Getting Staff Involved

Editor, Managing Editor, Assistant Managing Editor, Associate Editor, City Editor, Assistant City Editor…

Supplant those words with titles from the corporate or military worlds, and you end up with the same structure: top down.

So much for an atmosphere of free-flowing ideas. Journalists began grappling with this dichotomy in the Sixties and continue to do so today, experimenting with flat organizations (LaMonde being the pioneer), clusters, teams and even suggestion boxes.

An inescapable conclusion from the staff-driven calls for reform was that providing lip service and nothing else to the concept of democracy is the kiss of death. Some sort of apparatus needs to be built in.

Many newspapers use "off-campus" Think Tanks as a vehicle for generating input and innovation. Think Tanks help. However, less pretentious and more thorough approaches have longer-lasting value.

Our most successful Think Tank at the Boston Globe more than 30 years ago was at an old estate converted into a conference center in a bucolic setting only five miles from the newsroom. In two and a half days we managed to involve about three quarters of the staff in at least half a day each of no-holds-barred give and take.

On the morning of the third day a 30-point action plan was drawn up and a "goose-em" committee was selected by the staff. I particularly remember that part of it, because Ellen Goodman represented that staff in frequent visits to my office to get progress reports on our 30 commitments. They didn't quit badgering until several months later when all 30 were accomplished.

Think Tanks are useful but tend to be infrequent (seldom more than once a year), are mostly limited to the brass, can be costly and can create morale problems among those left behind.

Newrooms should be like universities, with ideas bouncing off walls, plenty of dissent and lots of flexibility, all tempered by that wonderful institution: the deadline. Top-down management at newspapers is as outdated as hot metal when it comes to fostering democracy.

A process we adopted during my tenure as Editor involved every single person on the staff and resulted in the creation of three-year game plans that were reviewed and revised each year.

Independent-minded journalists are repelled by dictatorial management, but there also is evidence that most are looking for some direction.

From where should that direction come? Editors have the responsibility to lead, but my view is that their leadership should be based on the "collective wisdom" of the staff. That two-word quote comes out of a 20-page, 6 x 9-inch handbook that was the product of our Virtual Think Tanks.

In short, here's how it worked:

SURVEY - Everyone filled out an anonymous survey relating to our self-perceptions, motivations and aspirations, as well as our views on the work environment and advancement opportunities.

DISCUSSIONS - First we organized group dialogue around six basic content areas: national and foreign news; local news; sports, living and arts, business and features, with emphasis on the Sunday newspaper and specials sections. Each group met for at least two 2 ½-hour sessions. Then we had meetings on several areas of the process: reporting and writing, editing, photography and design and the library. Finally we looked at the human side of our internal operations. The first set of content sessions were fed by research data we had accumulated and included analyses of our readers, competitors (which varied from group to group) and ourselves; that is, our strengths and weaknesses.

In the second session we formulated an agenda focused on what we could do to improve our content for current readers and what we should do to increase our appeal to groups targeted for expanded readership in each content area.

In the end we developed a specific agenda of a dozen to twenty items that we would work toward over the next three years. In addition each group determined its own set of 3-4 goals; specified who they saw as their prime competitors; set out a few ways they could achieve their goals, and delineated areas that needed further discussion.

All this was boiled down and printed in an easy-to-read format in the 20-page handbook that was distributed to everyone.

It drew the staff together toward common purposes. It raised the level of understanding of basic issues facing us for the decade ahead. It produced a collective vision for maintaining and improving the quality of the newspaper. It defined how we would be relevant and compelling. And it convinced just about everyone that collaboration and pooling talents could achieve a lot more than individual efforts.

Maybe it doesn't make sense for the inmates to run an institution, but I'm convinced that a staff-driven newspaper can be ten times better than one that is editor driven. The flip side of top down is bottom up.

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