A
WALK THROUGH THE NEWSROOM
Drawings by MK Mabry
"Happy newsrooms are all alike," Tolstoy didn't write.
If he had written such a thing, Tolstoy would have been wrong.
Journalists are both satisfied and unsatisfied on the job in countless
interesting ways. The factors can be highly individual. They may
be related, for example, to the specific nature of our work or
to the status of our ethnic group or to chemistry and personality.
But there are larger themes that tend to affect the morale of
all of us in journalism. In the articles that follow, we zero
in on situations where those larger themes seem to matter. Consider
these pages a walk through the American newsroom.
Feedback
Name Withheld, Job
Security Aaron Moore, Mission
Susan Schwartz, Leadership
Lauren Janis, Appreciation
Vince
Rinehart, Freedom
Tom Grant, Solidarity
Ariel Hart, Ownership
Tim
Kingston, Pressure
Department of Labor, Fundamentals
John Giuffo, Judgment
Sarah DiLorenzo, Priorities
Joshua Lipton, Respect
Name Withheld,
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FEEDBACK
A young
reporter, eager to learn, gets only a meager diet of virtual editing
from a city desk less than five feet away
It's
been one year, one month, and eleven days since I started working
for this mid-sized newspaper. In that time I have talked to my
editors for what feels like a total of five minutes.
I've written roughly 150 stories. But whether I'm covering a homicide
or localizing a national news piece I am on my own. My editors
almost never make suggestions or even remark on a story once it
is filed. In fact, they rarely talk to me at all. Communication
here is as poor as a cell-phone connection in the middle of a
national park.
The city desk is only four-and-a-half feet from my own work area.
I am within earshot of all noteworthy conversations and if I crane
my neck over a chest-high partition I can just about read the
words on my editor's computer screen. But newsroom geography is
where our close relationship ends. My editors choose to avoid
trekking the vast four-and-a-half feet and instead communicate
with me electronically. Assignments, questions, and the rare comment
are almost all done via e-mail.
I can actually watch my editor read a message that I've sent seconds
earlier and predict the exact moment when I'll get a reply. I
can't help thinking that an actual discussion might be more productive,
but it never seems to happen.
When I arrive in the morning, I log on, check the assignment list
and approach the editors if I see my name next to a slug. Our
conversations rarely last more than thirty-five seconds.
Although I always make an attempt or two, when I am not writing
for the following day, the chances that we won't speak at all
are pretty good. Messages flash on my monitor routinely. I'll
craft a three- or four-paragraph story pitch and get an e-mail
back that reads "sounds good." No input, no thoughts,
no suggestions.
Even when I'm working on a front-page story, sometimes the fleeting
thirty-five seconds in the morning is all I get. Nobody asks for
a budget note and, until I volunteer the information, nobody seems
interested in an update.
I have had three sit-down discussions with my editor this year,
and they have helped me flesh out ideas and pressed me to write
better, more poignant stories. His suggestions are perceptive
and his advice is frank. But as soon as we leave that round table
and take our positions in the newsroom, he becomes the same unapproachable,
removed character.
In this newsroom only a self-starter can excel. I'm doing just
fine, but I can't help thinking that even a little more discussion
would improve our product. As a young reporter, I want to feel
comfortable asking questions and talking to a seasoned journalist
about the direction of a story.
I am not asking for someone to hold my hand and coddle me through
every story. But a two-minute conversation? That would be nice.
-- Name withheld
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JOB
SECURITY
Two newspaper companies, one public, one private, share a revolutionary
idea:
layoffs make poor business sense
Maintaining
employee morale in newsrooms across the country becomes tougher
and tougher as corporate officers choose layoffs as the best option
to offset profit losses. According to IWantMedia.com, a media
news Web site that tracks layoffs, about 100,000 workers in the
media industries have lost their jobs over the last fifteen months.
Even during the current economic decline, however, two companies
are finding other ways to reduce costs. Advance Publications'
Newhouse Newspapers (Staten Island Advance, The Patriot News in
Harrisburg, and Portland's Oregonian, among others) and the McClatchy
Company (Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Sacramento Bee, Anchorage
Daily News, and more) have pledged to avoid across-the-board cuts.
Most private and public media firms alike fear announcing such
an intention and then having to stand by it. (Advance is privately
owned, while McClatchy is a public company.)
Donald E. Newhouse, president of Advance, says its policy dates
back several decades and reads specifically: "No non-represented,
full-time employees will be laid off due to economic conditions
or technological change, as long as the newspaper operates."
