reporters in her charge. Under the new system, she became a team leader overseeing six health and science reporters. "The frustration I felt was in having gone from a position where I had an impact on the paper as a whole to just a single team," she says. But the journey from team leader to her current job, managing editor for news, taught Bottomly something about another leadership issue: empowerment. Rather than always solving the problems of reporters who come to her to vent, Bottomly says she had to learn to simply listen at times, or help them solve their own problems. "They need to leave my office feeling smarter, stronger, and more able."

Much of newsroom morale is distilled in the relationship between a reporter and his immediate editor. So much can be overcome when it clicks, and so much is undone when it misses. "I don't think you can do any one thing to address morale," says Gabrielle Crist, a reporter at The Forth Worth Star-Telegram. "It is basically the reporter and the editor." A reporter in Alabama, who is otherwise satisfied with her job, says the one thing she would change is her immediate editor, who she says is too dictatorial. "He has his own ideas about what makes a good story and tends to be very heavy-handed about assignments."

Like any human relationship, what makes the editor-reporter thing go varies. But mutual trust and respect, and a belief that you both are committed to producing the best stories possible, are good places to start. Listen to Jane Hansen of the Journal-Constitution talk about her favorite editor: "He was brilliant. He listened. He was always available. He didn't rewrite. Rather he would say something like, 'Well, you could say it this way and that would be fine, but it might sound better to say it this way.' I had the final say, but I don't ever recall not taking his advice. He made me want to do my best for him."

LIMITATIONS

Even when editors are well-trained and seasoned, when reporters are motivated, and the paper's watchdog credentials are solid from publisher to obit writer, morale will not have Stepford-wife consistency. As the labor department description on page 45 says, journalism is a hectic, demanding job. We have to, as Colette suggests, do our work despite the stress. "In this job," says Jane Hansen, "you have to set aside whatever else is going on in your life, whether it is something in the newsroom or something personal, and perform when the job demands it." But as Paul J. Rosch, president of the American Institute of Stress, said in 1998 when asked about managing newsroom stress: "There are some stresses you can do something about, and some that are beyond your control. It's important to know the difference."

So morale matters, as you will see in the following stories. But it is never a simple matter.
 
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Brent Cunningham is CJR's managing editor.