"Would I pick one
over the other? No, I think
there are benefits to both."
-- Claire Abt

"I learned more in the past
year and a half than I would have
in five years at the newspaper."
-- Tom Foster

From newsrooms to commerce, hybrid technologists migrate

They are the Robocops of the newspaper, half technologist and half journalist.

Trapped by taking interest in proof printers or stock tables, they are forged by installation fires. They emerge fluent in both newspeak and geekspeak, serene both in mayhem and order. Even their job titles can be oxymorons, for example, systems (denoting structure, logic, repetition, order) editor (embodying flurry, spontaneity, inspiration, disruption). This newsroom staffer is a bridge builder, linking the temple lore of journalism with the disciplines of information systems.

Increasingly, technology sellers are tapping these people to bridge another chasm, between system designers and newspaper customers. Whether they seek new challenges, personal opportunities or just a change, these newsroom-bred hybrids are thriving in the heat of commercial life.

Pause for breath leads to making a break
After 15 years in the newsroom of The Sun of Baltimore, Claire Abt followed her thirst for challenge to the manufacturer side and landed in December 1997 at Unisys Corp., a publishing solutions supplier based in Blue Bell, Pa. Now she pits her DocCenter archive tricks against the expectations of a dozen newsrooms, instead of just one.

Steve Wainwright applies his 28 years of news skills, including 10 as the Seattle Times systems editor, to cultivate on-line content at Intype Inc., an Internet applications developer in Seattle; the company was sold July 22 to Oxygen Media Inc. of New York, which counts Oprah Winfrey among its founders.

After reporting and launching special projects for 19 years, Tom Foster stepped away from statistical dissection at Syracuse (N.Y.) Newspapers to harness databases for new media builder PentaWave Inc. of Scottsdale, Ariz.

Although each one's story differs in the details, all took a deep breath and saw the same old grind ahead, while outside technology was remaking industries. So they stepped over to where the future is hatching.

Reapplying skills
Each one applied their old penchants in their new work. While Abt's furious agate macros earned her a place among the Sun's newsroom geeks, it is her love of helping people that made systems work so sweet.

Most of her opportunities were hands-on tasks, "simply because we were so understaffed," Abt said. "Anything anyone had in interest in, they could do, so I did a lot." From tweaking user profiles to writing typesetting codes to training users.

Her tenure spanned a convulsive era, converting the library from clips to bytes, merging Baltimore's morning and evening papers and migrating output to PostScript.

The satisfaction lay in improving life for reporters and editors, Abt said. "The idea [was] that I was helping people, whether or not they appreciated it," she said.

"If you do your job well, people think there's no job to be done -- because there are no problems." Like circus performers, if a systems editor makes it look too easy, people don't realize how difficult the work is.

At Unisys, Abt tries to do the same thing as an applications specialist in the Information Systems Group. After the sale closes, Abt works with the newspaper's librarians to mold the highly customizable archive system to their wishes.

"I'm not in sales, I'm here to implement it. ... Whether I'm working with a reporter [at The Sun] or working with a systems editor [at a Unisys customer site], it's very similar.

"On the other hand ... there's the shift," she said. "I can't turn around and blame the vendor; I can't say, 'They did this to me,' because I am 'they,' and that is the big difference."

Abt continued: "Sometimes that is really good, and sometimes that is really difficult. Sometimes that forces me to be more creative and more resourceful at finding solutions."

However, Abt liked her evolution from newsroom to product maven. "There was always something more to learn, and I very much appreciated that."

Caught with a screwdriver
Wainwright advanced through Seattle's newsroom ranks from copy boy to copy editor, then to chief of the copy desks and news editor before taking the systems editor mantle.

"Literally I got caught with a screwdriver one day," he said. "I was adjusting a Hendrix terminal in a union environment, so they determined that I must have some technical aptitude." At the Times, the systems editor was responsible for capital budget planning, evaluating new technology, training and documentation on new procedures, library operations and pagination planning. "If a piece of paper jammed in the printer, that was my responsibility too," he said. "Sometimes I managed 200 people, sometimes I reported to 200 people."