Gary Pruitt, McClatchy's president and c.e.o., says it would take
"an economic cataclysm" before the chain would resort
to all-out layoffs. Employees are less distracted, he claims,
since "the specter of layoffs is not haunting the newsroom.
We do this not because we're patsies. Job cuts just do not make
good business sense. They're expensive in terms of severance pay,
morale, and the momentum of improving the newspaper." They're
also costly because "you lose that expertise, then during
the recovery you have to rehire and retrain employees in all departments."
Bob Ludwig, publisher of The Huntsville Times, one of Newhouse's
twenty-eight dailies, says the no-layoff policy "has a definite
impact on morale. Our employees say it's one of the main reasons
The Huntsville Times is a great place to work."
Frank Parisi, senior vice president at the Minneapolis Star Tribune,
says he gets similar feedback from employees. "Our workers
respect and admire our decision to stay away from job cuts,"
he says. Parisi wonders about the working atmosphere at the Star
Tribune's crosstown rival, the Knight Ridder-owned St. Paul Pioneer
Press, which plans to reduce its staff by 10 percent.
Both Newhouse and McClatchy have found other methods to cut costs:
reducing the use of consultants and temporary workers; limiting
business travel; delaying the filling of vacant positions.
The media industry is cyclical, says McClatchy's Pruitt, and that's
why it's imperative for a newspaper to stay efficient during the
good times in order to make it through down periods.
-- Aaron J. Moore
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MISSION
From publisher to reporter, the primacy of the journalism guides
a small daily,
even when it takes on one of its own
My
newspaper, the Press Enterprise in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, is
small -- 21,000 circulation -- but aggressive. In the five years
I've worked here, we've gone to off-campus parties to write about
underage drinking at our local college, exposed corruption in
a local economic development group, and traced an embezzler's
criminal past all the way to Alaska. I've never seen our paper
back down from a story. Not when advertisers threatened to cancel;
not when VIPs called the publisher to complain; not even when
the officials of a major medical center banned the sale of our
paper on their premises because we had investigated their finances.
Last year, my fellow reporter Michael Lester investigated the
local United Way and found that it was spending a high percentage
of its donations on administrative overhead. The United Way board,
of course, is made up of our community's heavy-hitters, among
them the Press Enterprise's corporate treasurer, who was serving
as president of the board when the story broke. He was anything
but happy that we were doing the story. The investigation strained
relations between the newsroom and the treasurer's office. In
the middle was our publisher, Paul R. "Pete" Eyerly
III.
In the end, final say on the stories was left in the hands of
the newsroom. No one in corporate management edited or even read
them before they ran. Our treasurer was treated like any other
source; his side was included. When the articles won first place
in a state newspaper contest, the publisher sent Mike a handwritten
note of congratulations.
This sense that we all have the same mission, from the publisher
on down, is one of the reasons I've stayed at the paper five years.
That's not to say that everything is perfect. We could use computers
with more memory, modern software, and better Internet access.
Recently, when a young boy was shot to death, I had to repeatedly
leave the scene to update my editor from a pay phone, while the
reporter from a competing paper used his cell phone to chat with
his office from the doorstep of the victim's house. Still, we
found and interviewed the boy's stricken family at least a full
day before the competition. What we lack in technology, we make
up for in old-fashioned bootleather and a good network of tipsters.
Another reason I've stayed is my co-workers. We like each other.
We go kayaking and rafting together. We car pool to baseball games
and bookstores in Philadelphia and New York. We hold ugly-tie
contests on election night. About every other month, we all gather
at one of the reporters' homes after work, on our own time, for
story critiques and discussions of writing, led by editor Jim
Sachetti and managing editor Dean Kashner. The publisher buys
the pizza, we supply the beer, and we spend hours debating the
best way to gather and write the news. The sessions, which were
started at the request of reporters, are held whenever one of
us feels it's time. They're always attended by more than half
the staff.
I think the fact that we are a family-owned newspaper helps foster
our paper's spirit. Our publisher's family has operated the newspaper
for three generations. When I first arrived, it looked as if his
sons, Paul and Brandon, were going to break the tradition. Brandon
was working in classifieds for The Arizona Republic, Paul as an
assistant district attorney in San Francisco. But within the last
four years, they've both returned home, bought houses, and are
learning the business, so it looks as if our future is assured
for at least another generation.
-- Susan Schwartz
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LEADERSHIP
A New Age guru failed to reinvent this newsroom; now a throwback
has the place humming again
It
is a Tuesday night at the Missouri Bar & Grille, the dive
bar that sits across the street from the offices of the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch. In March 2000, reporters had gathered here with
their publisher, Terry Egger, to down some beers, bitch, moan,
gripe, and groan about their controversial editor, Cole Campbell,
and the sorry state of the paper. "The Mutinous Crew,"
as the senior writer Harry Levins calls them, was fed up and said
so. Weeks later, Campbell announced that he was leaving the paper.
