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Dennis Ryerson understands that he's dealing with a newsroom that may be a little tentative, a lot shell-shocked. "I don't blame people for being wary," he says. "You go through all these changes and what's the normal human response? You put your head down, you duck, and you say, 'I'm just going to wait until this next phase passes.' And then you don't take risks, and you don't push, and you don't participate."

What's his approach to such a whipsawed staff? "I think you do a lot of talking," he says. "I think you've got to keep focused on the goals, and that's high-quality journalism. And I think you've got to set an example." His first example was hiring a managing editor. (Luna left in July 2003 to become metro editor at Gannett's Detroit News.)

"I wanted to do a couple of things," Ryerson says. "I certainly wanted to turn heads in the newsroom and let people know, 'Look, we're serious. And when I say we're hiring up, we're going to hire up.'... I also wanted to turn heads in the industry... And I was thrilled when things worked out with Pam Fine; she's an excellent journalist. I have enormous respect for her; she's a great mentor, great coach, enormous enthusiasm and passion. And that's part of what I think is needed in a newsroom that's gone through a lot of changes."

Fine had left the managing editor's position at Minneapolis' Star Tribune in June 2002 without another job. Her old boss, former Star Tribune Editor Tim McGuire, called her to tell her that "Dennis has an infectious personality and I should talk to him," she says. She did and was sold. "I felt he would be a wonderful partner," she says. Fine says the staff is ripe for coalescing around a vision to improve the paper. "In spite of the turmoil and changes of direction over the years," she says, "I think the staff has managed to put out a good newspaper."

In a short time at the Star--she started October 7 and we talked two months later--she had a good read on the paper and the staff. A lot were "demoralized and at sea," she says, and they value leadership--at all levels. She says she tries to spend time with staff members, take them to lunch, project a clear sense of what's expected.

Ryerson's name had circulated in the Star newsroom as the possible editor before. He and Barbara Henry had worked together at the Des Moines Register and at Montana's Great Falls Tribune. They talked about the job in 2000. But Ryerson was happy in Des Moines then, though he left for a stint in the Bay Area, as editorial page editor and vice president of Knight Ridder's San Jose Mercury News. The second time Henry called, Ryerson took the offer. His first day in the newsroom was March 24, 2003.

When Fine asks staffers what they would do to make the place better, she says, the first word is: "hire." Soon after Ryerson came on board, he had no assistant managing editor for local news, business or features. In early December, his new AME/business, Vickie Elmer, the former deputy business editor at Newsday, joined the paper. City Editor Blair Claflin, a former politics editor at the Des Moines Register, started in July and is also acting AME/local, a job he has applied for. In January, the paper named Jackie Thomas, a former Baltimore Sun editorial page editor, as the AME/features.

But it has been slow going, slower than Ryerson anticipated. He put an enormous amount of time, he says, into looking for a managing editor, and he was diverted into doing a lot of day-to-day decision-making. A number of positions below the assistant managing editor level have not been filled; some have been open for at least a year. The newsroom has 235 to 240 full-time equivalents. It's budgeted for 261. Ryerson says he plans to hire about 20 people and then see where the newsroom stands. But he wants to put his managers in place and let them do their own hiring.

The delay has been frustrating for those clocking in overtime, and it's something for which the editor has apologized. "I'm legendary for taking my time," Ryerson says. "I drive people nuts, but I'm not going to let just anybody in the door."

The departures have left staffing thin across the board. There are not enough bodies to do enough of the enterprise pieces, the surprising stories, the stuff that can make a good paper great. (The Star has had occasional flashes of greatness, though: The paper won two George Polk awards in 2000 and 2001. The State of Decline, a series that capped a seven-month examination of Indiana's sagging economy, was published in late March, just as Ryerson was stepping into his new office.)

With the staff departures, the business desk, in particular, has suffered. Writer Bill Hornaday says when he arrived in July 2001, there were 11 writers on the desk, including the auto writer in Detroit. As of late December, there were six plus one part-timer. "If you count people being on vacation or sick, there's going to be a lot of days when there's just four people writing," he says. "A few days this summer, there were only three."

The former AME/business, Mark Land, an Eberle hire, left in February 2003. Staffers say he was very well liked, and some of the business staff followed him out the door.

Particularly during the summer, Hornaday says, if he was filing a story from out of town, he would call in to see if there was an editor that day. "Essentially, it got to the point where writers were editing other writers. At a paper that size, I'm not sure I've heard of that situation before."

They were a band of impromptu G.A.s, putting out fires. "Having specialty people do largely G.A. things that weren't on their beat and a limited ability to do, say, enterprise-type stories was a frustration," Hornaday says. "It certainly didn't help morale."

For some time last summer, Tim Wheatley, the AME/sports, took on two additional jobs--filling in as AME/business and doing recruiting. "I've had easier years," Wheatley says. But he's not bothered much by the triple-duty. "In this business, it is always something." He says despite the change in editors, he's been able to continue to do the job Tim Franklin hired him for.

Hornaday is optimistic that additional positive steps are coming. Of Elmer he says, "So far she's been outstanding... She's just what we need right now as far as a person who's working to get folks' spirits back up in the business department." And she'll be able to hire. A week after she started, Elmer estimated she'd make four to five hires in the next four to five months.

