Newsroom reconfigurations give leadership a broader role

If you've worked at a newspaper of a particular size during the last 10 years, the odds are good that you've either witnessed or participated in one of the largest experiments to take place in U.S. newsrooms: a reorganization.

While newsroom reorganization has many incarnations -- teams, work groups, task forces, pods, maestro madness -- you can recognize its movement in your direction when you start hearing lots of talk about collaboration, improved community coverage and flattened power structures or hierarchies.

Sometimes change seems designed more to tickle your funny bone than to address serious issues. Managing editors become newsroom leaders, then turn back into managing editors -- only to be rechristened as the managing entity.

Sometimes, after numerous cycles, it seems to be change for the sake of change. Val Cohen, newsroom systems manager at the Orange County Register in Santa Ana, Calif., said there have been too many changes in his newsroom over the last 10 years to count.

"The Register is famous for tearing things up periodically," Cohen said. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

In most newsrooms, the impetus for change is complex. Factors include reducing costs, enhancing staff creativity, empowering the staff, seeking to attract and hold readers and advertisers, trying to accomplish more on a budget already bursting at the seams and changing the technological infrastructure.

Along those lines, the Register became the Newsroom Without Walls for a while in "an effort to get people to think beyond their traditional section and department orientations," said Cohen. While the paper hoped to achieve "better coverage, and more recently a much closer connection to the communities we cover," said Cohen, "ultimately the twin goals are community service and profitable business."

Often, people -- photographers, copy editors, reporters, graphics designers -- are shifted into new groups organized around different kinds of "interdisciplinary" coverage. For example, the San Jose Mercury News converted about a third of its reporting and editing staff to a team approach when it began launching new sections and a new approach to Page One.

"We wanted to make Page One the cover of the newspaper -- that is, reflecting the community's life clear and whole," said David Yarnold, managing editor at the Mercury News. "That meant making stories about religion or film or youth available for Page One and all sections, not just the predetermined weekly destinations that had been entrenched for years," he said.

To accomplish that, the Mercury News created five teams, "probably the most interesting of which is the Silicon Valley Life team," said Yarnold. "Its mission is to write about the cultural implications of the technological revolution and the remarkable place that is the Valley.

"We pulled writers from four departments to launch that team."

Redistributing responsibility
While there are few managing editors who don't want to offer better coverage to their communities, they are often doing so in the face of increased competition for good people from new media enterprises (which can pay higher salaries) and an ongoing shortage of good copy editors.

Redistributing responsibility may be the most available means of accomplishing their goals, but accompanying such change is the risk of creating a leadership crisis.

"I don't think there's a crisis in leadership in newspapers any more than there ever has been. What we do is hard," said Peter Bhatia, executive editor at The Oregonian in Portland. If there is a crisis, however, it may be more a result of strained budgets than lowered capacities. Yarnold sees an industrywide lack of critical thinking as the greatest problem.

"Combine that with staff reductions that increase the number of reporters per editor," he said, "and you're bound to see stories with less depth and a diminution of basic quality."

What Yarnold sees is what he calls a crisis of quality.

"The steady decline in newsroom staffing has created haves and have-nots -- and even the haves are beginning to see a loss of quality because editors have less time to handle stories at the same time reporters are being pressed to produce more," Yarnold said. "The other, more subtle, reason you're seeing a diminution in quality is that senior editors are spending the lion's share of their time on matters other than journalism."

Orange County's Cohen agrees with Yarnold that budgets are far too small -- and long-term perspectives are far too short.

"There may be a crisis in leadership; there's certainly bad leadership and management in many news organizations," Cohen judged. "But a more likely culprit may be the budget constraints imposed on newsrooms, coupled with short-term views of investments. The industry seems generally reluctant to spend well up front to obtain long-term benefits to business and workers."

Leading and managing
Clearly, redesigned job descriptions typically reflect changing management theories about journalism practices -- and, not coincidentally, changing economic and technical practices at newspapers.

The title "team leader" is a common element in a number of newsroom models, a manifestation of most reorganization efforts, which seek to redistribute not only tasks, but also responsibility.

The result is to push responsibility further down the food chain to create a more subtle newsroom hierarchy. Even so, the traditional power structure tends to remain firmly in place. At the Mercury News, team leaders have been trained to work collegially, and do well at brainstorming, said Yarnold, "but the fundamental reporter-editor model hasn't changed."

At The Oregonian, a redistribution of staff required a small increase in the number of mid-level editors in order to lower the existing ratio of editors to reporters. Bhatia noted that while now there are more middle managers, they also have more responsibility than before. Venerable positions -- assistant city editor, city editor, metro editor -- have been replaced by team leaders and assistant team leaders.

It is not coincidental that there are team leaders rather than team managers -- in a union shop, a wholesale movement of newsroom staff into management titles would likely require serious negotiation. But the actual difference is less clear, having to do with separating vision from execution. Yarnold describes the difference he sees:

"Leaders articulate a vision. Managers identify the tasks required to achieve a vision -- even if the vision is just getting out the next day's paper."

