Battling the Bells, This Time for Techies
by David M. Cole
It’s probably
an apocryphal story, but it’s said that back when the telephone companies
were going to get into the news business, Bell Atlantic Chairman Raymond
Smith was asked where he intended to get the necessary talent.
As the story goes, Smith opened the top drawer of his desk, took out a copy of the New York Newspaper Guild’s current contract, and thumbed to the minimum-salaries page for reporters.
"Hell, I’ve got secretaries who make twice that," Smith is alleged to have said.
The newspaper business–whether we’re talking editorial, advertising or operations–is notoriously tight with salaries. Few come into this business to make their fortune, although some probably want fame. Others enter because of an innate desire to change society. But most people working in newspapers do so because it’s a fun job, albeit with lousy hours.
For the second year in a row, the TrendWatch Newspapers survey has identified the industry’s No. 1 business problem as "finding qualified employees." Keeping those employees is a challenge as well.
Pressures permeate the newspaper–Thomson Newspapers of Stamford, Conn., is so concerned about finding journalists it has instituted a "school for reporters," taking people from a paper’s local community and teaching them editorial skills. But the technology group is certainly hit as hard as (or harder than) any other.
Part of this stems from the success of off-the-shelf hardware and software. Back when you had a front-end from Atex or System Integrators Inc., the people you trained on those systems had limited mobility. Sure, they could move to another town, but if they wanted to stay nearby, you were the only place they could ply their skills. People certainly did move, but it wasn’t uncommon for a techie to stay with a publisher for 20 or 25 years.
Then came the off-the-shelf wave: Instead of purchasing wholly proprietary systems from the likes of Atex or SII, you bought your hardware and networking locally and–depending upon your size–had little to no proprietary software in the mix.
So you loaded up on Macs or Wintel PCs, got yourself some of those server things, and strung a bunch of networking wire.
Turns out, though, that when you move on from a proprietary system, you also take on many more responsibilities. In the bad old days, a medium-size newspaper could successfully swim with only one or two technical people. But off-the-shelf meant you got less support from the proprietary supplier (naturally), so you had to bring in a bunch of new technicians.
Now, once you’ve trained a techie on Cisco routers or some flavor of UNIX, the information-technology director at the bank (or the phone company, or manufacturer, or pretty much anybody who has an IT director), is lusting after your guy or gal. And they pay twice as much as you’re paying.
So, the flip side of the off-the-shelf coin is that you need more people to support the environment, and they are just plain going to cost more. That makes publishers grimace.
The freedom that has come with off-the-shelf solutions (and we’re not just talking pre-press here–business systems, packaging systems and press-control systems all fall into the same category), brings a lot of new responsibility with it.
As newspapering becomes more and more a technology business, it is incumbent upon publishers to focus not only on technology, but also on the people who make technology work. Technical people have never been newspaper "stars," but that doesn’t mean that they won’t be–or can’t be–in the future.
And all of this discussion has been about technical line workers–programmers, analysts, engineers. Woe to the publisher looking for a software analyst. Pity the publisher looking for a technology manager. Actually, it isn’t just newspapers that are lacking technology managers–there is a dearth across all industries.
Newspaper executives need to concentrate on compensation and retention packages, especially for technical people. When confronted with the decades-old problem of whether to get a true technician or a newspaper person who’s been technically trained, newspaper publishers today answer the question with, "Yes."
Because now you’re really competing with Bell Atlantic–not for content or advertising as much as for quality people. And the phone company still pays more than you do.
Cole is a San Francisco-based newspaper consultant and editor of The Cole Papers, a monthly newsletter on technology, journalism and publishing. E-mail, dmc@colegroup.com; phone, (650) 994-2100; fax, (650) 994-2108. The opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily TechNews or NAA.