Bringing more collaboration to newspapers: team approach

Teamwork.

With it, athletes become champions. Manufacturers build better products, and shift with their markets more easily. Workers add to their skills sets.

Today, most every industry has embraced teamwork.

Newspapers have tried.

Adapting the organizational form of a team into meaningful newsroom structures has been difficult, said Paul Pohlman, director of leadership programs at the Poynter Institute. Nonetheless, teams are touted as the cure for mythically proportioned declines in readership and budgets, and competition from more attention-grabbing media than the printed page.

The concept is embraced largely because the hierarchical editor-to-reporter assignment system inhibits reporter enterprise, and the beat system is too rigid to meet the demands of readership, journalists or management.

Teams provide a new framework for newsroom managers who believe that current structures inhibit traditional beats from working together. Take The Oregonian in Portland, for example. Executive Editor Sandy Rowe:

"We had a reporter on the metro desk who did health. In business, we covered the health care business. In features, of course, we covered health from that perspective.

"We also had a science editor and reporter.

"They never talked to each other. They were divided by sections and worked for different editors. Now we have people with expertise and authority grouped together. The groupings facilitate teaching each other."

"Ultimately," Rowe said, "the goal of teams, or any organizational structure, has to be making it easier for people to attain journalistic integrity. Much good art and craft are a result of great collaboration. That's really all teamwork is about.

"It does not mean diminishing individual effort. People are not cloned. The Lone Ranger is still out there."

Why change?
A change mentality has swept Media General, according to one of its editors, Donna Reed.

The Richmond, Va.-based company hired business consultants to take a look at everything -- news departments included -- to examine a range of issues, including productivity and training at its properties, among them the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal and Tampa Tribune.

A steering committee meets regularly to make sure that change is indeed taking place.

Reed, the Tribune's deputy managing editor, attended an American Press Institute seminar last summer to examine different models of newspaper teams. Afterward, eight strategy teams at the Gulf Coast paper spent the summer and fall doing research.

The Tribune's goal was to energize a newsroom located in a competitive media environment, and provide more seamless and less fragmented coverage of a fast-growing community, said Reed. At the same time, she sought to clean up a mutated system of bureau beats whose duties had begun to overlap with downtown functions.

"Reporters owned their beats and took them with them when they went to bureaus," Reed said. "Even the weather beat had mutated to a bureau."

Based on last year's research, Tampa will "flip the switch" later this summer: The newsroom will be physically and psychically rearranged. Gone will be old department structures; gained will be a universal desk, which will open the door to the pagination system for which the paper is shopping.

Current management structure will be realigned and flattened. Left will be only a managing editor, two deputy MEs and two assistant MEs (one for technology and on-line, another for business and human relations). Three senior editors, who had to reapply for their jobs, will handle news, photos, presentation and the universal desk.

They will lose their offices and be clustered instead in the middle of the newsroom with their 13 teams. Management now is advertising internally for team leaders. Once those people are named, each reporter will apply to join three or four teams and get a place on one.

On the Great Plains, consultants didn't play a direct role in converting Knight-Ridder's Wichita Eagle to teams, said Gary Graham, assistant managing editor of the Kansas paper and editor-in-residence at Northwestern University's Newspaper Management Center.

The process began when the executive editor initiated a newsroom-wide conversation about the quality of the paper -- addressing content, structure, production and staffing issues -- based largely on anecdotal information from reporters, and the biennial Knight-Ridder readership survey.

Then Managing Editor Janet Weaver brought in team experts from another paper to help decide what structure would work.

On Feb. 1, Wichita celebrated its second anniversary as a team-based paper. Why did the Eagle adopt teams?

"I think sometimes change for the sake of change is good," Graham said, noting that change re-energized a veteran Eagle newsroom.

"The newsroom resisted the change," Graham said. After the switch to teams, "the place was chaotic: There was a new process and everyone was working with new people. There were new kinds of coverage, different timing, and different tasks.

"There was also a struggle to get people to take ownership for things that they hadn't before. Lots of things fell through the cracks," he said.

In the same year, the paper also installed new editorial and pagination systems. "We had lots on our plate," he said.

The Eagle survived its turbulent flight, Graham said, but it was hard to resist tinkering with the structure when the trip got bumpy. "Janet Weaver, the managing editor, said just let it play out," he said. "If you tinker too much, you won't know what you've got."

Since then, he said, a number of people have gotten excited about what they're doing and the new ways they're doing it, mostly because the newsroom has begun to establish new routines, new relationships.

Last fall, newsroom management felt comfortable making the first significant change to the team structure: It consolidated two teams, and beefed up some areas where coverage seemed thin. "We think it helped," said Graham. "We're getting the paper out."

Unlike Tampa, Wichita has no universal desk. In fact, said Graham, "We blew up the copy desk. Now a presentation team handles production."

Two news editors ("we had four, but we spun two off into reporting spots") decide on story placement to keep team leaders from fighting over turf, he said.

In Portland, teams were implemented in stages.

"We wanted to be sure that if things needed to stay the same, they would," Rowe said. "Team structure is not an end in itself; the goal is great journalism. It's just a tool, and teams are a helpful structure.

"This level of change is very difficult to implement and monitor. We're still working on it after two years. It's not a finely tuned machine."

As elsewhere, the Oregonian has its doubters.

"Newsrooms are properly skeptical," Rowe said. "Newspapers have jumped on a lot of different bandwagons. For a while, it looked like a fad to me, and it looked a lot less attractive.

"I stripped away all of the consultant-babble crap. We don't use those terms in the newsroom. They're phony and journalists don't like them. If you can't say it in journalism or English, then you shouldn't be doing it."