On this Tuesday night, three members of the infamous crew -- Levins,
columnist Bill McClellan, and feature writer John McGuire -- reconvened
at the very same table to drink pitchers of Bud Light, recall
the darker days of the Campbell regime, and talk about how the
Post-Dispatch is doing now that its new editor, Ellen Soeteber,
has reached her six-month anniversary.
When Campbell arrived at the paper in October 1996, he was hailed
as a visionary with progressive ideas. As it turned out, he seemed
to care more about philosophy than daily news. He embraced "public
journalism" and believed that newspapers should set the agenda
for the community. Campbell turned the Sunday news analysis section
into an experiment called "Imagine St. Louis" that focused
on one community issue a week, regardless of timeliness or newsworthiness.
According to the mutineers, he rarely went to news meetings, hardly
communicated with the staff, and didn't seem to read the paper.
He did away with the city desk and assistant city editors, creating
teams with names like Thriving Community. "They were made-up
titles," says McClellan. "It felt like the Wizard of
Oz. The city editor became the 'In-house Knowledge Consultant.'"
While newsrooms are notorious for resisting innovation, Campbell's
changes seemed over the top. Stories fell through the cracks.
No one knew who covered what. What did Thriving Community mean,
anyway? Breaking news stories were missed. Aggressiveness and
enthusiasm waned. "There's always a degree of bitching in
a newsroom," says McClellan. "But morale got worse and
worse. It was like the last days of the shah. We knew the revolution
was coming."
One day in April, it came. Campbell was gone. The staff was stunned.
When the announcement was made, no one said anything. In a room
full of people trained to ask questions, no one did. "It
was like when the cold war was over and you didn't quite realize
it," Levins says.
Nine months later, the Post Dispatch hired Ellen Soeteber as editor
-- the first woman to hold the position, the sixth editor in the
paper's 123 years, and only the third editor not to be named Joseph
Pulitzer. She had been the managing editor of the South Florida
Sun-Sentinel, and before that, metro editor of the Chicago Tribune.
She grew up in East St. Louis. She is talented, aggressive, and
no-nonsense.
Soeteber, fifty-one, has green eyes and an easy laugh. And she's
serious about her news. She dived into her new job immediately.
She met with the staff and listened to them. She reorganized the
newsroom and put seven assistant managing editors in place. And
as of July 8, she got rid of "Imagine St. Louis" and
replaced it with "NewsWatch," a section that analyzes
timely news issues.
"I'm an editor who never thinks we can be good enough,"
Soeteber says. "I want to be the definitive source of news
in the St. Louis area. I want to be timely, fair, balanced, and
enterprising. We're creating a lot of energy. We're going to be
a real newspaper again. Boom, boom, boom, and get those stories."
For the staff, that's a relief. "She has a sense of urgency,"
says Mandy Davis, assistant metro editor. "She talks to editors,
goes to news meetings, and she reads the damn paper. She's a newswoman.
Ellen's arrival has done nothing but improve things."
Of course, Soeteber's editorship is still new. There are those
who disagree with some of her decisions, and there are lingering
bruises from her reorganization of the newsroom. "Can I say
that people here are clapping and cheering every day now?"
Levins says. "No, we're still in the middle of it. But, God
knows she's competent. And everyone wants her to succeed. If she
succeeds, we succeed."
-- Lauren Janis
------------------------------------------------------------------------
APPRECIATION
Publisher, editor, m.e., city desk, reporters, photographers,
op-ed . . . miss anyone?
Recently,
a memo from The Washington Post's management praised a series
that appeared in the newspaper. It lauded the staff members who
wrote and reported the stories, the person who designed the pages,
the top editors who guided and shaped the work -- but not the
copy editors. I hasten to add that the writer of the memo was
truly contrite when that fact was brought to his attention. The
oversight was not hostility -- just a lack of sensitivity.
Such slights do matter. They build up over time and create a feeling
among copy editors that no one's paying attention to us, that
no one understands what we do. Frequently, you hear about your
work only when a terrible mistake or misinterpretation gets into
the paper.
Some papers give copy editors small bonuses for good work. Others
have a monthly contest for the best headline; the winner gets
a gift certificate to a restaurant. A lot of the positive feedback
that comes our way is from other copy editors. It's not enough.
I think it's an issue everywhere -- top managers at newspapers
don't seem to remember that just a small word goes a long way.
