Implementing Change   

Change comes slowly to newsrooms.

"I don't know how many times I've heard, 'Well, we've never done it this way,' " says Gene Foreman, a journalism professor at Penn State and a former Philadelphia Inquirer managing editor. "So there is resistance."

At the New York Times, Howell Raines tried to implement major change at a paper that the staff--and many others--thought was at the top of the game. From "flooding the zone" and raising the "metabolism" to playing up photos and pop culture coverage to numerous staffing changes and departures, the Times was experiencing a bit of a transformation. Some decisions won kudos; others didn't.

But some regarded Raines' overhaul as more appropriate for a struggling mediocrity than arguably the nation's best paper. It may have needed tweaks rather than a makeover. And that infamous top-down leadership style stifled dissent--it was the opposite of participatory management, a type that many say enables editors to institute change without turning off most of the staff.

Foreman talks about the "broad sharing of information about why the change is needed and giving people a chance to vent about that and try to gently steer them toward it...modifying that goal as good ideas come about."

Tom Curley, president and CEO of the Associated Press, agrees. He emphasizes that journalists have a high level of empowerment by virtue of their jobs--making quick decisions on complex subjects and using sophisticated technology to communicate with the world. "If they have a lot of power and you want to start changing the rules, you have to get their buy-in," Curley says. You "can't give it short shrift, can't ignore it, you can't make decisions in a closed office with a half a dozen lieutenants who are yes people."

For Gene Roberts, Foreman's boss for 18 years in Philadelphia, how you implement change varies from newspaper to newspaper. "To some degree, it depends on the climate," Roberts says. "When John Carroll took over the Los Angeles Times, a great deal of the staff was ready for change, and John was able to implement a...rather major change in key positions because the attitude of the staff by and large was that they wanted it." (See "Let the Good Times Roll," September 2001.)

Carroll assumed control after the paper had emerged from the reign of former Times Mirror Chairman and CEO Mark H. Willes, a controversial news exec if there ever was one, who championed "blowing up the wall" between the editorial and business sides of the paper and later presided over the Times when the Staples Center scandal went down--an incident that began with the revelation that the paper was to share advertising money from an issue of its Sunday magazine with the sports arena and ended with the departures of the editor and publisher. And boy did Carroll make some alterations: About 20 percent of the newsroom staff was redeployed, half the masthead changed and the content was reorganized.

Minus a newsroom ready for transition, Roberts says there's a limit to how much change an editor can make in a short period of time "without having everyone dropping into a state of paranoia."

Roberts speaks from experience: He was a change agent at the Inquirer, a paper that was seen as a weak non-contender before he took over in 1972. Roberts built it up to a destination paper that competed with the New York Times. His 18 years there, in which the Inky won 17 Pulitzers, are remembered with tremendous glory-days fondness by staffers who served under him.

The man who inspired many a follower describes a slow, patient and strategic approach. Roberts advocates focusing on what really needs to be retooled and not monkeying "with things that you can't carry to complete fruition. It's better to do three things well or get three departments at an A level or A+ level, in my opinion, than to have six departments at a C+ or C level--or even B+ or B level.... If you concentrate and spend your resources over a broad level and pull everyone up from a C to a B simultaneously, unquestionably the paper has improved," he says. "But you haven't established a major beacon for the future, because you basically said average won't do, but you haven't said excellence is what we're after."

The one-department-to-the-next method is what worked for Anders Gyllenhaal at Raleigh's News & Observer. (Gyllenhaal, editor of Minneapolis' Star Tribune, was the executive editor in Raleigh from 1997 to 2002.) If one department improved, "people would see that part of the house was looking better and [think], 'I'd like to have some of that, too,' " he says.

Gyllenhaal compares changing a newspaper, which still has to come out each day, to an image from an advertisement he saw a few years ago--a plane is flying at 30,000 feet and people are building it in the air. "Because you're asking people to fly at 30,000 feet"--and asking them to hang on to a construction site--"you have to have everybody involved," he says. "Any change I've seen that was imposed, that I've been involved in, is never going to work."

Top-down loses out. Says Foreman: "It's tough on the editor or the top editors to lead that way through diplomacy rather than through sheer authority. But it certainly is more effective in the long run.... If people are forced to do something, they're not going to be by any means enthusiastic."