Bhatia uses similar terms: "Management is more about task and the needs of the moment; leadership is about strategy and the needs of the long term."

At The Oregonian, team leaders spend more time on leadership -- a big part of their jobs is figuring out long-term strategies within their coverage areas, he said. "One of the keys to being a good leader is not letting management overwhelm you."

While leaders may be able to influence the future of the newsroom, they don't necessarily have the authority or opportunity to shape the long-term view in the way that traditional managers have.

"For simplicity's sake," Bhatia said, "I'd describe a team leader as more than an assistant city editor but less than a city-metro editor in a traditional sense. We no longer have a city editor or a central city desk, but teams organized around topics who are led by team leaders."

Strong leaders may not have the same clear path to upper management as previous generations of journalists.

"I don't think we adequately anticipated how difficult the change would be for editors," said Bhatia, "who went from the traditional command-and-control model to the team model, where they were asked to be coaches, teachers and mentors and part of a team.

"Plus, we moved them physically into their teams and out of traditional 'editors' pods.' That adjustment was difficult," he added. "In addition, as teams have matured we've had to make sure they remembered they were not independent newspapers but part of a larger one. The independence and growing expertise of the teams is a major plus, but a newspaper still has to come out every day. We've had to work hard on accommodating both."

Reorganizing change
Another mark of the reorganization trend is that change occurs more frequently and rapidly -- in part because the models don't always work as expected, and in part because the environment in which they're situated is in nearly constant flux.

"There have been plenty of bumps along the way," said Bhatia, "and plenty of adjustments we've made, but we feel we're on the right track."

Responsibilities change fairly regularly at the Register, said Cohen. The paper now is facing a major new reorganization induced by dramatic technological improvements -- the shift of responsibility for editorial color into the newsroom.

"Some of these changes don't work, and in general we abandon or modify them and move forward," said Cohen. "I think this is a good thing; if we get everything right, we aren't trying enough new things."

Reorganization that creates a more collaborative environment may by its very nature require more frequent subsequent change. Often, relaxing the newsroom hierarchies may increase the potential for leadership. That's a real plus when leadership skills are in short supply relative to the tidal wave of technological and economic change sweeping over the industry, as well as overwhelming competition from new media.

Bhatia agrees that the "collaborative style of management that has been part of the team system has led to a newsroom where good ideas can flourish -- and where the journalism is improving dramatically."

Often, leadership may be a more appealing role than management: "Smart reporters and photographers can tell that managing and editing often aren't fun or rewarding things to do in this kind of environment. We have to find ways to make those mid-level editing jobs enjoyable and satisfying," said Cohen.

Cohen says that while creative people may "sometimes have a natural talent for management ... mostly they become managers because they're good writers, and the only way American corporations can reward them is to promote them, and the only promotion path is to management.

"Consequently," he said, newspapers "often lose good creators and get bad managers -- a classic lose-lose."

Any diminution of newsroom resources in the present will have an impact on the future. Will the reorganizations taking place today create a lack of experienced newsroom managers -- rarely a newsroom's richest resource -- in the future? Yarnold said "Absolutely."

Cohen, however, doesn't think the reorganizations are the problem. "I think newsrooms have always lacked experienced managers," he said, "because in most cases newsroom management is created from writers and artists who become editors."

Despite the chaos that can come with major organizational change, the results have been more than satisfactory. Yarnold and Cohen both describe the changes their newsrooms have undertaken as mostly successful.

For Bhatia, "The improvement has been much more dramatic and rapid than I expected. That said, the process of changing a metro-sized newsroom is taking longer than I expected."

Successful change doesn't just happen. It requires "training in management, organization and planning," said Cohen. If your newsroom is considering organizational change, he says that during the process, it is important to "pay attention to behavioral dynamics, hire motivated, engaged, dedicated workers, and promote them -- or keep them on the line, give them authority and pay them as if they were promoted."

Industry organizations may be another potent resource for newsrooms considering leadership-related change.

"There's no question that the journalism training organizations have become interested in long-term leadership issues," Cohen said, citing as a positive trend "the focus on leadership from industry leaders."

Cohen's list of such movers and shakers included Sandy Rowe, editor of The Oregonian and former president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and organizations such as the Poynter Institute of St. Petersburg, Fla., the American Press Institute of Reston, Va., the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education of Oakland, Calif., and the Asian American Journalists Association.

"I think it is important for all of us to understand our industry has short-term and long-term needs," Cohen said. "The short-term tends to revolve around technique and adapting to the requirements of the Information Age. These are very important and necessary to our survival.

"But we will be here for the long term, and managing/leading for the long term needs as much focus and training as can be brought to bear."

-- L. Carol Christopher

From THE COLE PAPERS, December 1998, Copyright © 1998, All Rights Reserved.