Laying off the techies

I nodded in recognition when I read Regina McCombs’ latest blog entry on Poynter (“Power Struggles over Converged Newsrooms May Diminish Value of Web Sites”) about the layoffs of online staff at the Washington Post. She suggests that the targeting of multimedia folks in the latest rounds of cuts at news organizations is an indication of “printies” (as she calls them) wanting to maintain control. I think she’s right, and I think the trend goes beyond a mere power struggle in the newsrooms. I think it gets to the heart of fears about journalistic authority arising from digital cultural values.

I’ve been doing some research on newsrooms that are converging from print to online. I believe part of the challenge to this is a matter of critical mass. At smaller newsrooms, editors bring in a handful of online journalists to try to make a transition effective. This means not only producing stories across multiple platforms but also diffusing digital concepts to reporters who have been wielding pen and paper for decades. And not just the staff: Publishers and managing editors – many of whom came up through the ranks as print reporters themselves, too. For a while online staffs were protected from these latest culls. (As an aside, this was not so during the tech crash in 2001, remember? At my newspaper the meager online staffers were let go or reassigned and we print reporters were left to happily continue doing what we had been doing for years.) This time around media owners hoped the techie folks could save those that remained.

The problem is these people wanted to change things up. Introduce interaction between reporters and audiences. Ask reporters to record video or audio. Perhaps suggest some form of user-generated content or even open-source news production apps. At first, this seemed kind of cool. A marketing gimmick. But newsroom leaders realized such changes meant a complete overhaul of business as usual; journalists had to develop new relationships with audiences; and, reporters started recognizing the revolutions they would need to make in work habits. And all of that is hard, especially when you have a desire to keep the best reporters happy in conjunction with our human tendency toward inertia. McCombs wrote that “Print and TV managers too often become ‘a focus group of one,’ as Theresa Collington, executive producer online at WTSP-TV describes it, trying to impose their view of the multimedia universe onto the Web site. Editors can tell you exactly what the newspaper truck drivers do. Too often, they have no idea what each person on the Web team does.” And I think this might be true for a lot of newsrooms. The problem goes much deeper than any problem of ignorance or unfamiliarity on the part of leaders. It goes to values. Institutional norms must fundamentally adapt for the entire newsroom before we’re going to start seeing re-allocations of resources (and significant retraining of staffs) rather than cuts to the digital staffs.

I know of a couple newsrooms that re-dedicated some staff to finding new revenue streams using digital technology. I know of others that are bringing in consultants to retrain reporters by converging print values with online features. All of that seems on the right track to me – figuring out a way to rebuild business models for today’s culture, rather than going backward into an era from yesterday. News organizations need every writer, reporter, photographer, multimedia producer, social media editor they have. Every last one. But they each need to embrace the online world to make sure there are still jobs around for all.