Deconstructing the Newsroom   

It's a world where the story and the work have long predominated. But maybe there's room for a life as well.

THEY SAY IT'S adrenaline that keeps it all going.
Every day, this thing we call a newsroom brings together the thrill of the hunt and a race against time. Cinematically speaking, it's "His Girl Friday" for the senior set, "All the President's Men" if you're thirtysomething or "The Paper" for newbies--a collection of smart, just-this-side-of-eccentric scribes on a mission to get the hottest stories for the next day's paper.
But, alas, life isn't always quite as glamorous as the movies. The real newsroom culture has over-long hours, the kind where you're steeped in exhaustion and stress, not tossing off acerbically witty barbs at your deskmate over one more cup of coffee. There are freakish editors who don't suddenly make the right decision in the last reel, as well as certain peculiar-to-journalism expectations thrown into the mix. Is that environment the best for producing a great paper? Talk to the people working in newsrooms now and ones who have left, and some common themes--and questions--emerge. Come inside the newsroom culture, deconstructed.

The Story reigns supreme.
Yes, The Story is valued above all else, and if you write good ones, the kind that get on the front page, you're at the top of the food chain.
This makes sense, of course, since The Stories fill up The Paper, and it's difficult to persuade people to pay 50 cents for several blank sheets of newsprint. Stories are what win readers (we'd like to think, anyway) and are the vehicle by which newsrooms actually fulfill their mission--to inform, to entertain, to provoke. They inspire change, they teach us something, they win awards. They're probably the biggest measurement journalists use when judging the relative clout of any given newspaper, and they arguably play the biggest role in judging the relative clout of any given reporter.
So ideally, you write good stories--ones with colorful detail, surprising information or news you can use--and your bosses tend to appreciate you, because you're helping the cause.
What's "good" gets a little fuzzier when you look at the newsroom as a whole, where the stories are judged on a bigger stage and with more competitors. In fact, there's an unspoken pecking order in most newsrooms based solely on the perceptions about what kinds of stories each section produces.
Work in metro or national? You're at the top of the hierarchy because you write what generally makes up the bulk of A1. Business usually comes next. Then the serious points start to wane. Features? Fluff chicks on parade (they're never here past 6). Sports? Guys who are fun to banter with but not, shall we say, of a certain caliber to make it in a real section. Despite the move in many newsrooms toward increasing the mix on A1 to include more stories from these sections, folks in these departments often are taken less seriously.
Nancy Lofholm now writes everything from straight news stories to features as the Denver Post's western Colorado correspondent. But in the early 1990s, at the Daily Sentinel in Grand Junction, Colorado, she found she had to combat opinions that she was, somehow, backsliding when she switched from metro to features because the schedule meshed better with her child-care needs.
"The other people in the newsroom were shocked. I had people come and say, 'Are you sure? Do you know what you're doing? I think you're making a big mistake. You won't be taken seriously if you do features.'... I think there was still a throwback attitude that features was still looked at as the women's page." Lofholm went on to win several national and state awards for her feature writing.

But The Work is what gets you noticed.
Coming in a close second to The Story is The Work, and you'd better put in a lot of it. The pervasive message reporters get from the second they step into a newsroom is that this workplace is a caste system, with those at the top writing the most stories or writing the biggest-clout stories--or, in unusual cases, knocking themselves out doing both. The assumption is that you better either be turning out at least several stories a week or writing the kinds of A1 projects that win so many awards it's all right that your byline shows up only twice a year. Work hard, and you'll be rewarded. Work harder, and well.... Hey, can you make another call before you walk out the door?
Consider Laura Wisniewski, now an assistant metro editor at the Detroit Free Press, who started her career straight out of college at the Oakland Press in Pontiac, Michigan. "I really felt like the harder I worked, the more I could prove myself," Wisniewski remembers. "The longer my days, the more I wrote, the more stories I came up with on my own, the better it was. I really had a sense of proving myself."
On one level, there is a reassuring order to such a dues-paying mentality: It's clear what's expected, and there's a certain scrappy appeal. But without careful editors to help spread the load--or the ability to say "no"--reporters can quickly get buried in a mountain of work that they're afraid to admit is a mountain.
Wisniewski went from the Oakland Press to the Associated Press' Detroit bureau, where she was the day rewrite reporter for two-and-a-half years, juggling stories all day long on eight screens at a time. It's experience she calls invaluable, but she also says she knew she couldn't keep up that pace indefinitely.
"It was very draining. I was there during the [Persian] Gulf War. There's a large Arab community in Dearborn, and I was sent knocking at 6:30 a.m. on doors. They have a very set schedule at the AP--that's probably the only way you could survive working at the wire. You could easily get so addicted and caught up in the news that you don't leave."