In features, Courtenay Edelhart is the home and garden writer, a job for which she thought she was just pinch-hitting when the previous garden writer left in 2001. Edelhart, who came to the Star in April 1997, is still on the beat, boisterously explaining how she was raised in apartments and has let the rosebushes she inherited when she bought a house die one by one. She's the type of person, she says, who will simply point at something in a flower shop and say, "I'll take that yellow thing."

"I've told everyone who will listen, I'm not a garden writer, and no one seems to be bothered by that," Edelhart says. "At the size of newspaper that we are, we should have an expert on that beat." (She also takes other assignments; in early December she was writing a business story.)

On the city desk, Claflin--who previously worked with Ryerson and Henry in Des Moines but actually was supposed to have his first interview at the Star the day Terry Eberle's departure was announced--says he has filled four positions since coming to Indianapolis in July and has six to eight openings. "You can be depressed; sometimes I am depressed when I look out into the newsroom and there's nobody to send a story to," Claflin says. "But it's a tremendous opportunity to bring in talented people with new and different ideas about how to go out and cover news. In a very short time, we're going to change the face of the paper with all these hires."

The paper has managed to make time for more than the required breaking news. A photographer and a sports writer teamed up for a December special section on the dying World War II generation. In November, transportation writer Dan McFeely wrote a 64-inch first-person piece on his decision to get stomach stapling surgery. McFeely also traveled to Columbus, Ohio, to report on a string of highway shootings. "Suddenly I got assigned this, and I wasn't told to find an Indianapolis connection." For the Star, he says, this is a new concept.

But before the paper can do more traveling and more enterprise, those 20 hires need to be made. Ryerson and Fine talk about improvements they want in almost every area of the newspaper: local news, business and features are the main priorities. There are plans to add a zone east of the city, and eventually Ryerson would like to reinstitute a Washington, D.C., bureau--to not rely solely on Gannett News Service. Steps are taken one at a time. Fine was surprised to find the paper had no national editor when she arrived, no one to troll through the wires and, as the paper grows, to think about covering national events. Such a job has been posted. In the fall, the Star carried three front-page stories written by WTHR-TV, its newsgathering partner, two of them about the state's child protective services department and the death of a child under its watch. The Star didn't have a reporter assigned to that beat; Fine has since asked Claflin to find someone to fill the void.

Hiring well is a time-consuming process. And the departures have far outpaced new acquisitions. Edelhart, McFeely and others talk about how difficult it was to watch attrition take its toll. They believe Gannett didn't replace people in order to decrease the newsroom's size. Judy Wolf, the Guild's treasurer and a copy editor, says, "I don't think there's any question" that that's been the case. (Because membership is optional, the Guild doesn't have concrete staffing numbers.)

In features, Edelhart counts 10 departures in the past three years. Other than the AME/features job, the Star has posted only one position, a religion writer. "We're down to bone marrow, and Gannett doesn't see it that way," Edelhart says. "They think we're where we need to be."

Publisher Henry has frequently said that turnover, about 12 percent a year, is at or below the industry standard for newspapers of all sizes. But AJR found no evidence that that is the industry standard. According to ASNE's 2003 newsroom employment survey, turnover in the past three years for all papers has been 7.85 percent in 2002, 5.34 percent in 2001, and 3.6 percent in 2000. When I asked Henry about those numbers, she replied in an e-mail: "I guess [I] was basing my impression of turnover on times when the economy was better and turnover was higher... To be very frank, we needed turnover in order to improve the quality of the paper."

For those in the trenches, turnover at the Star has been anything but standard.

Ryerson says he doesn't blame the staff for feeling that there was an effort to decrease staffing through attrition before his arrival, although that's not his impression. "I think the staff feels like, we've cut back, we've cut back, we've cut back."

Was Gannett trying to reduce the staff? Henry sidesteps the question. "The issue for the Star is not the number of people in the newsroom, because at 260+ people, the Star's newsroom is not understaffed," she replies in an e-mail. She says she doesn't know what the budgeted staffing number was before Gannett bought the paper. "We have had fewer people in the last year, because there is more care going into the hiring," Henry says. But the newsroom budget, which has increased every year under Gannett, she says, will go up by about 5 percent this year.

Ryerson has some selling to do, both to attract high-quality people to Indianapolis and to reassure his troops. He knows it, and he's already made great strides in both areas. The next question for the Star is: Will he and Fine stay?

Despite his roving past, Ryerson says his work in progress at the Star is going to take awhile. "I'm also getting too old to move"--he's 55--"and my wife and I want to build friendships here and get to know the place."

He continues: "I love this job; it's a great job."

The optimism at the Star is palpable. But so are the caution and the wariness--the feeling that this phase, too, will pass.

"I would say for the first time in a long time, I've been really excited to come to work," says reporter John Fritze. Among the positive changes, he cites less emphasis on short pieces and stories that don't jump. "Length used to be much more of a priority before Dennis got here."

"I've never been happier in my professional career than now," says Suzanne McBride, media partnerships editor, which means she's the paper's liaison to WTHR. McBride, who joined the News in 1992, says she sees people who are excited; she sees potential.

Her husband, consumer columnist John O'Neill, captures the feeling of a wounded newsroom when he talks about the need for stability. "I wouldn't want a horrible editor to come in and stay a long time," he says. "But even if an editor were not as good as I think Dennis and Pam are turning out to be--and as I said, I'm very encouraged--I think almost as important as the fact that they would be doing a good job is the fact that they have to stay here."