Workers are often forgotten
in new publishing technology

You're a Cole Papers reader -- it's likely you've shuffled down the aisle of an occasional technology exposition, gotten a tingle down your spine thinking about the new Power PC chip, or felt cheated when you've had to exit an exhilarating technical discussion just to keep a social engagement.

The technological possibilities of the '90s are exploding around us like fireworks at a state fair on the Fourth of July. Some are brilliant, some fizzle. Either way, we spend enormous amounts of time, thought, paper and ink talking about and, yes, occasionally salivating over new technologies and their potential in terms of our collective economic future.

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, technological change and new management strategies have gone hand-in-hand. The shape that change takes often has as much to do with the way a business handles the social side of technological invasion as the technology itself.

Social reorganization -- in the newsroom and elsewhere in a newspaper -- is virtually inevitable. In and out of newsrooms, executives are experimenting with new strategies and working to get a handle on what some of those changes -- both current and future -- may mean in terms of management and labor relations.

As the newspaper industry became increasingly automated, the number of people required to do a given amount of work declined. Skilled craft workers lost control over their crafts.

As the number of workers declined, jurisdictional struggles among unions increased in attempts to protect their members' jobs. Coupled with the impact of new technology, unions' struggles against one another over technological jurisdiction left their energies too dissipated to negotiate with management effectively.

With the advent of third-generation typesetting systems, which brought VDTs into newsrooms in the 1970s, human typesetters began to disappear. In essence, much of their work had been effectively shifted to newsroom reporters, editors and clerks, a trend which has intensified with the drive to paginate.

How are newspapers -- management and workers --understanding and attempting to shape that accelerating shift? According to Mary Sepucha, director of labor relations at the Newspaper Association of America, "It's an exciting time, but it's also daunting for employees who have been doing things the same way for years. Things have changed radically in the way they do their work.

"Many of the machines we're seeing in newsrooms are breaking down the traditional newspaper disciplines," she said, "and creating new, cross-jurisdictional work."

This has been clearly visible to a key player in newsroom labor relations. According to Ruthanne Greeley, executive secretary for the contracts committee of the Newspaper Guild, "The work lines get muddied. Lots of managers try to move jobs during the contract negotiations."

At the same time, union members have new opportunities. "There are chances to do new things and explore new areas," she said. "They're excited about being able to do their jobs better and more effectively."

Technology's impact hit production first, but it isn't stopping there, Sepucha said. Part of its impact is in how it forces groups to respond to one another.

"What might have been composing room work is moving into the newsroom," Greeley said. "That's an issue that could create tensions among workers and among unions. Where there is a single, unified management, there are various unions." Those unions are having to confront how to handle new categories of work.

It's those new categories that are forcing newspapers to adopt an interdisciplinary team approach: Old-line departments such as editorial, advertising and photoengraving are yielding people who are drawn into a common area to work on new products together.

One consequence for management, Sepucha said, is that "we're able to use expertise to better value" -- putting the right person in the right job, based on his or her skills.

"One of the problems with technology is that, for example, you're sometimes using fairly high-priced expertise to lay out the paper on a pagination terminal rather than assist an editor," she said. "You want to be careful not to dilute the value of the work. A lot of papers are getting around that now through creative services or ad layout departments."

For most newsroom workers, Sepucha predicts the future will closely resemble the past: familiar tasks, unfamiliar alliances.

"The work of reporters," Sepucha said, "won't change significantly, and editors will still have the same responsibilities as always. But they'll be using different tools.

"You'll see the artist working with the editor on projects. They'll use Macs and scanners to creatively flow type and art, to combine art work with the printed word. They'll rely less on old techniques of production to get done what they need to."

They'll rely on new techniques and broader skills to gather the news, she noted.

"We'll need editors who can synthesize in a more concise form and who are extremely computer literate. If you look at most of what will be in the electronic newspaper, complicated things will be reduced to the 'who-what-when-and-where' and consumers who want more will go further to look for it.

"The new kind of electronic journalist will be more comfortable with on-line data retrieval and networking than a reporter who's creating the story on a VDT.

"Most newspapers," Sepucha said, "can cover more than they could before -- reporters can do broader research via Nexis, etc. They can sit at their terminals and have the information at their fingertips. They don't have to go downstairs to a dusty library."

This trend toward requiring workers to have more skills, and use them more intensively, is apparent to James Schafer, vice president for industrial relations at the Seattle Times.

"Individuals have to have broad-based skills," Schafer said, "so that they aren't reliant on being successful by doing the same thing more and better."