Not long ago, the Post Company decided, for economic reasons,
to close the cafeteria at 6 p.m. Copy editors felt it was a slap
in the face. That subsidized benefit is now available only to
people who work in the daytime. Copy editors work at night.
-- Vince Rinehart, interviewed by Ariel Hart.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FREEDOM
A former TV reporter learns respect for the pierced and tattooed
alt-weekly crowd -- and rediscovers journalistic joy
Some
newsrooms are so sanctimonious you'd think their staff meetings
convened on the head of a pin. At one time, I wanted to join that
kind of staff and get the big "J" tattooed on my ass.
But now I work at The Local Planet, Spokane's alternative weekly.
This week's staff meeting gathered around two piles of nachos
and eighteen single-servings of airline booze. I think I was the
only writer wearing the same hair color I was born with.
The conversation centered on possible slogans for our latest promotional
giveaways -- condoms. How about "Get It Every Thursday,"
someone suggested. Or: " We've Got You Covered." Here
I am, old enough that some of the staff could call me Grandpa,
wearing the only tie, trading penis jokes with a bunch of geeks
who think it's swank to use a prophylactic for marketing a newspaper.
And I'm thinking: this is journalism heaven.
Two months ago, I was the investigative reporter at the ABC affiliate
here, KXLY-TV. Most of our news coverage was like covering the
River Styx: more murder, more mayhem, another numbing excursion
to the city of the dead. I wasn't always allowed to do the stories
that I thought we should do. When I went to my news bosses asking
to do a story on conniving car dealers, the answer was, "No,
they're advertisers." Maybe something on drunken and drug-dealing
dentists? No, they'll sue. Around the time I left, the news director
stood up and berated the entire newsroom. If ratings didn't improve,
he said, heads would roll. Apparently mixing crime with crowd-pleasers
such as bee-sting therapy and household makeovers had been a failure.
That's when I bailed. But TV doesn't leave a reporter with many
choices, primarily because of those no-compete clauses in our
contracts. Most TV guys leave town. I didn't want to. An old editor
once told me: "You're only as good as your sources."
How good would I be if I left all my sources behind?
Then the owners at The Local Planet offered some things that I
hadn't seen in journalism in a while, things like truth and courage.
"No sacred cows," they said.
"Freedom," they said.
I've worn a grin ever since. Sometimes I feel like a bungee jumper
on the way down, bearing his teeth in terrified joy, wondering
if I'll feel my face hit the ground before the strain of the cord
at my ankles. After all, my little alt-weekly has yet to turn
a profit.
Still, I've rediscovered the joy that bound me to journalism twenty-four
years ago. In Big-J days, I might have likened journalism to a
religious calling, and suggested that I was on a mission. But
I really got into this business because it was the most fun I'd
had in my life.
Oh, yeah, I get to tell the truth about some people, especially
the comfortable. I get to pursue justice, especially for the little
guys. Here at The Local Planet, I've already suggested stories
about two major advertisers; my bosses just shrugged and said,
"Okay." And that's fun. It's fun to go to a rave and
talk to teenagers all night about drugs and happy hardcore. It's
fun to smell the sweat of a gym full of Native American pugilists.
And it's truly fun to write about secret documents being shredded
at city hall and to badger social workers into helping a poor
woman escape from her Trailer of Death. Best of all, that's what
I did just this week.
That's real journalism. A lot of Big-J journalists may look down
their noses at the pierced and tattooed writers at places like
The Local Planet (as I once did), but the fact is these are the
journalists living close to their sources. These are the journalists
who haven't replaced their ideals with cynicism. These are the
journalists who give a damn about more than face time and ratings.
And they're having a hell of a lot of fun doing it. I think I'll
ditch the tie.
-- Tom Grant
------------------------------------------------------------------------
SOLIDARITY
Tough new owners, an unratified contract, a byline strike --
Time to stick together?
When
Ted Cohen took up journalism at the Portland Press-Herald in 1975,
he joined the Portland Newspaper Guild. He said the union at the
Maine daily created "great working conditions" for members,
giving them a feeling of solidarity that was almost as reassuring
as the material benefits from collective bargaining. Now fifty,
Cohen is still a reporter at the 75,000-circulation paper and
still pays his weekly dues, but things have changed. The family
that owned the Press-Herald since 1921 sold it to the Blethen
family's Seattle Times Company in 1998. The union contract expired
about the same time, and still hasn't been renewed; the Press-Herald's
last pay raise was in 1997. Minimum pay for a five-year reporter
is $41,390. Guild leaders called a byline strike in July. Relations
with management are now so "hateful and spiteful," Cohen
says, that he fears for the life of the paper if the union decides
to strike.
