Editor Meltdown   

Working on the desk at a newspaper was never a walk on the beach. But now high stress, unreasonable workloads and added production duties

On Steve Shender's first full day as an editor, the earth moved. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake rattled the Santa Cruz Sentinel, and Shender found himself "not on the desk... I was under the desk." Maybe that was a warning.

That was just the first jolt in a seismic four-year ride as an editor that left Shender feeling "very burned out..and suffering from mild chronic depression."

So he quit to write speeches for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. He became still another victim of the stresses and strains piling up on editors these days, breeding burnout and contributing to a brain drain away from newspapers.

I've visited newsrooms across the country in recent months and talked with dozens of editors in person and via electronic mail. Everywhere the same message thunders out: Entry-level and middle editors need help urgently.

The stakes are high. Thirty-eight percent say they plan to leave the field within five years, according to a recent study.

"I've been out of school 16 years," says Linda Fibich, a former Milwaukee Journal night editor who recently left to direct a reporting bureau at the University of Maryland. "In that time things have changed not just dramatically but frighteningly for scores of people, and it's left to the middle managers to handle it."

At one roundtable, a West Coast city editor reeled off a list of grievances, including poor training, high stress, heavy turnover and frequent health problems.

"We've been talking about all this for 20 years," the editor lamented. "What that tells me is that management has no real interest in changing things."

When I sent out E-mail asking for editors' experiences, good and bad, I got a mailbox full. No one offered happy ones.

"They give an editor..all the responsibility but none of the authority, and then they give you a nearly impossible workload," wrote a former editor, "and when you screw up in the most minor way, they treat it like you accidentally dropped a nuclear bomb on downtown Cleveland."

The editor invited me to call and noted pointedly: "Don't worry about disturbing my family life. I haven't any. The job cost me my marriage, too."

A typical response came from Chris Hawley, recently promoted onto a city desk.

"I've gone from a job that I enjoyed every day to one I hate some days, tolerate other days," Hawley wrote. "I love the editing – in fact, I want to work with my reporters more closely... [But] I work seven days a week and rarely get to edit my reporters' stories with them."

Talk about a quick lesson in frustration: Hawley, an editor at Bowling Green University, is 20 years old.

Almost Unendurable

Editors have never led the pampered life. Typically thrown into the job with little training, they have long worked under grueling deadlines, grouched about underpay and overwork, and carried more responsibility than authority.

To some degree, their plight simply mirrors changes in the larger society. Tim McGuire, the top editor at Minneapolis' Star Tribune, cautions against assuming that editors have it worse than executives elsewhere. "We get awfully insular when we just think about newspaper editors suffering strains," McGuire warns. "It's this changing world. Go to any industry in your town, and you find the same thing."

So editors' grumbling is age-old, and they hardly have a monopoly on stress. Unfortunately, these truisms can blind management to their valid, rising complaints.

For many editors, what was always a difficult job now borders on the unendurable. The rapid rate of technological and journalistic change seems to amplify all the old problems and spin off new ones. And the new breed of journalist has less patience than ever with undesirable working conditions. In an information age, top talent can easily bail out and find attractive opportunities elsewhere.

As things change, the vise tightens on editors. More than ever, their plates are heaped with new managerial, technological and administrative tasks in newsrooms where ambitions are expanding but resources may not be:

• Editors find themselves sandwiched between increasingly demanding management (caught up in a near-panicky effort to rejuvenate readership and stay ahead of tough economic times) and increasingly restless staffs (intolerant of old-style management and top-down decision making).

• Almost every innovation, from redefining news to redesigning sections, falls on middle editors to enforce, typically without major increases in staff and budget.

• Computerization and pagination in particular have abruptly revolutionized life on the desk, bringing new demands and duties even as downsizing eats away at available staff power.

• Papers move people onto the desk at younger and younger ages, often with little seasoning and insufficient preparation.

All of these developments are helping to create a generation of disheartened, burned-out editors.

"The role has changed but the training and background of editors haven't," says Fred Blevens, who spent 17 years in newspapers, the last five editing at the Houston Chronicle, before bolting for graduate school in 1992. "You become more of a technocrat than anything else."

