* 1988: A young reporter arrives for her first day of work at the Concord, New Hampshire, Monitor. In the ensuing weeks, she finds that the newsroom increasingly resembles a combat zone: several reporters on the small staff have their arms wrapped in Ace bandages or held stiff by plastic braces. At times, some move about with their arms held out like sleepwalkers; others dash to the restroom periodically for warm-water wrist massages. What is going on around here? the reporter asks herself.

* 1990: During a long staff meeting at the San Jose Mercury News in northern California, a number of reporters fiddle with the laces of their wrist braces or annoy colleagues with the "zip, pop . . . zip, pop" of Velcro snaps. Missing is one veteran reporter who has recently undergone neck surgery -- an extreme remedy that one newsroom executive considers the result of years of typing notes with the phone receiver tucked between shoulder and ear.

* 1991: Reporters at the Los Angeles Times saddle up for a "chair derby" -- a noisy free-for-all in which normally serious journalists test-drive ergonomically correct chairs and other equipment. Nearby, several colleagues play with pneumatic height-adjustment buttons like kids who have just discovered a car's power windows.

These are snapshots of life in today's newsrooms -- workplaces in which one finds increasing numbers of employees who suffer from disabling hand, arm, neck, and shoulder disorders collectively known as Repetitive Strain Injury, or RSI (see "A Newsroom Hazard Called RSI," CJR, January/February 1987). Since 1987, RSI has ranked as the country's leading occupational illness. Two years ago the Department of Labor estimated that the number of cases of disorders associated with repeated trauma had climbed to 146,000 -- six times higher than the 1980 figure.

No one knows for certain how many of the afflicted are journalists, but some figures provide at least a rough outline of the extent of the problem. David J. Eisen, director of research and information for The Newspaper Guild, says that the guild has logged nearly 3,000 cases of RSI among employees in the Canadian and U.S. news industries, a figure he believes represents only a fraction of the total. Citing the need for more surveys, Eisen says, "RSI is like rice in a kettle of soup. It doesn't come to the surface until you've stirred the pot."

Eisen's claim that RSI is underreported is backed up by a study by the California Department of Health Services, which found that in California's high-tech Santa Clara County state occupational safety and health officials had reported seventy-one cases of carpal tunnel syndrome in 1987 -- the same year that health-care providers there reported treating nearly 4,000 cases of the same work-related form of RSI. Ironically, new policies that some newspapers have adopted to prevent RSI may discourage journalists from reporting their disorders.

Consider the example of the San Francisco Examiner, where a full 60 percent of the editorial and clerical staff responding to a guild survey reported symptoms of RSI. Early this year the paper decided that several employees whose doctors had determined they should work only part-time would be sent home on disability, which pays roughly one-third of a person's salary. One disgruntled editor said in a recent interview, "I have RSI and I don't know anyone [around here] who doesn't, but I'm certainly not going to tell management about it now. To me, the policy means that if they cripple you they can just throw you away." (The Examiner says it has no written RSI policy and instead evaluates employees with the disorder on a case-by-case basis. But Examiner reporter Carol Ann Lucas says, "The implied policy has had a hell of a chilling effect on people around here. Several people have told me they are afraid to report their problems for fear that they'll be targets of future layoffs.")

While underreporting of injuries remains a problem when attempting to determine just how widespread RSI is in the newspaper industry, the statistics at some major dailies are startling. At Newsday, 192 out of 812 editorial employees have filed workers compensation claims for RSI; at the Los Angeles Times, 317 of the newsroom's 1,200 employees suffer from the affliction. Meanwhile, The Associated Press, Newsday, Reuters, and The Fresno Bee, among others, have each had dozens of emloyees who suffer from RSI, some of whom have had to undergo surgery for nerve damage in the wrist.

With RSI on the rise, newspaper executives and medical employees who previously tended to dismiss sufferers' complaints as imaginary or neurotic are now scrambling to take preventive measures and remedial action. Noel Greenwood, senior editor of the Los Angeles Times, says that since 1986 the paper has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on RSI treatment and prevention. He recalls that "where we had attitude problems [in the mid-80s] was in our medical department. People being afflicted by this were some of our best people. Yet our medical staff back then thought it was a scam. One even called it 'mass hysteria.' But no one thinks that now. The problem is real, and it's in every newspaper's interest to deal with it now."

