Vol. 5, No. 6, June 1994

Labor pains

Publishing must teach its workers that constant change is the future

I've got a secret:

Ninety-nine and eighty-four-one-hundredths of installing a new pagination system (or a new front-end or a new ad system or ...) is people-driven. The remaining sixteen-one-hundredths is technology-oriented.

Picking the equipment and installing it is the easy part. Whether getting time for training or just getting people to think in new ways about technology and their organization, now that’s hard.

As a consultant, when I (or colleagues Mike Middlesworth or Tom Shorten) go into a paper, the first thing we do is take a look at the organization as it stands and try to figure out how a new system would work within those confines. Rarely do we leave without making a lot of suggestions about how to change work flow.

We frequently spend time with the workers who are the most scared, the most confused. More often than not, those scared workers are in top management, but we do talk to ad takers and reporters on occasion as well.

I bang the training drum quite often, but training isn't all of the problem, or the solution -- though it is a big piece. Workers -- and management -- must come to grips with the notion that to survive, the publishing industry must change. Some of the changes are for the better, some for the worse. Some changes are subtle.

A newspaper cohort once noted, "This is the only job I've had where you have to wash your hands before you go to the toilet." Then the Linotypes disappeared and low-rub ink came into being and the next thing you knew, newsrooms looked more like insurance offices than the grubby manufacturing plants they really are.

I knew the industry had changed when the janitors stopped supplying Lava soap -- the friend of mechanics worldwide -- in the newsroom lavatory.

Inside, the issues of technology and labor are discussed in the abstract by L. Carol Christopher, of our staff. Christopher, a former editor at the Dallas Morning News and Denver Post, is working on a Ph.D. in newspapers, technology and work at the University of California at San Diego.

She talks to a number of labor experts about the influence of technology on workers and their products. Some of Christopher’s experts make statements with which I do not agree (for example, that pagination encourages earlier deadlines), but they conclude that communication with workers is the key to identifying and implementing new technologies (what a surprise).

The reality of implementing new technology is explored in another article inside. Paul McFarlane, systems editor of the 23,000-circulation Carroll County Times in Westminster, Md., talks about how his newspaper implemented a PC-based pagination system last year that now produces color pages as full-page negatives.

He delves into the impact technology has had on the duties and responsibilities of several workers.

Also inside, we slip back into the abstract with excerpts from a new book.

Bradley Koltz, the systems and production manager of the Essex County Newspapers in Massachusetts, has self-published a little book he calls Nextwaving: A Guide To Fourth Wave Publishing Systems and Beyond. Part an explanation as to how he installed PC-based publishing systems at New England Business and the Essex papers, part a philosophical discussion, Nextwaving is something everyone in our industry should read.

Koltz’s main point: Buying Fourth Wave systems (a term coined by Jonathan Seybold to describe open software and commodity-based hardware) is OK, but you need to purchase a system that can "grow and adapt and evolve" as your business (publishing) encounters and endures the vast changes on the horizon.

Between Christopher, McFarlane and Koltz the issue is clear: The secret of the publishing business in the ’90s is change -- and how well you manage your people and equipment to adapt to it.

Constantly.

-- David M. Cole

From THE COLE PAPERS, June 1994, Copyright (c) 1994, All Rights Reserved.