Assignment editors feel the administrative burdens most directly, while copy editors absorb the front-line shock of onrushing technology. In particular, copy editors complain that technical functions such as coding and pagination crowd out time for polishing copy.

"The time frames remain essentially the same but a number of tasks have been added," says Buck Ryan, a Northwestern University journalism professor whose "Maestro" cooperative editing system is being tried at papers around the country. "That comes from the reader-friendly paper – you don't just write a head but a deck and a summary quote, too; the zoned paper – it's not just editing a 20-inch story but four five-inch stories turned over for different editions. And there's pagination, of course. The composing room was diminished, but those tasks remain. You're still concerned about folio lines being straight and things fitting on the page to the last line."

Department-head editors often feel fenced in, too, largely because of mounting administrative strains and lack of appreciation.

Former editor Jane Harrigan, who now heads the journalism program at the University of New Hampshire, sees "the rampant misunderstanding of what editing is supposed to be," even on the part of other journalists. "A lot of people still don't really believe that dealing with people is an editor's job," Harrigan says. "They see it as a punctuation patrol."

Says Burgetta Wheeler, who voluntarily moved from copy desk chief to a less stressful job as deputy news editor at the News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina: "No matter where you are in middle management, you're stuck between two things: the people above you and the people below you. You're trying to balance what your bosses think you ought to do with what you think you ought to do for your people."

Fewer People, More Work

Even as they downsize staffs, many newspapers have pushed ahead with new editions and new projects.

Linda Fibich describes the time her paper added a night shift. "We added a reporter and editor but no support staff," Fibich remembers. "So we would handle circulation complaints and let people know who to call to place an ad and just listen to people's complaints. My colleague and I easily spent two hours a night, cumulatively, handling things that didn't have anything to do with journalism."

Betsy Cook, the daughter of a West Virginia newspaper owner, turned down a chance to go into editing. A journalism professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, she's devoted several years to studying copy editors.

Her conclusions are dismaying.

She finds increasing burnout caused by "lower levels of..supervisor support, autonomy, task orientation, clarity and physical comfort, and higher levels of work pressure."

Young editors, she concludes, face special risk. "It's the younger employee who tends to be more burned out, sooner, in his or her career. Younger people simply are more demanding of how they're treated."

What should change?

"What we keep recommending are just common sense, people-management skills," Cook says. "If something's not done, we're going to continue to lose employees."

When employees do leave, they wind up happier, at least according to one survey. Fred Fedler, a journalism professor at the University of Central Florida, and two colleagues sought out 62 journalists who had left the business for other jobs. One result: By more than 13 to 1, they said their new jobs provided better working conditions. Steve Shender, now writing speeches for the federal government, echoes the point. "I feel totally rejuvenated," he says.

Still, many editors love their work. They emphasize that editing can be a rousing, powerful job that makes coming to work a stimulant. They relish the intoxicating rush of deadline, and they understand that some stress is inevitable and even invigorating in a daily enterprise.

Longtime editors point out that many of the factors that elevate stress also make papers livelier and better.

Sports Editor Bob Spear has been editing sports copy for nearly 30 years at the State in Columbia, South Carolina. To him, two changes stand out: Editors have less raw power than they once did, and the volume and pace of work have exploded.

"Once the editor was God... Now there's more give and take," Spear says. Editors must show patience and flexibility, negotiating instead of ordering. That means more stress and less control, but also more teamwork.

Advancing technology, from faster wire transmissions to portable computers in the field, delivers far more copy to the desk in speedier bursts than before. That increases the workload, but it makes for better newspapers.

Being an editor, Spear concludes, is "harder now for a couple of reasons..but papers in general are better edited than they ever have been."

As I hear editors' complaints, they don't mind inhabiting a pressurized position in a competitive world. But they plead for management to reduce the unnecessary stress, the draining, dispiriting and eventually debilitating burdens that hound good people from the newsroom.

"This is never going to be life in a Paris cafe," says St. Louis Post-Dispatch Managing Editor Foster Davis. "But it doesn't have to be as tough as we make it." l