Other newspapers, plagued by lost workdays, mounting disability payments, and newly disabled employees, are resorting to a variety of measures. For most, the initial defense against RSI has been educating employees --about posture, rest breaks, and symptoms, and replacing too-high desks and early-model PCs with ergonomically sound equipment, including adjustable keyboards and chairs and hands-free phones. The American Newspaper Publishers Association, for its part, will send ergonomists -- workplace design specialists -- to member papers on request for a fee.

However, user-friendly equipment is not cheap. The Los Angeles Times and Newsday in New York have each spent more than $ 1.2 million retrofitting workstations, and the Times has created, at a cost of $ 15,000, a widely distributed documentary on RSI. Newsday has even brought in a novel, voice-activated VDT -- which cost $ 9,000 -- that has given one severely afflicted reporter a new lease on her career (see sidebar, page 44); two more are on order.

While RSI-afflicted reporters at Newsday are impressed by the new device, some say that other ergonomic improvements are "mostly for show" and are not enough to prevent pain and muscle spasms. Editors and other managers at the paper, however, are confident that cutting down on time spent in front of VDT screens, combined with state-of-the-art workstations, will slow the spread of the malady.

"I would never suggest that we have pleased all the people. But the frustration [caused by new cases of RSI] is shared by everyone," says Stu Levin, manager of occupational risk and workers compensation at Newsday. "An RSI problem is the last thing this company wants. It makes all the sense in the world for Newsday to want to make this problem go away. All of our efforts are geared toward getting a handle on the problem."

Levin's defense of Newsday's policy on RSI is similar to that of some other newspaper executives. "Look, this is not the best time to be asking for hundreds of thousands of dollars for new equipment," says John Epperheimer, who until recently was chairman of a newsroom ergonomics task force at the San Jose Mercury News, where at last count 15 percent of the paper's newsroom staff were afflicted with RSI. "Yet the publisher took the request to [Knight-Ridder] management and fought for it." The new equipment, together with recommended breaks, has led to a drop in reported injuries, he says.

Expensive equipment alone, however, is no silver bullet against RSI. At Reuters, for example, where some 30 out of 150 reporters are afflicted with RSI ailments, some reporters contend that the relentless work pace of the wire service significantly contributes to their problems. Andrew Nibley, whose title at the wire service is editor America, says that, to lighten the load on the financial news desk, where the problem has been particularly severe, he has issued an "edict," cutting down on the length of stories.

At smaller news organizations, which are frequently understaffed and where editors often lack the authority to increase newsroom staff, management is more likely to take a hard-line attitude towards reporters with RSI. Some editors are sympathetic -- Pat Baden, formerly of the Roanoke Times and World News, who developed severe tendonitis in 1989, found her employers "extremely supportive" -- but many reporters at other papers say they are being pressured to work despite increasing pain.

Constance Hale, who developed carpal tunnel syndrone and severe tendonitis at the small Gilroy, California, Dispatch, criticizes "the boot-camp mentality typical of the small paper -- the idea that this is a training ground and should work nine or ten or twelve hours a day." Hale, who points out that three of the paper's five metro reporters recently developed RSI (she was one of the three), attributes this in part to ergonomic problems. She says that a too-high keyboard made typing painful, but that, despite repeated request for a better chair and a phone headset, she was not given them. "If a small paper can't afford new equipment in the middle of a recession, I can understand that and respect it," she says. "But how about cutting us down to one story a day? It doesn't make sense to lose good reporters by treating them as if they're totally dispensable."

Since Hale left the paper, the Dispatch has installed improved equipment -- hand-me-downs from other papers in the McClatchy chain -- and has begun educating reporters on proper ergonomics, with brochures and seminars. The paper has found it more difficult to deal with the work load, however. "At a small paper, you work harder and you write more stories than at larger papers. I don't know how to get around that," says Mark Derry, executive editor of the Dispatch.