According to some of Cohen's colleagues, morale at the Press-Herald
would be even worse without the guild. "Maybe the bitterness
and hard feelings wouldn't be in the open, but they certainly
would still be there," says features reporter Joanne Lannin,
who is president of the local. "People would be left to their
own devices to deal with them."
Having the security to speak up -- and the leverage to make bosses
listen -- is
high on the list of the rewards of having a union, members say.
"We can have an open discussion about journalistic content
because we're protected," says Tess Nacelewicz, the paper's
education reporter and a shop steward.
The more tangible benefits of union membership impressed Nacelewicz
when she came to the Press-Herald from the much smaller nonunion
Lewiston Sun Journal eleven years ago. Her salary doubled. Suddenly
there was a predictable end to each work day. She'd be paid for
overtime. "A journalist is not a machine," she says.
"Having a union helps impose standards. This is an imperfect
world, and employers are not naturally generous."
The Press-Herald's managing editor, Eric Conrad, says the offer
on the table is fair. He thinks the conflict has resulted in "strained,"
not "bitter," feelings on both sides, but he doesn't
think unions are necessarily divisive. "You can run a great
newsroom, a newsroom that is a terrific place to work, at either
a union paper or a nonunion paper," said Conrad, who has
reported at both. "I predict a year from now this will all
be a bad memory."
Cohen is one guild member who questions his local's confrontational
strategy. He never participated in the byline strike, although
he appreciates the "sense of solidarity" that the guild
brings to the paper, and even though he thinks the new ownership
set off the current dispute and wants to break the sixty-four-year-old
guild. He and his colleagues might be better off right now, he
thinks, if the union wasn't there to "throw down the gauntlet"
so readily and rigidly whenever it's challenged. The downside
of having a union, he feels, may be the confrontational atmosphere
that solidarity inevitably brings.
His union president disagrees. "With threats of layoffs,
and with newspapers so worried about profit margins, I think people
benefit from those protections," says Joanne Lannin. "The
more you're seen as a number and less as an individual, the more
you need the protection a union provides."
-- Ariel Hart
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OWNERSHIP
From freewheeling iconoclast to corporate cog, a weekly's staff
adjusts to life in an "alternative" chain
"We
call it black Friday, January fifth," says a former member
of the staff of the East Bay Express, which arguably has been
the Bay Area's most iconoclastic news weekly, but which has now
been sold to the New Times alternative-media chain. January fifth
was the day the sale was announced. "I had the feeling the
whole day that people wanted to cry," says an employee still
with the paper. "A lot of people wanted to quit." Over
the next few months, several did, and by many accounts, morale
is not much better now than it was in January. "I am really,
really depressed," says an employee who, like most Express
staff members interviewed, requested anonymity.
The problem? Sudden adjustment to a very different journalistic
and corporate culture. Think The Muppets meet The Borg.
Newsrooms generally don't like change, but in this case the culture
shock seems fairly dramatic. Before the sale it would have been
hard to find a paper more beloved by its staff than the Express.
To say there was "buy-in" by employees is an understatement.
"It was always your baby," says a staff member. "To
be melodramatic, now it feels like a factory." Everybody
who could write did so at the old Express: receptionists, distributors,
and production workers. "All of us were used to being part
of the process," says Terry Ryder, a former sales employee
who left the Express after the takeover. "Overnight we found
employees were not part of the process. We were just recipients
of instructions. And that was very shocking."
Journalistically, the old Express has covered the East Bay --
Berkeley, Richmond, Oakland, Alameda, San Leandro, and other communities
-- with intensity and a quirky focus. Express writers would pen
magnum opuses -- 6,000 to 12,000-words or more -- on topics from
foster care to Laotian teenage environmental activists to the
scene at the Berkeley Needle Exchange. The paper tended to pick
up on aspects of local activism well before they hit mainstream
media's radar. The Express also did something that few other papers
attempt, alternative or otherwise: coverage in detail of the livelihood
of ordinary people -- bridge and tunnel workers, vets, sewage
operators, and others -- often in the first person. Its opinionated
arts coverage engendered equally lively letters in response. On
the business side, a number of employees thought that 2000 had
been such a good year that the January 5 meeting had been called
to give them a pat on the back.
New Times rolled out a completely new design for the paper in
July, and employees fear that content changes will follow. Stories
are already shorter, and what some staff members fear is that
the Express will become a cookie-cutter version of other New Times
papers -- as many of them believe happened to San Francisco's
S.F. Weekly, purchased by New Times in 1995.
