JOB VS. LIFE: THE NEW EQUATION

BY JANE EISNER

 

Not too long ago, I thought that the weightiest issue facing newsrooms in America was how to better balance work and home life in the frenetic, demanding milieu of daily journalism. A generation of newsmen and women was coming of age in a world unlike its predecessors -- a world where both spouses held jobs outside the home, where day care charged a dollar a nanosecond if you were late for pickup, where the juggling act of life invariably collided with the unpredictability of breaking news.

Those concerns still exist. But the conventional work/family dilemma has taken on a new cast at a time when newsrooms are shrinking and shuddering over the fall-off in readership and revenue.

The old question was: Is my job worth all this time away from home and family? The new question: Is my job worth it?

Butch Ward, former managing editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, saw the number of requests for reduced work weeks and short-term leaves increase significantly in recent years, and he has a theory about why. "The awareness that you don't have a life is much more acute when the work is less fulfilling," he observed. Butch said this during the Inquirer's recent summer of its discontent, when circulation losses, budget crises, and staff reductions had left us all dazed and, frankly, depressed. But I don't think this situation is unique to Philadelphia.

Our profession is suffering from a lack of confidence, a confusion about who we are and where we're going. We're caught in the middle of an unsettling transformation in the way news, opinion, and information is gathered and distributed. At the same time, corporate pressure for increased profit makes it harder to hold onto our journalistic resources and values. All this is bound to exacerbate tensions that already exist for a group of creative, somewhat hyperactive people obsessed with work and generally unable to stop working.

Let's be honest: there's something addictive about a newsroom, especially at night. The rush of deadline can be far more exhilarating than helping your kid with her history paper. There's a reason we hang around, call another source, fiddle with that headline, sift for gold. But work can also be like an insatiable lover, impossible to satisfy. And for many of us, those demands can lead to serious soul-searching.

That's what happened to me. For nearly twenty years at the Inquirer I raced forward, incredibly lucky that editors like Gene Roberts and Maxwell King gave me the chance to tackle jobs that no mother had held before. Since they didn't question my capability to manage two roles and three kids, neither did I. I became a foreign correspondent when my first child was still in diapers; editorial-page editor when her youngest sister was still in nursery school.
There's a book about working mothers called It's Not the Glass Ceiling, It's the Sticky Floor. Actually, it's both. Eventually, the race wore me down. And I'd written enough about the state of modern parenthood to know that in many ways, your children need you more as they age, not less.

At the same time, my face pressed against the glass, I was also frustrated by how tenaciously the newsroom hung onto its family-unfriendly ways. Case in point: when Maxwell King was editor, a six-member executive committee met weekly to discuss personnel and policy issues. Not only was I the only woman in the group, I was the only person with a spouse who worked outside the home. The guys at first didn't notice the message they were sending when the committee met regularly late into the evening, in full view of the newsroom: Want to join this club? Marry your job.

That changed. Yet in some ways, a newsroom is inherently family-unfriendly. Even the most enlightened leadership -- like that at the Inquirer -- cannot and should not tamper with the obligation to get the very latest news to the readers. There's a reason it took me three years to finally see one of my daughter's basketball games, and it wasn't that I was a bad mom. It's because I was trying to be a good editor.

Fortunately, I was able to come to peace with this and remain excited and challenged by daily journalism. Thanks to editor Robert J. Rosenthal, I left the editorial board in December 1999 and became a full-time columnist last year, with more control and flexibility. Now the only thing that gets in the way of my work is, well, me. That I can deal with.

And the newsroom has made progress. Several dozen staff members work part-time, men among them. Managers are more accommodating. (Technology helps.)
But there's a new challenge. Walk around my newsroom these days and you hear more people talk about doing something else than anyone can recall. It's more than idle chatter. It's the hum of disengagement.

When the rewards of the workplace are significant, we can rationalize the time away from home, the missed Little League game or band concert, the fact that we never see our neighbors and barely have time to water the plants. When the rewards diminish, the questioning becomes more insistent. Is this worth it? Am I sacrificing myself on the altar of a dying profession, before corporate gods who embrace an opposing set of values?

So we write a book, teach a class, or take up a new, engrossing hobby. In one way, this is a healthy response to a changing work environment, and not so bad for journalism, either. Most of us spend too much time in the newsroom, anyway. Out in the community, volunteering at church or school, mingling with different people, we pick up ideas and insights into our readers' lives that we otherwise would miss. There's way more we can do to strengthen our connections to the communities we serve.

Still, I worry that this disengagement may also hurt our competitive and ambitious spirit. This isn't a nine-to-five profession, and I hope it never becomes one. Newspaper management has to be flexible and creative enough to help journalists balance work and life. But we've also got to ensure that the psychic, financial, and civic rewards are sufficient to keep us all striving for excellence. At any time of day or night.
 
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Jane Eisner's column, "American Rhythms," runs in The Philadelphia Inquirer on Thursdays and Sundays.