Dilbert

'Change is good - you go first'

By Dick Thien
Alumni News Editor

It is a simple message: “Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.”

It hangs behind the desk of Walker Lundy, editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Throughout his newspaper career, Lundy saw editors fixing the same problems — over and over and over.

He is open about why his newspaper, which some put between good and excellent, decided to change the way it was doing things for its 207,000 readers.

“It was our feeling that the newspaper was as good as it could be under the old structure,” he says. “If we were going to take a quantum leap, we had to reorganize.

“Nobody had all the answers. But if we had the right people talking about the right problems, they would figure out a great solution.”

St. Paul’s solution was good for its copy editors.

The veteran editor and the newspaper’s copy editors believe that today as the Pioneer Press approaches the one-year anniversary of its “new” newsroom, introduced Nov. 6, 1995.

Why the change?

To get his quality newspaper to the next level, it needed fundamental change, he says. The newspaper had to be transformed, not be in transition.

The Pioneer Press built its own reorganization structure, rather than follow a cookie-cutter approach that has been so popular in many newsrooms.

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over — and expecting a different result,” Lundy says. “That was us — doing the same thing over and over and over and expecting a better newspaper.”

Some think that personifies the newspaper industry in general and the copy desk in particular.

“We had 180 brains and we had to engage more of them.”

To engage them, the Pioneer Press tried something it had not tried before. It sent 18 staffers — nine Guild members and nine managers — to visit other newspapers that had done some kind of newsroom reorganization.

“Those initial trips served two purposes,” Ken Doctor, managing editor, says. “They certainly gave us great information about ideas that had been tried, some smart and some loony.

“But beyond that, the investing trust in our staffers, especially non-managers, to go and learn and bring back their observations set the tone for the restructuring itself. People began to understand we were serious about changing the way the place operated.”

Those 18 staffers, plus Lundy and Doctor, then organized the restructuring, especially setting the values and the goals of the change.

The values themselves served as a touchstone for the often complex work that was ahead. Those well-edited values: one newsroom, work smarter, respect.

A third of the newsroom then stepped forward as 60 staffers volunteered their time, thoughts and effort to solve three big problems: turf guarding, planning and communication.

Lundy and Doctor were kept abreast of everything the group was finding — what was working and what wasn’t going so well.

Those decision-makers, or in this case, decision-proposers, weren’t the same old bunch of higher-ups in the newsroom, either.

“Many were surprised that union people were involved,” Doctor says. “They were put on an equal level with management, and it told everyone that we were serious about involving everybody in what we were going to do.”

That set the tone for getting a jump start on one of the newspaper’s endemic trouble spots — communication.

It was not unusual to find little notes — unsigned — posted on a newsroom bulletin board, Doctor says.

Sometimes, they were downright mean-spirited, often directed at the copy editors.

Those nasty notes have disappeared. In fact, not too long ago, an unsigned note appeared where there used to be many. Several staffers responded to the memo writer’s lack of guts with signed notes.

Guarding turf and failing to plan and talk to each other no longer are common problems. One reason is the copy desk — and city desk — no longer exist.

“We just blew up the copy desk,” Lundy says, “and decided that copy editors ought to be on the teams.”

“Proximity is the name of the game,” Doctor says. “Face-to-face communication solves most of the problems before they become problems.”

The Pioneer Press system is built on the idea that those involved in creating a common effort, whether a section or a number of pages, should work together — near each other. Assigning editors are out of offices and work near team copy editors, reporters and page designers.

Beats were reorganized and renamed, not with goofy nonsensical labels but with names that reflect readers’ interests and, consequently, the team’s focus.

Signs hang in the newsroom where the teams are: suburban community, technology, education, entertainment, health, public safety, public interest, Minnesota roots, consuming, and investigations — plus, guess what? — nation/world, business and sports.

“The focus here is not process but content,” Doctor says. “All restructuring has tried to do is knock out the barriers to people doing their best work.”

Already the new system had led to new sections (a Monday “Tech” section and Saturday “Religion” section, along with “Topics” pages on education, health, public safety and politics). Those information-packed self-contained pages are inside the Metro section each week.

In the new system, copy editors are in three places in the newsroom:

- Some are on content teams (entertainment, business and sports) that originate content and create their own pages and sections. Other content teams (education, health, public interest, suburban/ Minneapolis) only originate content.

- A half dozen comprise the Nation/ World team that produces all the national and world news pages inside the A section.

- The rest are on the presentation hub, which produces Page One, the jump page and the different editions of the Metro section.

“We still call our reporters reporters and our copy editors copy editors,” Lundy says with satisfaction.

“Jargon-free and proud of it” became part of the restructuring explanation.

Dilbert’s influence

The soft-spoken Lundy has kept his focus, wits — and humor — during the newspaper’s reorganization. On the front edge of his desk is a little Dilbert sign that says, “Change is good — you go first.”