John Raeside, founding editor of the Express and the man who sold
the paper to New Times, says he does not believe staff morale
is completely in the doldrums. New Times, he says, has tried to
"professionalize" the paper and given it additional
resources. But he does concede that "People are not having
the greatest time of their lives; we are in a tsunami of change."
-- Tim Kingston
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PRESSURE
The following is a description of the reporter's job from the
2000-2001 Occupational Outlook Handbook, a publication of the
Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The
work of news analysts, reporters, and correspondents is usually
hectic. They are under great pressure to meet deadlines and broadcasts
are sometimes made with little time for preparation. Some work
in comfortable, private offices; others work in large rooms filled
with the sound of keyboards and computer printers, as well as
the voices of other reporters. Curious onlookers, police, or other
emergency workers can distract those reporting from the scene
for radio and television. Covering wars, political uprisings,
fires, floods, and similar events is often dangerous.
Work hours vary. Reporters on morning papers often work from late
afternoon until midnight. Those on afternoon or evening papers
generally work from early morning until early afternoon or mid
afternoon. Radio and television reporters are usually assigned
to a day or evening shift. Magazine reporters usually work during
the day.
Reporters sometimes have to change their work hours to meet a
deadline, or to follow late-breaking developments. Their work
demands long hours, irregular schedules, and some travel. Many
stations and networks are on the air twenty-four hours a day,
so newscasters can expect to work unusual hours.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FUNDAMENTALS
A new approach to reporting and writing, implemented with little
newsroom input, has reporters reeling -- but also seeing opportunities
Depending
on whom you ask at the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, these are
either days of rebirth and reaffirmation or retrenchment and retreat.
The one thing everyone agrees on is that The Plan has changed
the fundamentals of journalism at the Star.
Implemented in April 2000, The Plan is an attempt to increase
circulation by making the Pulitzer Inc. paper more reader-friendly.
Bigger graphics, increased use of photos, local angles, and get-to-the-point,
easier-to-read stories are among its hallmarks.
Some in the newsroom claim that the new, redesigned Star is lighter
on hard news and doesn't allow for necessary depth. "Reporters
feel they're not given the time to do the story justice,"
says Carmen Duarte, who covers ethnic communities. "It makes
us wonder, 'What's our job? Aren't we here to tell stories and
give readers more than ten to twenty inches?'" Reporters
also tend to feel the news hole has shrunk, although managing
editor Bobbie Jo Buel and assistant managing editor Dennis Joyce
insist that it has actually increased.
"People should be writing shorter and to-the-point,"
Buel says. "Study after study shows that very few readers
stick with the story after the jump." She adds that while
there is definitely more pressure on reporters to get in and get
out of stories, The Plan opens up an opportunity for more enterprise.
Reporters are expected to write one enterprise story a week -
stories from the reporter's beat, but with wide appeal.
Some find that push for stories with broader appeal, what Star
staffers refer to with a touch of derision as "sweep,"
a challenging concept. "When veteran reporters started working
under this news plan, we tossed story ideas out and they were
constantly killed," Duarte says. "It's as though we
didn't know our jobs anymore." Tom Stauffer, new on the science
beat, says he's had problems injecting some stories with "sweep."
For example, "There was amazing University of Arizona stuff
happening here with neutrinos," he says. "But neutrinos
are such a complex, specific story that a lot of people are just
not going to get past the first graf."
Part of the newsroom's frustration with The Plan may stem from
the manner in which it was designed. Employees feel they didn't
have much input. A newspaper consultant, Christine Urban of the
Massachusetts-based Urban and Associates, came to the Star in
1999 and began working with a handful of newsroom employees. After
nine months of readership surveys and page designs, they emerged
and the editors implemented their ideas. "The criticism that
there was not enough input by people is a valid criticism,"
says Buel. "If we had it to do over again, we probably would
have done it differently."
Still, some in the newsroom see elbow room inside the strictures
of The Plan. Tom Beal, an assistant city editor, worked with Duarte
on an award-winning series about Duarte's mother that touched
on broader local themes. It ran for thirty-six days last winter,
shortly before The Plan was implemented. "Mama's Santos:
An Arizona Life" was a huge hit in the newsroom as well as
with readers, and many see in its success a path around the limitations
of The Plan, and a way to convince management to allow longer,
more narrative stories into the paper. "I don't want to tell
you that everything is peaches and cream at the Arizona Daily
Star," Beal says, "But if you've got a good story, you
can usually convince people that it needs extra attention, time
and space."
A number of veterans, including city editor Ann-Eve Pedersen,
have left the paper because they found The Plan too constricting.
