Up to 300: OSHA’s New Record-Keeping Requirements

The U.S. Occupational Health and Safety Administration revised its 1971 record-keeping requirements to streamline the overall system for employers, better protect employees’ privacy, and produce better information about occupational injuries and illnesses.

First proposed in 1996, the final standard for a new OSHA 300 log goes into effect Jan. 1, 2002. The new standard requires employers to:

Record all needle-stick and sharps injuries involving contamination by another person’s blood or other bodily fluids
Document standard threshold shifts in employees’ hearing
Establish a procedure for employees to report injuries and illnesses
Record cases when injured or ill employees are restricted from their "normal duties," defined as work activities the employee regularly performs at least once a week.

The standard eliminates the term "lost workdays" and focuses instead on days away, or days restricted or transferred.

The new 300 log conforms to OSHA’s proposed new ergonomics standard (TechNews, January/February 2001, p. 32) by simplifying the way employers record musculoskeletal disorders. The revised forms have a separate column for recording MSDs, which OSHA hopes will improve the compilation of national data on these disorders.

The standard also takes steps to protect employee privacy by:

Prohibiting employers from entering individuals’ names for certain types of injuries and illnesses, such as sexual assaults, HIV infections and mental illnesses
Offering employers the right not to describe the nature of sensitive injuries when the employee’s identity would be known
Giving employee representatives access only to the portion of the form that contains no personal identifiers
Requiring employers to remove workers’ names before releasing data to people not provided access rights under the rule.

The final rule is available online at www.osha-slc.gov/recordkeeping/index.html.

NAA Goes International

Newspaper professionals from outside North America can now join NAA as part of the Association’s new International Federation.

NAA currently has seven other Federations for newspaper professionals in specialized areas such as display, co-op and classified advertising, circulation, new media, research, and marketing and promotion. The International Federation differs from its counterparts in that industry professionals will be able to join even if their company is not an NAA member.

NAA’s international contacts have continued to expand in recent years, observes Reggie Hall, NAA senior vice president for association sales and marketing. In addition to the nearly 70 overseas newspapers that are already NAA members, nearly 1,000 foreign newspaper executives either attended an NAA event or visited NAA headquarters in Vienna, Va., last year.

"It was clear to us that many of our foreign newspaper executives wanted the benefits of NAA membership," says Hall, "and we see the initiation of an International Federation as the way to address these needs. This new Federation also provides a strong new resource for existing members by providing greater networking and idea-sharing opportunities."

Available only to newspaper executives outside the United States and Canada, membership is $150 per year. Members receive copies of NAA’s magazines, Presstime and TechNews; Internet access to electronic copies of the seven Federation newsletters; participation in one of NAA’s e-forums, which include a half-dozen technology topics; and Federation-member discounts on products, services and conferences. For more information, e-mail international@naa.org.

‘Producing’ New Hires

A new recruiting tool conveys the appeal of newspaper careers to high school, technical school and college students, as well as technical experts employed in other industries.

Called "Producing Newspapers," the four-color, six-panel NAA brochure details a variety of technical careers.

"The newspaper industry is a great place to work for technical professionals," says Tom Croteau, senior vice president of NAA’s Technology Group, citing new tools and delivery methods. "The opportunities for people with the right skills and background are wide-open."

The brochure will be distributed to NAA members, colleges and technical schools. Copies of "Producing Newspapers," item 10102, are sold in packs of 25 for $19.95 for NAA and Federation members, or $39.95 for nonmembers, at (800) 651-4622.

New Committees, E-Forum

To study operational issues in greater depth, NAA’s Newspaper Process and Technology Committee is splitting into two.

Led by Edward E. Pieratt, director of technology for The E.W. Scripps Co.’s newspaper division, the Pre-Publishing and New Media Technology Committee will investigate technologies to prepare content for print and electronic delivery. The Systems Integration and Business Systems Committee will focus on newspapers’ electronic-communications and information infrastructures and is led by Larry Maas, corporate-production director of Howard Publications Inc. of Oceanside, Calif. The move "will help us devote the proper attention to these specialized areas," says Tom Croteau, senior vice president of NAA’s Technology Group.

In addition, NAA has added a new online-discussion forum focusing on newspaper-production issues. Visit e-forum.naa.org/#technology.

Newspapers’ Wireless Portal in the Works

Mobile users calling up content from their local newspaper are typically forced to scroll through their phone’s narrow display, often coming up empty-handed.

