The Printer’s Devil

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No doubt, you hear and read a great deal of twaddle about “managing” your newsroom.

Here are some of my Commandments for running a newsroom:

• Get to know your staff.

As one wise editor told me: “All your reporters lie to you at one time or another.

“You have to know when and why they lie and learn to work around it.”

Get to know their strengths and weaknesses.

Use their strengths to your best advantage.

As far as weaknesses, you learn to accept them and work around them. (You’ll hear a lot about “working around” on this Web site.)

I’ve talked about stupid but busy publishers before, but you’d be surprised at how many will spend all their time trying to “improve” or “raise the bar” on weaknesses while ignoring a reporter’s strengths. It doesn’t work.

If someone mentions they love gardening or talk a lot about it, have them write a garden column.

If a reporter with a haunted look tells you he doesn’t like the hurly burly of cop reporting or just doesn’t do a good job at it, give him another beat.

Another thought: Don’t confuse competence with compatablity. Sometimes, you may not like a prima donna reporter but you may find he or she is such a good reporter that you’ll have to live with it.

• Don’t “fix” things if they aren’t broken. (And try to distract the publisher. A stupid but busy publisher loves to come up with problems to try out their latest gimmick solutions on.)

That also means keep your copyediting to a minimum. Misspellings, tangled grammar or errors in fact — edit those.

However, you’ll find you really don’t have the time and it tends to infuriate reporters needlessly.

As one editor told me — somewhat peevishly after I had butchered someone else’s copy — make damn sure what you do is an improvement. Otherwise if you want the story written your way, go to the meeting, sit there for an hour and write it yourself.

Instead, if the level of writing in the newsroom is bad, have your reporters or others do short “mini-courses” for specific topics or do joint edit parties in the newsroom for stories that have already run . Make sure the teachers know what they’re talking about.

• Always stick up for your reporters, especially with the publisher — which by the way, can be a tricky proposition (I’ve seen and heard of editors getting fired for that).

Reporters have a hard life — crummy pay, lousy hours and if they’re good, they’ll annoy a great many people.

• Your reporters should never have to ask for a raise. You should know your company’s pay and promotion policies inside and out and be aware of the benchmarks for each of the reporters and have the paperwork for raises done before.

• Never lie to your reporters. They shouldn’t be in your newsroom if they can’t detect lies and phonies and you will stand out even more than most polished, well-practiced sincere politicians.

I can’t imagine anything more corrosive and demoralizing to a newsroom than when the reporters can’t trust their editors. The publisher, they know is a phony.

Be especially careful about extolling the joys of the company’s benefit package. Most newspapers’ pay and benefit plans are about the same level as Saipan sweat shops.

Let the publisher yak about the paper’s “competitive wages.” The paper may be competitive with other papers but I guarantee, when it comes to pay, a reporter can do better pushing a broom in a school or sitting behind a desk at a business.

(I know. I’ve compared.)

When the publisher or business manager extols the wonder of a pre-tax benefits deduction, quietly point that the newspaper also gets out of paying Social Security taxes on the pre-tax deductions.

• Avoid doing evaluations, especially male reporters. You’ll always hear publishers insist on them but you need to work around them.
I guarantee, if you are conscientious about evaluations, most of your reporters quit or become malingerers, neither of which you can afford in a small newsroom.

• Learn the delicate art of telling your publisher “no.”

I always insisted that I ran my newsroom — which stupid and busy publishers didn’t like.

If a publisher had a brain storm, they went to me first. If I liked it or figured I couldn’t get it trash-canned, I knew who to assign it to.

You’ll find that stupid but busy publishers have all these wonderful ideas for stories or special sections but they have no clue about how difficult or time-consuming they can be. Remember, they’re stupid.

And nothing can create more confusion than publishers assigning stories directly to reporters. I’ve seen important stories get lost because reporters had to drop everything to satisfy some publisher’s whim. A reporter tends to figure if the publisher orders it, it must be important.

It rarely is.