"I thought that it was a dumbing-down of the paper,"
says Pedersen. "It was a shift away from hard news to soft
features." But others are dug in. Duarte, for example, offers
this advice: "Don't give up. I know it can be difficult,
but hang in there. When you lose hope, that's the worst thing.
We should be in this business because we want to make a difference
in bettering the community. It sure isn't for the money."
-- John Giuffo
------------------------------------------------------------------------
JUDGMENT
Desire to vent among TV newsfolk is strong enough to support
three kvetch sites; amid the predictable rumors and backbiting
is evidence of real problems
TVSpy.com
is the gold standard in TV complaint Web sites. Both the first
and the best, the site traces its roots to a weekly report that
Don Fitzpatrick prepared every week for Ron Tindiglia, then vice
president for news at CBS; Fitzpatrick's "Rumorville USA"
was meant to keep his boss informed about all the dirt in one
of the dirtiest businesses.
A resource like "Rumorville" was not to be a secret
for long, though, and the newsletter's readership grew at such
a rapid pace that eventually TVSpy.com was created for distribution
in a new, less edgy version. The Web site also invites people
to post their résumés and look for jobs in its job
bank. The most interesting feature, though, is its "Watercooler,"
where TV newspeople come to kvetch.
While TVSpy has refined its image to remain number one, FuckedTelevision
has filled its shoes as the underground site for newsies. FTV
works from the premise that "there are two kinds of people
in television, those that have been fucked and those that will
be fucked." Stations and news directors trashed on the site
are automatically entered into a contest, receiving "fucked
points" for all of their transgressions, until they have
enough points to land them in the "Fucked Hall of Fame."
NewsBlues.com takes a different approach, creating separate forums
for over 470 stations, allowing employees to discuss problems
at work.
For all the differences in presentation, however, the complaints
-- inadequate equipment, staff shortages, intolerable bosses,
and, of course, firings (the lifeblood of FTV, where "fucked"
usually means fired) -- are much the same from site to site. Among
the bitterest complaints, perhaps, are those rooted in what employees
see as management's wrongheadedness. The replacement of veteran
journalists with young beginners draws particular fire.
"I know how the game is played," says one TVSpy poster.
"Younger = cheaper. But, I am shocked at news directors in
top forty markets who are hiring these green reporters."
On NewsBlues, a disaffected contributor from WNGX in Atlanta says,
"The future of this station is anybody's guess but a call
letter change is for sure as WGNX has come to signify for Meredith
that We've Got No eXperience in this market." An employee
at KRON in San Francisco asks, "Will Young, Inc. hire enough
staff to cover the additional newscasts? And will that staff possess
college diplomas with dry ink?" Of a news director at WSIL
in southern Illinois, FTV reports, "We got a few e-mails
on this guy and they were kind of nasty. They did say that this
twenty-something news director does not know his ass from a hole
in the ground."
To many, the hiring of younger reporters is only part of the push
to spice up "the look" of TV news. As one veteran laments
on TVSpy, "I too love TV. But, when the fixes to a station's
woes are more and sexier promos, new music and a set face-lift,
how else can we feel? Will TV news ever be journalism again?"
Asks one reporter, "How many times can you cover the same
fire/shooting/car accident stories before you realize how insignificant
your contribution is? Local news is so irrelevant." Another
agrees: "It was cool at first but it has faded over time.
The overnights, weekends, covering the shooting/car wreck/fire
of the day. After a while, it gets old."
Some believe it's getting old for viewers, too. "Ship is
sinking, folks," one poster warns.
Meanwhile, they keep coming back to these sites to find out what
veteran was fired yesterday, what outrageous tease will lead into
yet another fire story tomorrow, and whether it's time to look
at the classifieds today.
-- Sarah DiLorenzo
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PRIORITIES
Reporters struggle to reconcile their hard-charging past with
a reader-friendly
future mandated by a new owner
When
Gannett bought the Asbury Park Press in 1997 from the Plangere
and Lass families, some belt-tightening was expected. "Personally,
I didn't feel a sense of resignation immediately," says Wally
Patrick, a former Press copy editor who was transferred by Gannett
in February 2000 to the Home News Tribune in East Brunswick, New
Jersey. "I thought the shake-up would benefit the company."
Since then, though, some former and current Press employees say
that the paper has lost its edge; that hard news and ambitious
projects have been supplanted by life-style coverage and news-you-can-use,
and that newsroom morale has suffered as a result. "Before,
there was a creative type of discontent," says Steve Giegerich,
a seventeen-year veteran of the Press. "We fought to make
the paper better. Now, there's a sense of resignation here."