The group of 18 went first and, as Lundy puts it, “constantly reminded staffers of the reasons for all the change:

“1. For our readers. We have to resell the equivalent of 93 percent of our subscribers annually to keep circulation flat.

“2. For our future: We are not keeping up with the changes in readers’ lives, needs and interests.

“3. For ourselves. We have three choices: Work less and gamble our future, work more and risk burnout or change how we work. What kind of newsroom do you want?"

Although Dilbert might be a happy employee in St. Paul, especially if he were a copy editor, not all Pioneer Press news staffers wanted to do as Dilbert said — “You go first.”

The staff settled into three groups:

- Those who got it and were enthusiastic about the possibilities the new structure offered them personally and professionally. Many copy editors were in that group.

- Those who hoped it would work, but adopted a wait-and-see attitude. That group was a mix of most of the 120 newsroom staffers who may have attended some of the restructuring meetings but were not directly involved in creating the new system.

- Those, though not a large number, who thought the editors had gone mad. Some reporters were in that group.

St. Paul’s copy editors say they would not want to turn the clock back, although some reporters still have failed to totally buy into the newspaper’s reorganization.

In fact, only 10 reporters participated in the “new” newspaper discussions.

To many reporters, things weren’t broken. During one discussion, a copy editor said that from where she sat, things couldn’t be more screwed up.

“That’s funny,” a reporter said. “From where I sit, things are just fine.”

A few reporters told their colleagues that things being covered by the newspaper were not why they got into journalism in the first place.

“What we are doing now may not be why they got into journalism — but it is what we are going to do,” Lundy says.

Some reporters had trouble dealing with fundamental, transformational change, Lundy says. Others were unsure what it meant.

To Lundy, it’s simple. A person can walk to Chicago over and over — or take a plane. That’s transformational change, and the Pioneer Press copy editors have gained the most from it.

They now are involved in the whole game, rather than only the last quarter. No longer do they have to execute a game plan they weren’t in on, including fixing someone else’s mistakes or playing catch-up with a 2-minute drill.

The change

There are four stages of change, consultants say: forming, storming, norming and performing.

In the forming stage, the whole newsroom, not just one or two departments, took a good look at itself and figured out — with almost everybody’s brains — how to get to the next level.

Staffers looked at structure, they looked at values and they looked at what was unbroken and didn’t need fixing.

The staff knew it did not want to re-structure from top to bottom, then end up publishing the same old newspaper. The teams guaranteed that didn’t happen because their content and focus also were changed.

The newspaper stays focused on its goal by getting after, as Lundy puts it, “the right stuff by the right people in the right place.”

That means playing a story where the readers could logically expect to find it, rather than a certain section because it was written by a certain department.

“We’ve got a livelier and more diverse Page One almost every day,” Doctor says. “Bylines move where they need to, and stories that need good display get it more often.”

The forming stage also involved the most fundamental change: Reporters, senior editors (formerly department heads), copy editors and, in some cases, designers, were assigned to teams.

A presentation hub was created, which means designers now work on every section cover every day.

The presentation hub is where everything is put together other than business, Showtime, nation/world and sports. They are self-contained, each with its own designer.

Restructuring also meant separating more clearly the work of word and story editing and design, resulting in a higher level of expertise brought to each.

Openness is a hallmark of the new system, best symbolized by the story planning area found square in the middle of the newsroom.

How it goes together

There are four daily sessions where content is talked about — including a critique of yesterday’s efforts and planning tomorrow’s newspaper.

- The first is a brainstorming gathering at 9:30 in the morning where the editing team finds out what’s coming. It lasts about 15 minutes.

- The second, critique and planning, is from 11:30 a.m. until noon. At that session, yesterday’s newspaper is gone over by everybody, as well as more discussion of tomorrow morning’s content.

- The third session is at 2:45 p.m. and tends to concentrate on decision-making — and Page One.

- The last checkoff is another 15-minute gathering at 4:30. That one is to find out what’s fallen through, what’s changed and what’s new, if anything. It’s also where the presentation hub gets a solid feel for news play and what the front page will look like.

According to Doctor, those gatherings have moved the newsroom’s crunch time up almost an hour to an hour and a half.

The 11:30 a.m. and 2:45 p.m. huddles are in the middle of the newsroom, and they are not limited to the usual suspects who used to be off in some conference room where most of the staff dared not tread, even if they wanted to.

The focus is on what’s good, what could be better and what needs to be followed up.

The sessions are open, and all staffers are welcome. On any given day, the sessions will include regulars sitting in chairs in front of a large, white mark-up board: Lundy, Doctor, senior editors, including visuals editor Peter Wein-berger, and Brett Benson, the story manager or traffic cop, who avoids duplication and guides stories and art into the right place in the newspaper.

On any other given day, staffers, including reporters, hang around the edges, throwing in their 2-cents worth about this, that or the other.