Rowe has found her staff thinks its version of teams is a real benefit journalistically, which is good. "If you can't sell it in the newsroom," she said, "why bother doing it?"

Coping with change
"Change always happens," said Tampa's Reed, "but not always all at one time."

The legendary panic that sweeps a newsroom in the face of almost any kind of change has, in some newsrooms, reached near epic proportions with the implementation of teams. "Some days I could go into the newsroom and pop a balloon and lose five people," said Reed.

She described her newsroom's response to its changes as similar to the grieving process: "Pockets of the newsroom are in denial, some embrace it, some are more tentative. A great many wonder, 'How will it affect me?'

"You can't give reporters enough information."

Teams aren't that new for some, of course.

"In the '70s and '80s," said Reed, "I worked in a Cops and Courts pod. We called ourselves the Power Pod. Metro news has always worked in teams, and those folks aren't blinking."

For many journalists, however, newsroom applications of the team concept may involve sweeping aside tried-and-true news routines and the proven strengths of traditional beats and departments. Consequently, it isn't surprising that many working journalists greet management edicts about newsroom restructuring with all the glee and joy with which most Californians regard earthquakes and trailer park residents welcome tornado season.

In addition to the dimensions of the changes, newsroom managers may score extra points with the folks upstairs if, in the process of reorganizing the newsroom, they lower the FTE (full-time equivalent) head count, said Reed.

Rowe said that if economics are part of the decision to go to teams, that's OK, "but you have to be honest. And if you're going to teams just to save money, you'll probably fail. You'll also fail if people don't have the right skills."

More work for the same or a smaller work force isn't taken lightly in any workplace. In Wichita, the pagination burden is heavy, Graham said, despite the addition of one or two bodies.

"The old copy desk didn't have that much responsibility. The night side is stretched, and it's a horse race every night. But that's more about pagination than teams," he said.

Reaction to teams at the Eagle is mixed, an informal survey taken last summer indicated.

"The majority likes it, but a significant number is not as comfortable," Graham said. The paper has lost a couple of people because of the switch to teams, including one team leader who had been a department head.

The change may be especially hard for people who perceive that they've lost prestige, particularly editors with large departments who now manage teams of only six to eight people, Graham said.

Still, "there's no underground effort to dump teams completely."

Rowe pointed out that a teams-based newsroom operates quite differently from a traditional newsroom.

"There are different skills attached to it than to traditional journalism. Working in teams requires training in team decision making," she said.

Everyone in the Portland newsroom went through several days of training in the process, and refresher training is available.

"We had a consultant do the training," said Rowe. "But," she emphasized, "we knew the path we wanted to follow, and had sign posts to know when we got there."

Most team-based newsrooms comprise merely work groups that are called teams, and which are forced on the newsroom staff, in the view of Dan Suwyn, managing editor of Georgia's Savannah Morning News.

"It's usually perceived as just another fad, and another way for management to prove it's needed in the newsroom," Suwyn said, pointing out that true teams are notable for their lack of hierarchy.

Little coping may be required in newsrooms where the incentive for change comes from a seed planted by management rather than as a pile of lumber dropped on staffers' heads. For example, at the Statesman Journal in Salem, Ore., Managing Editor Kris Gilger said, "We did it right. Lots of newspapers have created total havoc -- they've posted jobs, et cetera.

"I talked to people as a group about the idea of teams. Some people said they were interested, and I held discussion groups about what other newspapers were doing."

When there was enough interest, Gilger said, the newsroom itself formed a task force. "I stayed out of it."

The task force presented four scenarios, and Gilger told the 70-person staff to vote on the type of implementation they wanted. And while she would have chosen the more progressive model, she went along with the slightly more conservative design the newsroom chose.

But that's not the way it happens most places, despite the best of intentions.

"Often," Suwyn said, "newsroom managers attempt to change the newsroom structure to replicate peak performance situations -- huge events like disasters where people can say, 'We as a newspaper did excellent work.' They look at the structure as a whole and ask, 'What can we copy so the newsroom can work?'"

But changing the structures, "that's only 50 percent," he said. "What's significant is what happened to people to allow them to see their work in a broader context."

Coping with team structures may be more difficult for some employees than others, too. Suwyn said newsrooms are hiring different types of employees now than in the 1940s and '50s -- and presumably the '60s, '70s and '80s.

"Some people -- some good journalists -- just don't fit in," he said. "Today we're hiring knowledge workers who have more in common with software workers than with people on the production line at Saturn. These are creative people on deadline, and they demand a say in the direction of the newsroom. They're a qualitatively different kind of journalist."

Teaching team skills in journalism school would help, said Rowe.

"New journalists have unsteady legs. If they knew how to ask questions of each other, and if they knew they had the support of other people who were partly responsible for their success, it would be a lot easier for them."

The future
Clearly, the days of the newsroom curmudgeon may be limited. Graham quoted one of his colleagues as saying that teams may not be the future of newsrooms, but teamwork is.

Suwyn pointed out that while the management trend of the day is the Total Quality Management process from which teams were derived, two years from now it probably will be something different.

"We need an environment in the newsroom that will allow us to turn on a dime -- we need to be able to grow processes. And the skills to grow are more important than the structure.

"We have to create a rich environment where technical transitions like the Web and whatever comes after it can happen and grow. With a production mindset, you won't be able to have the creative people and mindset you need for that."

Bringing teams into the newsroom has given Rowe renewed hope that newspapers can develop real expertise in areas that are important to readers. And it has helped her realize the importance of creating an intellectually vibrant environment in which both subject areas and journalistic skills are important.

-- L. Carol Christopher

From THE COLE PAPERS, April 1997, Copyright © 1997, All Rights Reserved.