Doug Underwood is associate professor at the University of Washington School of Communication in Seattle, author of When MBAs Rule The Newsroom and a former reporter at the Seattle Times and points further east. He contends that while there is an awareness of how computers can make information more accessible, much remains to be done to spread that realization around a newspaper -- and start reaching for that potential.

"Clearly," he said, "everyone is aware of how much more you can do with information with the computer, and I think that's provided some outlets for a handful of employees.

"But it could be expanded a lot more beyond that circle, to enrich news coverage in every direction of the newspaper and to expand opportunity to market the paper for new revenues. But you must provide funds and opportunities and promote people with the vision to do it -- not by formula, or by investing in the MIT Media Lab [see The Cole Papers, December 1993] instead of an editor with a shrewd sense of community and whether products will work in the local community."

Some of today's management approaches recognize that it's essential to nurture workers with a larger stable of skills, and then give them greater involvement in running things.

"If you look around the industry," noted the NAA's Sepucha, listing the names of most major chains, "you'll see a large number of newspapers talking about managing change, training, TQM [total quality management], team building and strategic planning to try to deal with [these kinds of reorganization].

"A major part of the human relations/labor relations function is to manage change and help employees manage it."

Managing change can touch on a sensitive area: union jurisdiction. Schafer, who has been in labor relations in a number of industries, has asked bargaining units at the Times why they "impose historic and continuing limitations on work flexibility, because as all of the other segments of the work force become more creative and flexible as new work develops, we will assign it to individuals with the greatest flexibility in skill.

"If we are going to have a business relationship [between employer and employee], then as with any other business relationship, you have to describe a competitive advantage. That's a legitimate question to ask an employee."

The history of relationships in the newsroom, according to Schafer, has been one in which there was a mutual consideration of needs between employee and employer, and which rewarded employees who did good work with supervisory positions -- something that "improves both their psyche and their pension plan. Their career plateaus, then they retire."

That career path has gone off a cliff.

"I shocked people at a meeting recently by saying that while organizations may hire people for jobs which have a long-term definition, I no longer believe in hiring individuals into careers," he said. "Most people beginning at entry level have felt that they were being hired into a career. What I'm saying sort of attacks something fundamental to that relationship."

He cited as a fundamental change the fact that "supervisors are hired more for their ability to lead than to do the work," he said. "More and more organizations are coming to realize -- and are articulating -- that the employee is more responsible for their own internal development and future success than the employer."

This change in expectations of what a worker should be doing may be difficult for some people in publishing to accept. There are managers, Underwood said, who have been brought up in a corporate culture that has made them loyal to the corporation and for whom management experience is more important than journalism

He doubts that such managers "can spur people to ... entrepreneurial thinking. They're not risk takers. So I'm not as encouraged as I'd like to be."

At the same time, there's a pronounced bulge in middle management -- "people who are coordinating tasks and people who can paginate -- graphic artists, those who are involved in design. There are more people involved in the meeting culture that's developed in preplanning and packaging the news product.

As for traditional tasks, Underwood said, "there's no growth in those kinds of jobs." If you are seeing growth in the size of newsrooms, that's because the backshops are shrinking, Underwood said.

"Most of the new employees in newsrooms are in production or in jobs related to planning, marketing or packaging," he said. "They're not adding reporters or front line editors."

The truism that the future is shared may be true more for management than for workers.

Where you're sitting is likely to give you a very different perspective on the problems -- and sometimes the goals and solutions -- that lie ahead. It may even give you a different perspective on who "us" is.

And that's one hitch that no management technique seems able to get around: During the '90s downsizing frenzy, no less than in past management fads, workers can't count on being workers. The Newspaper Guild's Greeley will tell you exactly that.

"One of the first things that jumps out at you is elimination of jobs," she said. "With the use of wire services, outsourcing, stringers and correspondents, jobs are in jeopardy and we're very concerned about that. It takes fewer people to put out the news.

"We're seeing layoffs, not increases in jobs in newsrooms. And if it's not layoffs, it's attrition -- just not filling a job when it comes open."

Technology has the potential to be a positive force, Greeley said, "to allow the creation of new opportunities for workers. But we fear that the trend will be toward continuing shrinkage in the newsroom and other departments."

While the temptation may be to blame technology for the loss of jobs, it's important to remember that technology is neutral compared to the people who decide how it's implemented, or hope to accomplish a particular set of goals by adopting new technology.

