Growing Technical Talent

A tight job market has created a growing industry problem: finding and keeping quality technical people. Some newspapers now devote newfound attention to the challenge. Here’s a look.

by L. Carol Christopher

Think back to a nasty time in newspaper history. Printers’ unions were strong. Management wanted control over the production process. The line was drawn in the sand; and newspapers slowly began moving away from hot type and labor-intensive typesetting, platemaking and printing; and toward labor-saving automation.

Once home to one of the most amazing combinations of blue-collar and intellectual labor, newspapers have separated themselves from the art and craft of production, placing their faith instead in technology that, after countless cycles of change and development, has made publishing a high-tech industry.

The history of newspapers is rife with power shifts, and in the latter half of the decade, the power has shifted back from the machines to the people that operate them.

“We have raised the computer to such a level that we assumed it would do things it can’t,” says Jeff Turner, president and chief executive officer of AdOut in Van Nuys, Calif. “Quite frankly, people still build newspapers. We can automate a lot of stuff, but you still need to have skilled people.”

Now a critical problem in virtually every industry, newspaper managers are particularly despondent over their difficulty in finding and retaining technical employees. There’s more money in other industries; there’s often more excitement and glamour. At its Redmond facility, Microsoft’s intracampus shuttles keep baskets of hard candy on the seat so employees can get a sugar-induced adrenaline rush as they move from one building to another.

Newspapers typically haven’t led the market in compensation and benefits packets, and those remain keys to snagging sought-after technical workers.

“The job market is so tight for techies,” says Keith Greene, executive director of the Media Human Resources Association of the Society of Human Resource Managers in Alexandria, Va. “And newspapers aren’t paying the big bucks. We’re encouraging them to pay competitively.”

Adds Greene, “Money may not be the primary motivator of people, but it can definitely be a de-motivator.” Greene also attributes industry instability, takeovers and the gradual replacement of independent owners by investment groups looking for solid returns as factors exacerbating the problem.

Uncertain times, perhaps. But discussions with industry leaders and hot topics at the last few NAA Newspaper Operations Super-Conferences indicate things are changing. Facing a tight labor market and new technical challenges, newspapers are taking new tacks on long-standing human-resources strategies to help hire, train and retain—and in the process, just maybe reevaluate technology’s role in what they do.

“I think the whole newspaper industry needs to take a look at how we elevated machines and...take a second look at where we need to be elevating people,” says Turner.

Ink-Stained Cyberwretches

You might not consider journalists—those ink-stained wretches toiling over hyphens or sports agate—high-tech employees.

But others do. Content remains king in the Internet’s brave new world, meaning journalists are seeing job opportunities—and starting salaries—rise. Even newspapers’ own Web organizations frequently raid talent from print newsrooms. Online-newspaper managers face an even tougher challenge: Internet experience melded with journalism sensibility prove a hot skill set.

Again, culture places newspapers at a competitive disadvantage. Internet startups offering stock options or other ownership stakes allow their workers to “vest in peace,” as Chris Jennewein, vice president of technology and operations for Knight Ridder New Media, put it. Consider the legendary help-wanted ad for priceline.com, which promised prospective hires “an excellent compensation package that includes health/dental insurance, 401(k) plan, stock options and on-site masseuses.” Yes, masseuses.

Before sending in that résumé, bear in mind that like elsewhere in the production process, money—and even massages—aren’t everything. According to Jennewein, management flexibility and a willingness to change rapidly and take risks also play big roles in attracting—and keeping—talent in an Internet economy (see p. S10).

Team-building proves another winning strategy. In fact, NAA’s Digital Edge (www.digitaledge.org) discovered a surprising trend in approaches among new-media staffs: bowling, a favorite activity at the Los Angeles Times, Community Newspaper Co. in Needham, Mass., and Star Tribune in Minneapolis. Others encourage the kind of wacky gadgets and informal work environments you see in the offices of Internet startups, though managers note that when important news breaks, professionalism quickly returns.

Which brings up a key point. Online staffers who feel that kind of connection are less likely to find the heady rush of breaking news anywhere but in the industry that coined the phrase, “Stop the presses!”

But what about the newsroom, where low salaries have never kept aspiring journalists from uprooting and moving to small communities to cut their teeth? Even that’s changing: Due to a lack of workers and competition with new-media outlets, starting salaries have risen slightly, but not enough to stop anecdotal stories of long-standing newsroom vacancies, particularly in smaller markets.