In addition, Nancy Conner, reader advocate, often shepherds visitors to the sessions. That opens the discussion beyond journalists to actual customers, the readers.

“Though we may be stuck in this eight-story office building downtown,” Doctor says, “we’re really trying to create the idea of the newsroom as a community communications center. That means bringing the community in to interact with us.”

The sessions have “closed the long-standing communication gap between daysiders and nightsiders that has existed for decades here,” Lundy says. “Under the old system, daysiders usually found it impossible to learn the rationale behind decisions or get explanations for mistakes made at night. Nightsiders, in turn, often felt invisible.”

In other words, senior editors and reporters had no idea what copy editors did at night, why they did it or, sometimes, who they even were. Copy editors, as almost everywhere in the industry, got no respect.

No longer.

The 11:30-noon critique, attended by some copy editors, is where story manager Benson passes along the good, the bad, the glad and the sad from the morning gathering. The over-used word “communication” is precisely the right word to describe the professional — and civil — critiques between the dayside and nightside staffs.

Few traditional news conferences are in the middle of the newsroom; even fewer are open to copy editors.

Their presence on the content teams is paying off, Lundy says.

“Personal relationships have developed between reporters and copy editors. The copy editors have a more thorough knowledge of the story and beats. The better story editing and communication are helping produce better journalism.”

That’s not all.

Lundy recalls a reporter who brought his parents into the newsroom and said to them, “I’d like you to meet my copy editor.”

Lundy says, “It was the my that really impressed me.”

That would never have happened under the old system, Lundy says.

The newspaper was storming by the second month, Lundy says. Today, it’s “probably on the sundown side of the storming stage,” Lundy says, “but I don’t think we’ve gotten to either norming or performing yet.”

The last two stages of change faced three problem areas, Lundy says: the teams needed time to jell; too many stories failed to fall neatly into a certain team’s content area; and the newsroom’s production center — the presentation hub — had trouble figuring out how much people power was needed to get the newspaper out on time.

Big change meant big fixes, and most of those trouble spots were addressed in what the staff calls Big Fix 1 and Big Fix 2.

Lundy knew adjustments would have to be made; he just didn’t know how many or when.

“Some things we did not anticipate; others we thought would work themselves out, but they didn’t. We knew we wouldn’t have it perfect the first time.”

So far, Big Fix 3 is on hold. Since the one-year restructuring anniversary last Nov. 6, Doctor has been working with the original group of 18, the senior editors and others to do two things:

- Acknowledge the great changes the newsroom has seen in its first year.

- Plan what needs to be addressed in the second year.

“One consultant told us that the first part of change is knocking out all the little problems so you can deal with the big ones,” Doctor says. “That fits us. We’re now better able to respond to all the global challenges of changing reader needs and electronic competition.

One sign of the success of all the sharing in the planning and execution at the Pioneer Press is that all of those original non-Dilberts are still on the staff.

Not only that, but restructuring also meant another change in the newsroom: diversity.

The news meetings used to consist of seven or eight white men and a lone woman reading budgets behind a closed door.

The top level of the newsroom, below Lundy and Doctor, is now much more diverse. Of 11 senior editors, six are men, five are women and two are people of color.

Decision-making and assigning is now much more in the hands of those who represent a cross-section of the readership.

The result

It wasn’t perfect then, and it isn’t perfect now.

The old copy desk, with a slot, was efficient. When the work got heavy, the slot parceled it out, everybody picked up the pace and the newspaper got out on time. With one copy editor on a team, the flexibility of the old copy desk is not there to spread a heavy load around.

Although not often, there have been times when a story gets only one read because there is no backup team copy editor.

The newspaper added a Saturday copy-editing shift and reorganized some team copy editor shifts to make sure that doesn’t happen any more.

“A late-breaking local story is a real challenge,” Lundy says, “especially with our lean operation on Saturday nights.”

With no city editor, copy editors are unsure who’s in charge at night If there is a late-breaking story off the wire, no problem. But if it’s a local story that requires staff deployment, the copy editors take charge. So far, there are no so-called ownership boundaries, and no one has said the copy editors have gone too far.>

Many copy editors also think they are gaining more expertise in specific subject areas under the new system. That results in smarter and tighter editing for readers.

They also have found that because the traditional hierarchy of copy desk jobs has been wiped away, better systems of informal and formal training and development are needed. That will be a priority in 1997, Doctor says.

If insanity — doing the same thing over and over hoping for a different result — isn’t a reason to look at St. Paul’s system, surely its effect on copy editors is.

“Copy editors feel like they’re members of a team,” Lundy says. “The stereotypes of copy editors have been blown up.”

A year ago, Casey Selix, then a Pioneer Press copy editor and now a bureau chief, told the Lexington conference that she was worried about increased errors after the copy desk disappeared, but her job was seen as legitimate by reporters.

After 18 years in the newspaper business, Selix now says copy editors have something they never had: respect.

Now, that’s positive — and fundamental — change.