His greatest satisfaction is "inter-species communication," as he calls "that point where people and machines are communicating and producing ... creative, meaningful stuff."

Wainwright left the Times in late 1995 in search of new opportunity. "I felt that I'd been in a secure place, and a stimulating, challenging job, but a secure environment, for a long time," he said. "I had never had a resume. I wanted to go out and get scared." He landed at a six-person e-commerce startup, where his first day's duty was marketing on Seattle's sidewalks.

"I was mortified that someone from the Times would see me handing out flyers ... 'How fast they fall,'" he chuckled. One big shift: "At that point I was no longer considered a technical person. I was the only person who could write a sentence, so I was the word guy."

About 22 months ago, Wainwright was recruited by Peter Rinearson, a former Times reporter (and Pulitzer Prize winner) who founded InType's parent, Alki Software Inc.

InType was building a collection of six sites and web guides aimed at parents, from pre-natal through teen-age years. Now Wainwright focuses on web applications concept development and mentoring new media's fresh troops.

"I provide supervision to what generally is a young staff, in their mid-20s. They kid me about ... acting like dad sometimes," he said. A number are recent journalism-school graduates, "so one of my emphases is that the principles they learned [in journalism school], that they understand how important it is to apply them in this medium," Wainwright said.

"Just because it isn't a newspaper doesn't mean that copyright doesn't apply."

His duties have included ensuring editorial quality, contributing to the business plan, writing marketing materials and pitching at conferences. With Oxygen Media's purchase, InType's line probably will not be pitched to the newspaper industry any longer.

Excited about technology
Foster's job evolved from news writing to databases via computer-assisted journalism.

His last title at Newhouse Newspaper's Syracuse site, data management editor, grew out of special projects and consumer reporting, including harnessing New York State school stats and digesting election poll results.

"I liked working with reporters on stories. That's what I had done for a lot of years. It's nice to see people get excited about technology instead of frustrated by it, for a change." His projects always required selling the potential of CAJ to newsroom skeptics. "There was a lot of thrashing, trying to decide what I was doing, what would benefit the most people," he said. "Sometimes it was difficult for people to appreciate what the potential was for things that we were working on, because it was so new."

Reorganization talk led Foster to consider a change. "I wanted to do a more full-time programming role, and that wasn't going to be possible in the newsroom -- you're still an editor dabbling around instead of a programmer. I didn't know if I wanted to work for [information services] either."

After 14 years of being an editor, his role was in transition, and he heeded a call from people he met through Syracuse's installation of the GuideLines system from the company then known as Management Process Integrators.

Foster now translates database potential into revenue terms, as director of automotive and editorial product management. At trade shows and site visits, Foster talks about the car dealer application AutoChooser and listens to how customers think it would work in the trenches, a role he got "because I know more about newspapers than your straight developer would.

"I find it interesting to be working with newspapers, but doing a lot more ambitious programming, being in the thick of helping newspapers solve ... their most critical decisions as far as positioning themselves into the future."

That future includes everything from point-casting to broadcasting. His mission is to store the unformatted data "in a very vanilla form," extract it and later apply the formatting appropriate to any medium. "It's a big leap from when I was doing something for the newspaper," he said.

The new, the now, the cash
The siren songs that lured these dedicated journalists from the lofty Fourth Estate to the grimy commercial fields have the same tune: Challenge. Opportunity. Remuneration.

"I was getting bored," Abt said. "During the last two or three years I was at The Sun, it was an established system, it was an old system at that point, and there was no development," she continued. The job was devolving into babysitting.

The frenetic pace at Unisys leaves no time for boredom. "There is so much for me to learn, and it's been very rewarding." Aside from the "continual challenge and continual high of installing," Abt likes "the problem solving, the opportunity to work with people and make things work for them. It doesn't matter if it's in my newsroom or it's my customer's."

Ditto for his initiation at PentaWave, Foster said. "It was a pretty steep learning curve the first couple months." Absorbing desktop applications, scaling up to Microsoft NT servers, SQL servers, Internet Information Servers, "that was the jumping in at the deep end." He said, "It was pretty exciting. Turnover at the newspaper took a long time. ... It was exciting to be in an industry that was changing quickly."

