Reference no: EM132267762
The Blaze
THE SITUATION Andrea Zuckerman had been dreading this day for some time. As the editor in chief of the Blaze, she had been aware of the impending downsizing for some time. But the Blaze is just a small, college-town newspaper—owned by a large national conglomerate. So she had to hold her tongue while the corporate wheels turned. She didn’t agree with how the consultants hired by corporate had determined who would go, which was largely determined by who had the highest salaries. And she didn’t agree with how the news was being delivered—not by her, but by a consultant who would be a complete stranger to all involved. “They’re taking away our wisest,” she noted, “and they’re taking away those folks’ dignity for good measure.”
Not that Andrea could argue with the reasons behind the downsizing. She was, after all, working in a dying industry. Every newspaper, from The New York Times and Washington Post down to the smallest rag in the smallest town, had a sliver of the readership of a decade ago. First, it was 24-hour cable news, then the Internet, than smartphones. Each made newspapers less central to the current events consumption of the folks in a given town. Corporate had tried to stay ahead of these trends when they bought the Blaze, an event that had been marked by a smaller round of downsizing as costs were cut, the paper was scaled back, and Tuesday and Wednesday deliveries were ended. But there had been hope associated with those changes, with everyone assuming that corporate resources could help the Blaze reinvent itself and leverage new technologies to stay relevant.
This time around, the Blaze is confronting a “new normal.” Its function moving forward will be to serve as a local portal to the broader news resources offered by corporate. When folks in town log on to the Blaze using either their web browser or their smartphone or tablet app, they’ll see a combination of local stories written by Blaze staff and national and world stories authored by staff at other papers under the corporate umbrella. Eventually, the print version of the paper will be a weekend-only phenomenon, and even that will almost certainly end at some point. All these changes mean that the paper will need fewer reporters, photographers, artists, and section editors, not to mention fewer assistants. There may also need to be some restructuring and merging of assignments and duties. But that’s getting ahead of things a bit. The first item that Andrea wants to discuss in her meeting with you is what to say to the staff at the morning briefing. As the survivors of a lay- off that are being poorly handled, it’ll be on her to restore some semblance of morale. After all, the last thing the paper needs is its remaining staff giving two weeks’ notice. In fact, they’re going to need to be more committed than ever because more is going to be asked of them than when they were hired. She’ll have to be somewhat careful with this speech, of course, as the HR person installed by corporate—Jessie Vasquez—will no doubt remind her. Jessie is good at his job in many ways, even if Andrea complains about his general level of risk aversion.
Jessie’s primary concerns will revolve around Andrea saying something that could either trigger a wrongful termination suit or be used as ammunition if such a suit is brought by a staffer against corporate.
The afternoon briefing is going to be more complicated. That’s where Andrea hopes to begin charting a course toward the “new normal” so that everyone understands what they’ll be in for. The rumor mill has already been working overtime, and many of the scenarios being floated might actually wind up being worse than the eventual status quo. So it’s important to begin discussing the future look of the Blaze quickly, to create some information to go along with the misinformation. Of course, Andrea doesn’t want to make decisions about that future course too quickly because nothing will undermine the staff’s confidence more than a collection of faulty ideas that get revised a few months into its existence.
There are a lot of things to consider when contemplating the new operations of the Blaze. The paper has historically grouped its functions into five areas: state, city, sports, lifestyle, and business. It seems to Andrea that those five areas will need to get merged into two or three. The reporters, photographers, artists, and editors in those areas will still perform the same duties; they’ll just do those duties for a broader range of content than they did before. But how to decide whom to group? Some groupings seem logical to Andrea, but it may be that the staff working in those areas would find other combinations more appealing. And it seems like the degree of “enlargement” will vary a bit. Some staffers will be taking on just a little bit more, whereas others will be taking on a lot more. The paper will need both groups to perform their tasks, and perform them well.
Of course, there’s also the matter of who’s willing and able to shoulder a lot more rather than a little more. Andrea knows from experience that this can be a dicey issue. Some staffers excel at a narrowly defined set of duties but struggle once those duties are expanded. Others seem to lack any limit to what they can take on, at least in the short term. But how to tell one group from the other, aside from Andrea’s own hunches? Everyone at the Blaze filled out a bunch of assessments and inventories when corporate acquired the paper, and all that information should be in everyone’s personnel files. It may not offer definitive answers, but it’s a good bet that the information would offer at least some insights.
Asking some staffers to take on a lot more while others are asked to take on a little more could be a recipe for controversy. Indeed, Andrea’s already been getting complaints about the relative workloads across areas for years! In this regard, corporate might actually help for a change. It turns out that they tend to budget more for compensation-related expenditures in the wake of a downsizing. They’ve learned from experience that survivors sometimes need a bit of a bump to stay committed, and they’ve also learned that “downsized” occasionally need to be hired back, this time at the going rate for the job market. Corporate can justify such expenses because the downsizing still results in cost savings, even with extra for the survivors factored in. She’d have to check with Jessie, but Andrea suspects she could leverage those extra funds in a creative way, to make the new pay structure match up with the new job structure.
Certainly, there are a lot of moving parts to the kinds of restructuring that Andrea is contemplating. Although her role as editor in chief gives her the best “big-picture” sense of how all those parts look from 20,000 feet, it’s still not clear that she knows everything she needs to know (even with Jessie’s help). On the one hand, it might be helpful to involve the Blaze’s staff in the decision making as the future course of the paper gets charted. That would give them “buy-in” and ensure that all the bases are covered as a new structure takes shape. On the other hand, keeping reporters, photographers, artists, and editors on the same page is often like herding cats. What if she asks for suggestions and the staffers take off in completely different directions? Once the Pandora’s box of “input” is opened, it’s not clear that even Andrea could get it to shut again.
Although the new day-to-day work of the Blaze staff is foremost on Andrea’s mind, she can’t help but think of a bigger- picture issue that hangs over everything. Will the staffers still feel the same way about not just their jobs, but their vocations? It was hard enough when the Blaze was first acquired by corporate. Many of the staffers had been attracted to “Blaze 1.0” because it was a small-town operation. They could live in a charming place with a low cost of living and could do their work the way they wanted to. The more corporate “Blaze 2.0” brought with it a certain degree of standardization, with corporate imposing some common work practices that it had honed in other, mostly bigger papers. But still, at the end of the day, everyone was still in the newspaper business.
Even if a new structure works out, and even if the compensation issues get solved, the move to “Blaze 3.0” poses a more existential threat. Is everyone still in the newspaper business, or are they now in the web portal business? How much of their identity is wrapped up in the feeling of seeing someone read the paper at a coffee shop or pick it up off a doorstep? And what does it mean for the Blaze to focus only on local news, no longer being able to weigh in on the world and national events, issues, trends, sports, and buzz? These issues hit home especially deeply for Andrea. Not only was her father in the newspaper business, but her grandfather was as well. They used to joke that “ink was in their blood.” One day, there might not even be any ink.
Some motivational clichés could be sprinkled into the morning and afternoon briefings, of course. But Andrea’s never been the rah-rah type, and the pain of losing so many colleagues would likely cause such speechifying to fall on deaf ears. Maybe this is how encyclopedia salespeople felt, or typewriter manufacturers, once upon a time. Or maybe there’s something Andrea could do to retain some of the meaning and “romanticism” in what the Blaze does. The paper has always been so focused on the day-by-day, issue-by-issue pressures of the job. Maybe it’s missed some opportunities to do something larger for the town or the nearby campus.
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