The Printer’s Devil

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I have worked for some of the best managing editors in the business — that’s even though they worked at small newspapers — they would have been equally successfully at the New York Times, Washington Post or New Orleans Times-Picayune.

I’ve also worked for some I would consider the worst. One received a Dart — a well-deserved one, I might add — from the Columbia Journalism Review while he was at another paper.

Perhaps it’s mere coincidence, the ones I think are the best rarely held staff meetings and the ones who were the worst regularly had regular staff meetings.

The best editors tended to average two staff meetings a year, one to discuss ideas and assignments for the coming “Progress Edition” (most of you small-town editors and reporters know what I mean, but I’ll explain that for others in a later post) and the other to break the news why the newsroom employees were going to get screwed out of their raises by the newscorp that year.

The worst ones always had staff meetings. I heard of one editor, who was an academic before becoming a managing editor, produced multi-page agendas and conducted the staff meeting by reading the agenda for that week word for word.

When I was a young and callow first-time managing editor, my publisher insisted that I have staff meetings.

“You need to be up in the front of the news room letting them know you’re in charge,” he would tell me.

I was skeptical because as a lowly reporter, I had sat through a fair number of staff meetings and I considered them as a waste of time.

As a managing editor, I found out it still wasn’t any different merely because I was standing in the front of the room. Staff meetings are a waste of time, and in a small newsroom, time is something you don’t want to waste.

Reporters miss phone calls — usually the most important ones always occurred during staff meetings — and people bringing news items had to wait.

Reporters spend more time complaining about the color of paint on the wall, about the publisher’s new overtime policy or make snide comments about people in other parts of the building or in the community.

In a small newsroom, you can relay the information to your staff just by walking around. If there was something important, wait until everyone is in the newsroom, stand up and say what you had to say and then sit down.

Of course, nowadays, there’s e-mail to communicate but in a small newsroom, I never cared for it — you never know if everyone got it or if it got missed in the 100 e-mails the average reporter gets each day. And it seems too impersonal for me.

You can’t escape staff meetings. Publishers, especially the stupid, busy ones, love to have weekly department head meetings. Once in a while I’ve found them useful but normally, they’re a way for the advertising director to lord it over all the other department heads and to suck up to the publisher.

There’s a story about the crazy Libyan dictator Moammar Qadafi. When he seized power in a coup, he decided that the Libyan bureaucracy wasn’t working hard enough and he ordered all chairs removed from government offices. From hence forth, everyone in staff meetings had to stand up.

The government still didn’t work very well but the staff meetings were a lot shorter.

Maybe crazy Qadafi wasn’t as crazy as everyone thought.