Computers and technology have shifted power to management, "and people feel that," Underwood said. How that power is used is the subject of a lot of talk around the water cooler.

"There's a tendency for managers to develop an 'us vs. them' attitude," he said. "During a shift to a new system, there's pressure to get people to shift to a new kind of thinking. If they don't do it fast enough, they're seen as obstacles to the process.

"And newsroom morale is at the bottom of the list of concerns. People have the lurking feeling that the changes are not really improving their prospects and that their managers don't know what they're doing. It concerns them."

Morale is not a minor issue for the Newspaper Guild.

"Reporters," Greeley said, "are spending lots of time looking over their shoulders and wondering if their jobs are going to be eliminated. Morale is low. Forty-five-year-old journalists who see where the industry is heading are changing careers entirely."

Newspapers aren't helping themselves in this area, she said: "The industry wants to keep good people with experience, but hires fresh young people at a lower salary. It may be a matter of economics, but how far can you cut the fat before you start cutting into muscle? These things affect the quality of the news."

Underwood agreed: "The goal is increased profitability and efficiency, so over time, you slim down the operation totally. That's why you bring in computers. News goals are always secondary."

Underwood contends that technology already has taken a toll on the quality of content, and that more losses are coming.

"With mainframes," he said, "they always had to push the deadlines forward, earlier and earlier and earlier so the news was more stale. With pagination systems, you have to get pages out early, with a small hole for late breaking news. The vast majority has to be produced well in advance. You may get in some late news, but most everything else was produced last Thursday.

"Sunday deadlines used to be Thursday, then they turned into Wednesday. The only thing that got in was what you could find on Saturday. What you ended up with was huge, packaged pieces produced well in advance, more than you want to know about what you already know.

"It feels very stale and prepackaged. I think that computers and pagination encourage that."

The move to develop electronic newspapers may only accelerate the trend. Such products, NAA's Sepucha argued, "will be drawn from what's put out daily in print. A lot of the work will be massaging what's already there.

"Newspapers won't need double or triple the employees to create the electronic newspaper or to provide other kinds of electronic newspaper retrieval services to readers. I do think we'll end up with more employees, however, than now if we're dealing only with the print product."

But Underwood argues that there are other options.

"Technology offers lots of opportunities to capitalize on a real future, to be seen as an organization that produces the best in-depth coverage of that community's world. There are exciting opportunities to have outlets for covering news with more depth and specialties."

But for those opportunities to be realized, he said, "investment, entrepreneurship and risk-taking are required. That's a real challenge for newspapers that haven't had to deal with much of that in recent history."

It would also solve a lot of employee problems to use the most talented employees to think about how to use the new technology, Underwood said, and to give people a chance to see it as an opportunity to broaden what they do.

"I think that in well-managed newsrooms, with good employee-manager relations, you could do all sorts of things to think about technology as a way to expand careers," he said. "There's lots of exciting potential, but it takes a real leader to do that. I'm not sure most newsrooms have real leaders, and even when they do, the profit pressures are restrictive."

Greeley suggests that worker participation is "the best way to have a voice."

"In the last 12 months, over 4300 people have joined the union in new organizing campaigns," the Newspaper Guild official said. "In tough economic times and with job uncertainty, people are looking at unions to see how they can work together to have a better workplace."

And, she said, "Unions are getting increasingly involved in cooperative efforts to bring about changes in the best ways for workers and the companies."

Schafer thinks that a communicative environment is the best strategy for coping with change.

"Strategies in the newsroom don't differ from any other place," the Seattle labor official said. "It starts with a reexamination of your mission and values. Communication, lots of dialogue, information, presentation with larger groups, vision, direction, availability of small groups. ...

"The biggest difference between things gone wrong and things gone well is the amount of time to think about what's happening, for people to participate and understand, to link the changes with the values and purpose of the organization."

As we move from the old to the new, there is little that is inevitable except change itself, and the consequences of our choices. What we must most protect from obsolescence is our vision of quality and our faith in the process of rational discourse -- our willingness to listen, to think and to work together.

Continuing technological changes in newsrooms -- and newspapers -- force us to confront inevitable social change. In ways both good and bad, the traditional fashion in which newsroom managers and workers have faced each other -- as well as their jobs -- are much a part of the past.

Those comfortingly familiar views of the workplace are as quaint as stacks of library clip envelopes tumbling off the corner of a reporter's desk, or Linotypes gathering dust in a cobwebbed corner, or the idea that we can still yell, "Stop the presses!"

-- L. Carol Christopher

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