Rather than hire highly skilled and educated newsroom employees from the outside, some smaller papers now seek to encourage homegrown talent. Terry Quinn, Thomson Newspapers’ senior vice president for reader and product development, was instrumental in the development of Thomson’s new Editorial Center, an effort to nurture editorial quality by drawing from a smaller market’s local talent pool. Recruits go through an 18-week combination of seminars and live exercises modeled on a much longer and better established training project undertaken by Thomson in Great Britain.

Along with training, Quinn says, Thomson uses award schemes, talent databases and stakeholder arrangements to make the workplace more desirable, all in a manner similar to performance incentives traditionally offered to advertising and circulation personnel.

“People like to work for a company that seems to know where it’s going,” Quinn says.

Technical Tools

As other newspaper skill sets become more generic, human-resource challenges increase. Way back when, there wasn’t exactly a ton of demand for someone who could run a Linotype machine. But try telling that to the IT staffer who keeps your NT servers running—the same servers you’ll find in any kind of business, from hospitals to hotels.

It behooves you to keep these people happy. And, as Jerome Ferson, pre-press and systems director for the Duluth (Minn.) News-Tribune, says, that means more than a Friday-afternoon pizza and a pat on the back. At a time when newspapers have fewer candidates to choose from, it actually means being more choosy.

“The foremost thing is to start with someone who fits the position—both the skills needed and the personality to fit into the culture of the department and company,” he says. Once hired, employees need to stay challenged, feel as though they’re part of a team, and be given opportunities to gain skills and grow.

“Through motivation, you attain retention,” Ferson says.

Still, finding people in the first place is no easy task, particularly with the labor market pushing salary expectations higher and providing few incentives to pack up and move to smaller communities. Even Thomson’s innovative efforts and groupwide resources haven’t guaranteed success, says Kimberly Bates McCarl, director for training and development.

Adds Steven B. Strout, Thomson vice president of technology, “When a metropolitan area can offer significantly higher compensation, it is difficult to attract people to smaller communities without taking into consideration methods to offer career advancement and competitive compensation.” What’s needed is a form of compensation that goes beyond salaries, he says, to include training, education and quality-of-life issues, “like being only 10 minutes from work.”

Thomson now tries to identify career paths for new technology hires, either through progressively more challenging technology positions or into management ranks. The company already has promoted people from one unit to another to show it means business.

Teamwork proves critical. Robert Velasco, now customer-satisfaction manager at The Sun in Baltimore, told attendees of the 1998 SuperConference how cross-training allowed a USA Today customer-service center to drop from 126 to 70 workers while increasing call volume and satisfaction. More importantly, turnover fell from 106 percent to 8 percent.

Adds Ferson, “There are no quick fixes. I strongly believe in fostering intrinsic motivation versus relying on extrinsic factors such as pizza, incentives or inspirational speakers.”

And when staffers do leave, take heart. As technology becomes less industry-specific, it’s become an industry in its own right, with its own culture and benchmarks for job duration. Even in the techie Mecca known as the Silicon Valley, technical turnover runs around 15 percent annually, depending on whom you ask.

Training Press Operators

Then there are the labor subsets unique to the newspaper industry, printing chief among them. Other than the occasional commercial shop, recruiters aren’t lining up to hire these highly skilled workers. They’re mostly approaching retirement age, without sufficient numbers of suitable replacements gearing up to take their place when they leave.

In many ways, the problem is one of newspapers’ own creation. Roger Lambert, press-maintenance manager with the Chicago Tribune, summed up the dilemma. Newspapers shifting to less labor-intensive offset printing in the 1970s and 1980s created an oversupply of skilled pressmen—the craftsmen of yore who squeezed decent color out of creaky letterpresses and kept worn machinery running. Many accepted buyouts, retired or otherwise left the industry. But soon after, an unprecedented jump in color demand spurred more complicated press runs, more complicated presses, and today’s shortage of highly skilled press operators.

Sound familiar?

“We’re not getting the people,” lamented consultant Chuck Blevins of Chuck Blevins & Associates in Vienna, Va. And since skilled workers are often replaced by less well-trained, less well-paid press trainees, “the pool of people you’d want to move up to supervisor is really disappearing.”

The result has been to demand more and more automation from press makers, though few expect the push-button press to arrive anytime soon. Still, “people are spending as much on automation as on a base press,” observes Blevins.