Harder is better.
This kind of runs in tandem with the idea that the more stories you write, the better you are. Newspaper folks take a sort of perverse pleasure in how hard it was to get something done. (If you're one of those special-projects reporters or the like, the ones who only write one story every few months or so whether they need to or not, the people churning out the whole metro front every day envy your status but secretly pooh-pooh your work ethic.)
"I think what we fear mostly is our colleagues," Wisniewski says. "You don't want them to think that you're a slacker."
Underscoring reporters' sense of pride in the sheer quantity of work they're doing is the real-life messages they're getting from bosses (the annual byline counts, the pleas from desperate assistant city editors to already-overloaded reporters: "Please, I really need you to do just this one thing," and the romance of the ideals of journalism--the underdog reporter filing against some kind of impossible deadline or circumstance). It's as though the worse your situation is, if you manage to pull a halfway decent story out of it, it's actually better. It gets put into your war chest of stories for one-upmanship at happy hours. The message is clear--not only do you not complain, you're supposed to relish the pell-mell nature of the beast.
"I felt like in news, you could never turn in enough copy," says the Denver Post's Lofholm, who has worked in news and features sections at smaller papers in Colorado and Nebraska.
Longer hours are the norm, rather than the exception. Few reporters expect to be working eight-hour days routinely--an aspect of newsroom culture that was hammered home to usatoday.com's Christine Montgomery when she came to the Web site in June 1999 from a reporting job at the Washington Times.
"There's sort of a shift mentality, for lack of a better word," says Montgomery, the site's features editor. "Here, we have to have people here all the time, round the clock. So if you come in at 6, you leave at 2. That took some getting used to: The 9 a.m. person left right at 5. I was like, 'This isn't journalism! What the hell are these people doing?' "
Of course, if you're going nonstop--as Montgomery points out the site's staff needs to--eight hours is pretty much all you can take. Well, a newsroom isn't the most placid place, either. And so inevitably the question arises: Is the quality of your work in the newsroom the same when you're writing three stories a day routinely, coming in at 10 and leaving at 8 or 9, as when you have the evenings and weekends to recharge?
"There is a certain signal you're sending off when you work that hard, but it can have a dulling effect on your creativity," says Rebecca Goldsmith, who covers aging for Newark's Star-Ledger. Without a recharge, she points out, the work can suffer.
The hard part is that since you're inculcated in the fast, frantic pace pretty much from Day One (and most everyone else is doing the same), it can be difficult, if not impossible, to figure out when you're going too hard.
"With being so busy and working from 9 a.m. to 10 at night and getting paged on the weekend, you just don't have time to think about how crazy your life is," says Brian Reilly, who left journalism after covering crime for four years at the Washington Times. "It seemed normal at the time."

How we cope: The people are pretty funny.
Of course, if it was all hell, all the time, nobody would stay in the newsroom. The upside is that newsrooms generally tend to attract smart, engaged, funny people. There's cynicism, sure--but that shouldn't be surprising for folks who get paid to check out everything before putting it in the paper. In off moments, that spirit often gets funneled into controlled craziness--the parody e-mails, the happy hours--that makes the frenzy a little easier to bear.
"You're surrounded by bright people. You know, when things are working well you move fast, you often work long hours and there's a sense of camaraderie," offers Stephen Buel, until recently a reporter and editor at the San Jose Mercury News.
"I like the idea that I can go to cover a story and newspaper reporters identify with one another," says P.J. Huffstutter, who covers technology for the Los Angeles Times. "I like the humor."
It's part of what makes Jonathan Gaw--who reported for Cleveland's Plain Dealer, Minneapolis' Star-Tribune and the L.A. Times before joining IDC, an Internet marketing firm in Mountain View, California, in January--sometimes miss the newsroom atmosphere.
"You know what a newsroom is," he says. "You look up from your desk and some guy's shouting into the phone at some poor secretary--you kind of miss that.... Journalists are just different people. For example, as a going-away gift a friend of mine got me a crystal ball, a real crystal ball"--Gaw now predicts Internet trends--"which, of course, is extremely amusing. Some of the people here kind of chuckle, and then some look at it and almost frown."