Another reporter, who, like many interviewed for this story, preferred
anonymity, says: "Morale is destroyed."
W. Raymond Ollwerther, executive editor of the southern New Jersey
daily, dismisses the notion that his paper has gone soft. "We
have not substituted, we have added," he says of the effort
to make the paper more reader-friendly. Last year, the Press won
a general excellence award from the New Jersey Press Association,
he points out, and this year it won the Rutgers/CIT award for
financial reporting. And indeed, the paper still produces serious
work, including a recent sixty-part series on education trends.
But clearly, the Press's focus has changed with the ownership.
"We find that readers today are looking for something beyond
local news coverage," Ollwerther says. "They want more
information about their life styles." In addition to pets,
the Press now has sections on teens, fishing and boating, and
working women, and has expanded its coverage of high school sports.
Judging by circulation numbers, the new focus has helped. Since
1997, daily circulation has grown from 154,055 to 158,624.
The paper's staff, meanwhile, is about 10 percent smaller than
before Gannett bought it. Under family management, the Press was
scrappy and ambitious. When Rwanda erupted in 1994, the paper
dispatched a photographer to the killing fields. When reporters
uncovered a scheme to defraud mortgage companies in New Jersey,
management assigned a team of reporters and editors to the project.
The project, called "House of Cards," earned a host
of national journalism awards in 1998. "We were trying to
move to the next level," says Giegerich.
Under Gannett, priorities changed. The "House of Cards"
project was scaled back, travel was cut, beats were merged, and
the Press stopped sending a reporter to an annual hurricane coverage
conference in Washington, D.C. Before Gannett, the Press had a
reputation for aggressive coverage of state government, and maintained
its own bureau in Trenton. Gannett eliminated the bureau and consolidated
statehouse coverage for all seven Gannett-owned papers in New
Jersey into a single office. "We had very little control
of the stories," says Susan DiSantis, a former state editor
at the Press.
The new Press has a pet section that includes photos of dogs and
cats that readers send in. The paper also began hosting a monthly
raffle for the community. Winners take home computers, and are
profiled by Press reporters. One reporter recently detailed his
adventures traveling in the Oscar Mayer wiener-mobile.
Andy Prendimano, the Press's art and photo director, sees both
sides in this newsroom debate. The decision to emphasize profits
and respond to market pressures by softening news coverage may
compromise the ideals of some in the newsroom, he says, but "What
good are you if you're out of business?"
-- Joshua Lipton
------------------------------------------------------------------------
RESPECT
Dear
Editor,
I saw you checking out my baggy eyes and dewlap when we met yesterday,
during your first tour of the newsroom, and something told me
I knew what you were thinking behind those veiled eyes.
I've gotten the same vibes from editors before. Some were quite
a bit younger than I; others hadn't seen fifty in a while. Regardless
of age, they sized me up in much the same way: obviously a reporter
of no great talent and little ambition. How else to account for
someone being a reporter for so many years?
Well, I would like to tell you why.
I stayed a reporter not because I couldn't move up the ladder,
i.e., become an editor, but because I was simply and purely in
love with the work. You know what? Every year, I got better at
it. Fresher, too. I know. That seems hard to believe. But it's
true.
Reporting and telling a story well is as challenging and satisfying
a pursuit as I could imagine. Despite the big frustrations and
little indignities that came with the job, I couldn't think of
anything I'd rather be paid to do. A good reporter is always learning,
thinking, reacting, judging, refining.
What is more interesting than chasing the truth, or getting as
close as one can?
What is more complex and unpredictable than the interplay a reporter
has with sources and subjects, or more rewarding than winning
their trust? What is more important than being fair? Harder than
avoiding exploitation? More satisfying than exposing injustice?
More thrilling than the moment when the legwork pays off and the
pieces of the puzzle all come together?
Then, the most delicious part -- the opportunity to write, to
report, to describe, to inspire feelings, to transport readers
into realms that they'd otherwise never know.
Give this up? To edit others, "inspire young talent,"
shape a newspaper, drive it to the next level? Not on your life.
If you want to be good at your job, try inspiring old talent.
Respect my life experience and the reporting skills I've accumulated
through the years. Forgive my occasional eye-rolling or impertinence.
Don't be offended if I see the story before you do, or leap ahead
before checking in.
Don't just tell me what to do. Every writer needs an editor, and
I need you.
And next time a particularly choice assignment comes up, forget
Mr. Perky who, we both know, is just passing through, and Ms.
Up-N-Coming, who keeps walking past your office and trying to
catch your eye. Send it my way. I'm your person, grizzled head
and all.
-- Name withheld