NAA hopes to simplify navigation by testing a local-news gateway, a central index allowing wireless users to access content from multiple participating newspapers. Users should be able to click on a "local news" icon or other bookmark for the gateway, identify a location, and be routed to newspaper services hosted by the gateway provider, says Melinda Gipson, NAA’s director of electronic-media business development.

NAA has partnered with Aether Systems Inc. of Owings Mills, Md., to create the wireless portal. The pilot project also will help newspapers determine how best to serve their readers with mobile news and information. Throughout the project, participating publishers will use focus groups to track site usage, and WindWire Inc. of Triangle Park, N.C., will evaluate how mobile users respond to advertisements.

The project marks the Association’s first research-and-development project in the wireless spectrum, says Gipson. NAA hopes to develop style sheets and templates to help newspapers repurpose content, preferably already in Extensible Markup Language, for the wireless platform, she says.

"The purpose is to figure out how to set up the back end so newspapers can transmit the useful stuff from the data they already generate," Gipson says. Classified ads, restaurant reviews and Yellow Page listings are among the database-driven examples, she says.

Testing a single access point is particularly important, says Ian Murdock, digital-media director of Hearst Newspapers in New York City and head of NAA’s New Media Federation Business Development Task Force, which is guiding the project with the New Media Federation Wireless Task Force. "In the current environment, carriers who want local content would have to negotiate deals with a variety of local sources," he says.

While phones are currently the most ubiquitous wireless devices, Murdock emphasizes that the project will look beyond phones to personal digital assistants and pocket personal computers.

"It’s not so much about wireless as we know it today," he says. "It’s much more about preparing us for the wireless of the next year, or two or three years out. If we were only doing this for a four-line screen on a cell phone, it’s not worth the effort. But if you think four and five years ahead, it’s a much more interesting phenomenon."

Participating newspapers include The New York Times, the Houston Chronicle, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Arizona Republic, the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, The Daily Oklahoman’s

Oklahoman.com, The Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, the St. Petersburg Times, The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, The Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Va., and the Daily News of Woodland Hills, Calif.

About half of these newspapers have their own wireless projects, says Murdock, but most are limited in scope.

In Brief

Denver-based Quark Inc. will begin widespread beta-testing of version 5.0 of its flagship ’XPress page-layout product this spring. Originally slated for a late 2000 release, Quark 5.0 will include the ability to work with layers, edit tables and create World Wide Web pages.

Ifra, the international asssociation for newspaper and media technology, will work with the University of South Carolina’s journalism school to build the Newsplex, a $1.5 million "micro-newsroom" that will focus on testing, teaching and training for next-generation, cross-media publishing. Slated for a May groundbreaking in Columbia, S.C., the center will open by 2002.

The business-to-business Internet trend, which made a newspaper-industry splash last year with online paper-buying services (TechNews, May/June 2000, p. 6), continues with the launch of pressXchange. com. Calling itself "a global resource for a global industry," the site offers to link buyers and sellers of used printing equipment, including newspaper presses.

In response to a "shift in product mix," Goss Graphic Systems of Westmont, Ill., announced a 150-employee layoff at its Cedar Rapids, Iowa, plant.

Continuing the ongoing loss of newsprint-production capacity, Madison Paper Co. will convert its 150,000 metric ton-per-year mill in Aslip, Ill., to lightweight coated paper.

Internet belt-tightening continues. Following layoffs by Knight Ridder, The Arizona Republic and Tribune Interactive last year, New York Times Digital reduced its staff by 69 workers, or 17 percent, in January. Likewise, newspaper-classified aggregator PowerAdz. com cut its staff by 30 percent.

Houston-based Enron, which bought Garden State Paper last year, continues its paper-industry push with the purchase of a newsprint mill from Daishowa Forest Products Ltd. of Quebec City, Canada.

Print-to-Web technology finally goes unplugged. The Cross:Convergence Pen, which stores bar codes developed by Dallas-based Digital:Convergence for later use, is now available for $89.99.

Say goodbye to George and Martha, the two 22-year-old Vax computers that dutifully served Cox Newspapers’ Washington bureau and the Cox Wire Service for the past five presidential elections. With the bureau’s content now transmitted via Cox’s wide-area network, the well-worn (and well-named) Washington mainframes were recently retired.