20 Under 40 - 2000 Profile: Michael D. Rife

PRESSTIME

By Presstime Magazine

First Published: December 2000

A lot of newspaper people talk about having ink in their veins. Michael D. Rife, mailroom manager for The Denver Post, can talk about it more than most.

The son of two newspaper-production professionals, Rife began his career at age 16 working as a part-time mailer for the Springfield (Mo.) News-Leader, where his mother was production coordinator. She left the business in 1983, but his father, who had been director of operations for Gannett Co. in Arlington, Va., worked at several of the group's papers as a trouble-shooter. Rife followed, picking up skills at each spot.

"I had the benefit of working for my father, which meant, at a very young age, I adopted the thought process of, 'We understand we have a problem, let's figure out how we fix it.' "

Rife brought that attitude to the Post in 1998. Since arriving, he has restructured the mailroom, adding staff and creating five assistant-manager positions to allow for a 24-hour operation while cutting overtime and temporary manpower hours. "I push my assistants to have meetings with the supervisors and with the machine operators to communicate their expectations to the staff," Rife explains. He also added new strappers, instituted an aggressive preventive-maintenance program that slashed downtime, and made several other changes that increased quality and productivity while reducing costs. In fiscal year 2000 alone, managers credit him with saving the paper more than $400,000.

Now Rife, who supervises 180 full-time and 160 part-time workers, looks forward with relish to his next mailroom challenge, a planned joint operating agreement with the Denver Rocky Mountain News. "I learned from my father that no matter how good things are, there's always a way to do it better, and this will give us a chance to prove it."

Education: Attended several colleges.
Career: 1982, part-time mailer, Springfield (Mo.) News-Leader; 1984-1986, part-time foreman, Valley News Dispatch, Tarentum, Penn.; 1986-88, part-time paste-up person, Rockford (Ill.) Register Star; 1988, ad-services manager, St. Cloud (Minn.) Times; 1988-89, trainer and trouble-shooter, Hawaii Newspaper Agency, Honolulu; 1990-98, night mailroom supervisor and mailroom manager, The Desert Sun, Palm Springs, Calif.; 1998-present, assistant mailroom manager, mailroom manager, The Denver Post.
Personal: Age, 35. Born in Springfield, Mo. Married, wife Susan.
Diversions: Home improvement, movies, church activities.
Connections: The Denver Post, 4499 Fox St., Denver, Colo. 80216. E-mail, mrife@denverpost.com; phone, (303) 820-5507; fax, (303) 480-9583.