I'm sorry. Did you say you wanted to have a personal life?
When you're 25 and don't have people waiting at home, the newsroom pranks and craziness can make up for the long hours. But what about when you're of the age when you're getting married and starting a family? How difficult is it to reconcile the demands of, well, having a life and having it all in the newsroom?
If a newspaper is to reflect its community as a whole, the newsroom's community needs to be more than a group of workhorses in their early 20s who have never grappled with a Diaper Genie or struggled through buying a house. Aside from the obvious perks of having some reporters who have longevity and wisdom on their beats, it's crucial to bring to the newsroom the different life experiences of the 45-year-old married mom with two kids or the 32-year-old dad of a toddler, as well as the early-20s hungry recruit who can work 12 hours and then come back early the next day to do it all again. But does the way the newsroom is organized encourage or even support such diversity?
"I don't think it's that you can't be a married woman and be a reporter," says the Star-Ledger's Goldsmith, who is slated to join the ranks of married woman reporters at the end of this year. "It's more what you're going to do. It's hard to be a daily reporter who has to leave at 5 every day. There are women here who have to leave at 6 every day. They don't have the greatest beat assignments....
"I think a lot of it is how you get along in the newsroom culture--if you're likable and try your best, or if you're a nervous Nellie and you're only thinking all day about when you leave."
In other words, if your parameters are that you must leave at 6 every day come hell or high water, you simply can't be assigned to a high-profile city hall beat on which there are night meetings twice a week. But as others point out, it's more a matter of finding that balance for yourself.
"There are committed, hardworking reporters and there are less committed, less hardworking reporters, and some of the most committed, hardworking reporters I know have kids and try to get out of the newsroom at 4:30," says Buel, who spent nearly 17 years at the Mercury News and other papers in California and Arkansas before going to a dotcom.
"Occasionally that can pose a daily challenge in trying to find a way to get a specific story covered, but I tried to view people more in their sense of the real hunger for the story. I'm thinking of a specific reporter who worked for me--she had two kids and tried to get out of the newsroom every day at 4:30. She got to the paper every day at 8:30 and she kicked butt. She covered deregulation of electric utilities better than anybody...and she, I think, was a great example of how it is possible to be really dedicated and dogged and hardworking and beat the competition and be human and have a life, and I think she did a better job than myself by drawing the line."
Don't ever leave me.
So what happens if you commit the worst sin of all--you think about leaving? Unless you're heading out for another (better) newspaper job, the reaction tends to be vague suspicion of your motives.
"I think newsrooms are very much a clique. They're very much like, prove yourself the hardest worker, or have the best ideas, or something sharp. You really have to show who you are," the Free Press' Wisniewski says. "So when you leave, it's like quitting the fraternity. And you think they're bailing out, or selling out."
"Everybody figured that Reilly was still gonna be a reporter," says Reilly, now a second-grade teacher in New York City. His former co-workers at the Washington Times simply couldn't fathom that he wouldn't want to come back.
Traditionally, people who left the newsroom went into public relations, the death star of jobs after journalism. (What reporter hasn't shuddered on the other end of the phone when a PR person has said, "Oh, I used to be in newspapers!") And once you left, you left. Rarely would a person who had switched into PR make it back into the newsroom.
But is all that changing, with the growth of the dotconomy that is sucking more and more reporters from newsrooms into Web ventures? (See "The Dotcom Brain Drain".) Some who have made the jump think so.
"There's this whole 'You've left the brotherhood' kind of thing--that's changed," says IDC's Gaw. "I'm fairly confident that I can go back. That's actually one of the things I asked when I left: 'Can I come back?'... Some of my colleagues are now calling me and using me as a source. If I'm good enough as a source, then I'm good enough to go back and report on it."
Buel--who recently founded vox.com, a Web site that's a division of a company called Cybergold at which freelance writers, musicians and artists can post their work--says when he announced his departure from the Mercury News earlier this year, there were those who initially expressed the suspicions usually reserved for the PR defectors.
"A friend of mine at the Wall Street Journal sent me a one-word e-mail that was just, 'Cybergold?' And he was clearly dumbstruck by the concept that I would go to work for an Internet marketing firm." But, Buel goes on to say, "It used to be that if you wanted an exit strategy from newspapers, PR was it. Now it turns out that the Internet is an exit strategy, because journalistic skills are highly valued."
Are people leaving because the pay is better? Certainly, no one's turning it down. And over the past few years, the stories of young reporters doubling and tripling their salaries have become legion--as have other financial perks that are strangers to even experienced scribes.
"We had people being offered salaries that we could compete with, but stock options that we really couldn't compete with," says Susan Goldberg, managing editor of the Mercury News, which has lost about 11 staffers to Web sites in the last year. "I think that...people who went into journalism didn't do it with the expectation of getting rich, but all of a sudden content producers for the first time ever seemed to be in demand. I think a lot of people understandably thought, 'Wow, I'm not going to let this gravy train go by without me on it.' "
Many who've jumped to the supposed cash cow (and even some who haven't) say that's not why: It's the chance simply to do something different. "Money's not the reason I got into journalism," says the L.A. Times' Huffstutter, "and hopefully money won't be the reason I get out."