What to do as the pool of available press operators continues to shrivel?

Grow your own.

At papers across the country, training programs harkening back to the days of apprenticeships and journeymen have begun to surface. What’s new is a serious commitment to training, particularly of the classroom variety.

“Think of your training needs the same way you think of iron needs,” Gary L. Watson, president of Gannett Co.’s newspaper division, told SuperConference attendees. “You wouldn’t leave the number of printing couples undetermined.”

Take the Chicago Tribune, which created an intensive four-year apprenticeship program, recruiting employees from other departments following a thorough screening that includes interviews and written mechanical-aptitude tests. Apprentices start in press-support areas such as ink rooms, platesetting or maintenance, then join press crews, all the while supplementing hands-on experience with classroom training.

Many papers temper training with tough love. At The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, senior personnel were placed in the same training programs as new hires, and pay scales and supervisory positions were adjusted to reward skills over seniority, says John Martin, the paper’s press-operations and maintenance manager.

Likewise, after revamping its training program, Tucson Newspapers gave workers only half-time pay for attending sessions. “We felt it was their responsibility to improve the quality of their work,” recalled Wayne Bean, the papers’ vice president of operations. Raises are tied to completion of different stages of the training, both in terms of work evaluation and tests.

New technology brings new training challenges, namely getting gearheads interested in computers. The Wall Street Journal has set up computer-based environmental-and-safety training across its 17 printing plants. In Spokane, a 1996 color-tower addition featuring digital ink pumps led to a novel approach to teaching computer skills: arranging interest-free loans to buy PCs, an option taken by about half of the 31-person department.

Press workers “tend to talk about the engine on their boat or their car,” Spokane Production Manager Paul W. Schafer said, “[but] conversation focused on their PCs—how much RAM they had, and what their families were doing with them.” When the new system arrived, mastering its controls was no longer “a huge leap,” Schafer said. “If our press operators had not seen a computer before, that would not have been the case.”

Execs stress giving folks in other departments a healthy respect for what press operators do. In Chicago, Tribune staff holds an “introduction to the press” class for sales, circulation and editorial staffers. “Most people leave with a greater respect for the people who operate the presses,” says Paul T. Lynch, manager of quality and technical training.

Paying for Packaging

Packaging represents a different industry-specific challenge: hiring for repetitive, minimum-wage labor at a time when the rising economic tide lifts all boats—even in the low-wage service sector.

Packaging remains the most labor-intensive portion of the newspaper operation, and like elsewhere, new technology means those personnel must “be better trained and better motivated than ever before,” David Thurm, vice president of operations at The New York Times, said during a Super-Conference session.

Unlike training in the pressroom, mailroom training is tougher to justify due to its high-turnover, part-time workforce. As Randy Seidel, president and CEO of GMA Inc. in Bethlehem, Pa., put it, “Newspapers don’t have the luxury of the Ph.D. approach.” But training can improve the speed of an 8,000 copy-per-hour inserting line to 14,000 cph, Seidel maintained. With savings of $1,000 per shift, that adds up to hundreds of thousands of dollars at smaller papers and millions at large metros. “Unless we invest in learning...we’re wasting obvious assets,” Seidel said.

Again, just finding people is becoming a challenge in many markets, where population and the number of preprints continues growing as unemployment falls. In North Carolina’s white-hot Research Triangle, population is growing 3-to-4 percent annually, while unemployment hovers at a nearly unthinkable 1.9 percent.

At the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, a 17 percent increase in inserts prompted execs to rethink hiring practices. The paper developed a relationship with a temporary agency, which now keeps a pool of workers at its disposal. Execs won a concession from their mailroom union to hire as many as 20 full-time mailers from the temp pool. “It gives the part-timers something to shoot for,” said Astrid Garcia, senior vice president of operations.

In addition, part-timers receive transportation assistance, a sheaf of benefits including 401(k), discounts and credit-union memberships—virtually everything but health insurance. Not surprisingly, word-of-mouth from existing workers helps bring in new ones. “We found good employees bring in good hires,” she said.

Again, tough love prevails even in a tight job market. The paper stresses attendance and dismisses workers who miss too many shifts. We “have as yet not seen a lot of people lose their jobs because of that,” Garcia said. “So I’m keeping my fingers crossed.”

Turnover has dropped from 26 percent to 16 percent, “obviously still high, but not as high as before.” And for others, Garcia urged thinking about new perks for part-timers.