Working for the producer also means encountering new people at trade shows and customer sites. There's more variety of social contact on the supplier side.

As Abt put it, "I don't get the same person asking the same thing 40 times; I have 30 or 40 people at five or six different sites." And at each site, the questions need a slightly different answer. That excitement can be draining, as can the constant travel and the lack of continuity with colleagues.

"It was a real kick for the first few weeks to work for a virtual office," Foster said, but doing everything over the Internet is less of a novelty now.

"I miss the people I used to work with," he continued. "You can't just pop in on somebody and have lunch."

Wainwright takes great satisfaction in shaping technology for human purposes.

"As a former co-worker said, 'Do you think the world really needs another web site?' I said, 'Probably not, but there is room for good ones.'"

The themes of what he's doing intrigue Wainwright. "I think the focusing on parenting, in having the fun of developing cool ways of doing things, we're also doing something meaningful for people," he continued. "If we were engaged totally in selling Beanie Babies or doing porn sites, I wouldn't be here."

That awareness of selling something is keen for all three. "We're all aware of the sales cycle," Abt said. "The guy I sit across from is working on an RFP [request for proposal]. I know the people who do the demos, I know the sales reps, I know every one of these people. If they have problems, I have problems, because if they can't sell them, I can't install or train or whatever I do. I don't feel isolated or insulated from that at all."

Wainwright enjoyed the strategic alliance courtships. "It was kind of cool to talk to people who are interested -- in exploring partnerships and relationships," he said. "All this activity that takes place, maybe one-in-10 actually turns into something. The fact that people are talking to one another and looking for positive ways to do business together, I think that's pretty invigorating."

It's a change from "moat mentality," as he dubbed "all the conference talk about reader retention and offsetting declining circulation." Wainwright said, "In this on-line world, it's not like that at all. It's all, 'Let's make something happen and see what we can do!'" In this new culture, "the status quo is not an option ... the idea that if you sit still, you'll get run over, is really prevalent."

Picking the right change is vital, Foster said. "It's an exciting field to be in because there are so many things you could be doing," he said. "It's hard to stay focused on the things you really need to do."

However, "at the newspaper you knew it wasn't going to get done, and that's OK, it would have been nice," he said. "Here one of those things is the golden egg, and we hope to lay it. You hope you make the right choices."

Aside from insight on the right choices, recruiters value newsroom-bred habits. When PentaWave called Foster "out of the blue," as he put it, "they were looking for people with technical skills with newspaper backgrounds."

"I understood the needs and demands of a newsroom and the role of a system in the newsroom," Abt said. "I understand how different people use it," how a reporter's needs differ from the editor's or the system administrator's.

Suppliers also appreciate the demonstrated work ethic, the self-direction and self-discipline, the heed to duty that marks newspaper veterans.

"I understand that 2 in the morning is a very real time to have a problem, and I'm not off call at 2 a.m., if that's what I'm supporting," Abt said.

At InType, some of Wainwright's newsroom experience is valuable, some is not.

The Times invested a lot of training in management seminars and workshops, training that startup companies can't afford to put people through, Wainwright said. However, "my knowledge of Atex, Hendrix and [Radio Shack] Model 100s is of little or no value."

How does that appreciation convert to cash? Is the pay better at technology purveyors than at newspapers? "Much, significantly. A 40 to 50 percent increase," said Foster. "And I didn't get any stock options from the Newhouse family, that's for sure."

"It's not a loss, and at minimum you can make as much as you did before," Wainwright said. "The more technical you are, of course, the more salary you can command. What everyone's after is stock options, which are not available in the newspaper world." If managing editors have trouble recruiting technically adept people, perhaps there's a reason.

What people on the inside at newspapers don't realize is that there is a lot of motion and activity and opportunity going on, Wainwright said. Even for middle-aged people, there are a number of opportunities. And one attraction is getting a new zest for work without abandoning the old faith.

Said Abt, "I don't feel like I've left newspapering as an industry, I'm just working in another facet of the industry."

-- Marion J. Love

From THE COLE PAPERS, September 1999, Copyright © 1999, All Rights Reserved.