OK, maybe you should have a life.
Still, could the exodus of some of their best and brightest to the dotcoms make newsrooms rethink their culture like never before? Certainly, there's a time-honored newsroom tradition of getting what you want only after job offers from elsewhere are dangling. In some newsrooms--particularly ones near high-tech meccas--that's meant a recent shift from a mind-set that espouses for-God-and-country motivation to staying for perks that are a little more concrete.
"That's why you're starting to see at both mid-size and larger papers a rush to make the reporters feel that they are more valued," Huffstutter says. "There are more flexible work hours. They are starting to roll out stock options, be more flexible with beat structures and more flexible with projects and with dailies."
Robert Rosenthal, editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, says that papers are "absolutely" trying to be more responsive. "It's happening--we have a lot of people working four-day weeks, things like that," he says. "You have to adjust when talented, smart people are going elsewhere. Rigidity is death."
And in some cases, it's happening even when there isn't a contingent jumping to the dotcoms. Tiffini Theisen, who covers workplace issues for the Orlando Sentinel, says staffers there are enjoying more flexible work hours, a relaxed dress code and elevated titles--in part because they've had the leverage of a job offer elsewhere. "I think they're definitely doing things to keep people here," Theisen says.
The Mercury News' Goldberg says many of the changes are happening simply because newspapers are paying attention to good management as a way to retain employees.
"All over the country, companies are figuring out that the way to keep people working for you is to manage them properly and try to figure out a way to accommodate people's lives in their work lives," she points out. "We are doing more with flextime. We do let people work from remote offices. We do let people work from homes. Newspaper salaries traditionally have been very low. I think the value of what good journalists do has increased, and salaries are going up, and I'm darn happy about it. It's just a very competitive market for good people."
And keeping good people is worth making some adjustment, says Michael Oreskes, the New York Times' Washington bureau chief. "It's not the way newsrooms used to work," says Oreskes, who nearly a decade ago as the Times' metro editor rejiggered some reporters' work hours and beats to accommodate their needs as new parents. "Obviously, newsrooms have always been somewhat informal...but there tends to be this presumption in the newsroom that you're always available. But you can still get good work from people who have other priorities and who are not always going to be available.
"It makes it harder to manage, harder to run things. But I think the upside is that you get incredibly talented people...and you maintain people's careers during phases during their lives when doing other things is just as important."
That's got to be welcome news for those wary of going wired in the wake of high-profile Web waverings, such as the recent layoffs at Salon and the implosion of APBnews.com. (See "Surviving in Cyberspace".) Theisen is one who decided to stay put in the newsroom rather than take an offer from a startup--even though the job would have involved an exciting move to Brussels and a more prestigious title. "There just wasn't enough stability," she says.
Sites linked to a reputable content provider--aka Your Daily Newspaper--seem to be weathering the recent dip just fine. "I do think the party's over for the startups," says usatoday.com's Montgomery. "But those closings don't make me worried for usatoday.com. I think it's just kind of a natural shakeout of the industry. I imagine it's much like the early days of TV, when anybody was putting anything on the air. Then there's a chance to mature."

A change is gonna come.
Part of the joy of workplace culture, of course, is that it can change. There's likely always going to be an element of the newsroom that values the commitment of a long day, and an element that relishes that rush of writing four stories in one day on a laptop that keeps breaking down. But as viable alternatives to newspaper jobs crop up just a mouse-click away--and if managers like Goldberg are right about her colleagues paying attention to the life demands of their employees--it seems that newspapers could be poised on the brink of what would be a big culture shift. The challenge is to preserve the aspects that make it good to work there, while getting more flexible and realistic about the parts that drive smart, talented people elsewhere.
So what still makes the newsroom a worthy place to work?
"I think of the creative surge in the sense of anything can happen at any time, and a boring day can become fun at any time," says the Inquirer's Rosenthal. "We'll get a breaking story on [our] Web [site], and we beat somebody, and it's exciting. It's like, 'Hello sweetheart, get me rewrite'--it's that romantic thing."
"Every day is a brand-new opportunity to get it right, to do it better, to shy away from yesterday's mistakes," says Melinda Johnson, features editor at the Santa Barbara, California, News-Press. "It's always a challenge, always an opportunity to reinvent, to reshape, to kind of cast off yesterday's mistakes, and just take another chance, come charging back."
Get me rewrite? A big comeback?
Sounds like surely it can be like the movies, at least part of the time.