“I do not have a magic pill for this,” Garcia said. “Listen to what the market is telling you.”

Training Yourself

Normally, training discussions focus on employees. But just for a moment, let’s talk about training you, or the managers who work for you.

Some advice:

Treat employees like consultants. Why? Because consultants have to keep their skills top-notch. And so do your tech people.
Think partnership. Many of your technical people have the skills and motivation to launch their own startups. If they decide to work for someone else, hopefully you, they’ll expect you to behave as if you have entered a partnership of equals: You have one set of skills to offer, they have another.
Modernize equipment. To the maximum extent your budget allows, provide your state-of-the-art knowledge workers with state-of-the-art tools.
Recognize achievement. Like you, and like consultants, technical professionals are marketable because of their reputations.
Encourage networking. Make sure your highly valued tech staffers don’t have reasons to discourage talent from knocking at your door some day.
Be flexible. Greene says that the traditional organizational culture of newspapers may work against that: Managers may demand that core business hours be maintained. If you can be flexible on this point, then do so.
Develop people. “There are certain things that people want,” says Sun Microsystems Inc. Career Development Program Manager Carol Guterman. “They want challenging and interesting work. They want to grow, develop, and learn new responsibilities.”

Guterman says that there’s always a risk in helping people get better; they might leave. But the more important issue is making sure that they’re connected to the organization and able to increase their productivity while they’re there.

Ultimately, you may face the same bitter truth in dealing with your technical wonders that parents face with their children: Sooner or later, they grow up and you have to let them go.

But just as good parents learn from their kids, you should make sure that you learn from your techies.

In the worst case, you’ll increase your technical knowledge. In the best case, the extra empathy just may help a valuable employee choose to stay at your paper.

L. Carol Christopher is president of Christopher Communications in Berkeley, Calif. E-mail, cchristo@weber.ucsd.edu; phone, (510) 444-7841; fax, (510) 444-7842.

Sources

Wayne Bean, Tucson Newspapers, Box 26887, Tucson, Ariz. 85726. E-mail, wbean@azstarnet.com; phone, (520) 573-4450; fax, (520) 573-4688.

Chuck Blevins, Chuck Blevins & Associates, 1617 Montmorency Drive, Vienna, Va. 22182. E-mail, crblevins@aol.com; phone, (703) 883-2200; fax, (703) 242-7712.

Jerome Ferson, Duluth News-Tribune, Box 169000, Duluth, Minn. 55816; (218) 723-5281; fax, (218) 723-5339.

Astrid Garcia, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 333 W. State St., Milwaukee, Wis. 53203. E-mail, agarcia@onwis.com; phone, (414) 224-2507; fax, (414) 224-2287.

Keith Greene, Society of Human Resource Managers, 1800 Duke St., Alexandria, Va. 22314. E-mail, keithg@shrm.org; phone, (703) 548-3440; fax, (703) 739-0399.

Chris Jennewein, Knight Ridder New Media, 50 W. San Fernando St., 7th Floor, San Jose, Calif. 95113. E-mail, cjennewein@newmedia.kri.com; phone, (408) 938-6100; fax, (408) 938-6098.

Paul T. Lynch and Roger Lambert, Chicago Tribune, 777 W. Chicago Ave., Chicago, Ill. 60610. Lynch’s e-mail, plynch@tribune.com; phone, (312) 222-3232.

John Martin, The Virginian-Pilot, 5429 Greenwich Road, Virginia Beach, Va. E-mail, jmartin@pilotonline.com; phone, (757) 446-2805; fax, (757) 446-2810.

Kimberly Bates McCarl, Steven B. Strout and Terry Quinn, Thomson Newspapers, 290 Harbor Drive, Stamford, Conn. 06902. Quinn’s e-mail, terry.quinn@thomnews.com; Strout’s e-mail, sstrout@thomnews.com; phone, (203) 425-2500; fax, (203) 245-2516.

Paul W. Schafer, The Spokesman-Review, Box 2160, Spokane, Wash. 99210. E-mail, paulsc@spokesman.com; phone, (509) 459-5000; fax, (509) 459-3940.

Jeff Turner, AdOut, 5990 Sepulveda Blvd., Suite 100, Van Nuys, Calif. 91411. E-mail, jeff@adout.com; phone, (818) 780-4700; fax, (818) 780-4567.