At some small newspapers, journalists have discovered that developing the affliction can cost them their job. That is what happened to Deborah Tager, a well-liked features editor at the Concord, New Hampshire, Monitor, who was fired in 1989 after developing tendonitis and taking two successive leaves of absence.

The dismissal led to a series of emotional organizing meetings in staffers' homes. A letter or protest was drafted and signed by about twenty members of the staff. "Everyone was shocked. They all felt as if [the firing] could have happened to them," says one reporter.

Asked about Tager's firing, Monitor editor Mike Pride says, "We waited for some months [while Tager was out on leave], but we didn't know when she would come back. Her doctors couldn't give us that information, and finally we had to say, 'Listen, we've got to fill that job.' I know the staff was upset about it, but we couldn't keep loading the work on to other people."

Pride also says he was "dumbfounded" by the incidence of RSI at the Monitor. "We had worked in the same newsroom with the same equipment for ten years and not had a single complaint." As a small newspaper, he says, the Monitor didn't have the flexibilty to leave positions open indefinitely, "but we did develp a policy with the staff's help that gave an employee [with RSI] who left the first crack at any; job they were qualified for within a year of being terminated."

Most of thos interviewed said that they liked and respected their editors, but than an "overwork" ethic pervaded the workplace and contributed to stress and the problem of RSI. Some also said that they felt angry, even betrayed, by what they described as management's "dismissive" and "macho" attitude toward RSI. "There was a definite sense that if you complained, you were seen as someone who 'couldn't handle it,' as a wimp," says former Monitor copy editor Diane Loiselle. Another reporter recalls that, while working on a long series, she experienced "terrible stabbing pains" in her hands and told her editor, "My hands are really hurting; I'm to sure I'll be able to do it." His reply, she says, was, "Well, we'll have to have it by tomorrow."

Pride says that the workload at the Monitor is not very different from that of any other paper. And he denies the charge that the paper was unsympathetic to RSI-afflicted employees. "I know it's difficult to speak up and say, 'I'm sick' or 'I'm hurt,' but when people said that, we listened and worked with them. I feel really badly about all the people who've been hurt by this."

As part of the Monitor's campaign against RSI, he says, three years ago the paper started installing new chairs and fully adjustable keyboards to replace the too-high tables, hired an occupational health specialist to check over workstation ergonomics and give advice on exercises, and distributed free headsets to those who wanted them. Only one employee has developed a serious case of RSI since that time, so Pride feels hopeful the program is working. "But no one is pretending to think that just because the problem has abated it won't come up again."

The twin questions of who is responsible for causing RSI and who will pay for its effects on a person's health and career and income are increasingly the subject of litigation. More than twenty New York wire service and newspaper employees, including reporters at American Banker, Newsday, and The Village Voice, have sued VDT manufacturer Atex Inc., since renamed Electronic Pre-Press Systems, a subsidiary of Eastman Kodak. (Workers compensation laws prohibit employees from suing their employers.) They claim that the company knew or should have known of RSI hazards, and that it failed to warn users. The potentially expensive lawsuits -- more than $ 200 million in damages are being sought -- are still in the pretrial stages, but their progress is being anxiously monitored by industry executives and computer manufacturers.

Newspaper executives are also anxiously watching VDT safety ordinances such as the one recently passed by San Francisco's Board of Supervisors over the vociferous objections of the business community. The new law requires all companies with fifteen or more employees to modify or buy a long list of adjustable equipment for its VDT workstations and to give employees alternative work for every two hours spent on a VDT. The bill was opposed by the Examiner, which in a December 19 editorial accused the county supervisors of wanting "to meddle in everything from the size of file cabinets to electroshock therapy."

Meanwhile, some newspapers and agencies are supplementing poor-paying workers compensation coverage with supplemental disability plans from private insurers, which can boost a reporter's income while he or she is on leave to a level approaching that of the reporter's normal salary.

In spite of these changes, and despite the widespread coverage of RSI in recent years, a few people in newspaper management remain unmoved, says Newsday's Stu Levin. He speaks of executives at other papers "who call us and say we are bad managers for not managing a bunch of hysterical workers. It is amazing to hear those people make those statements. It is also amazing six months later when they call us back and ask for advice on how to deal with the problem."

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