One of the
great fallacies of scientific management is that everything at the workplace
can be measured. Perhaps in a basic sales or manufacturing operation it can
(though I have my doubts), but there are plenty of areas where judgment calls
have to be made.
Reading the
recent news stories about the work culture at Amazon, I was glad I don’t work
there and never will, and I was reminded of the time our small-town newspaper
was prodded (with little success as long as I was around) to engage in its own
form of scientific management
The time
was the mid 1980s, and the paper had been going through a spot of labor
trouble, with a unionization effort that ultimately proved unsuccessful, but
that made the company take a harder look at itself. Some good things came out
of that, like performance appraisals and formal pay scales (I know, 50 years
late, but, hey!) along with some notions that I can only regard as crackpot
propositions.
Clean Desks? For Writers? Really?
One was a
suggested requirement that every desk in the newsroom should be completely
clean before the occupying reporter or editor left for the day. Supposedly this
was supposed to instill order and cleanliness to the operation, but to me it
smelled like a recipe for mutiny. I never lifted a finger to implement that
suggestion.
Many
newspaper people in those days took pride in the messiness of their desks. A
typical reporter would have on the desk surface, at any given time, notes for
various stories, a solid selection of coffee-stained government reports (with
the most necessary one at the bottom of the stack), agendas of coming meetings,
press releases needing to be rewritten, etc. These days I suppose it’s all on
the computer, but back then you actually had to touch the stuff.
A good
reporter or editor knew (or claimed to know) exactly where in the mess any
given document was and could, if you believed him or her, be able to produce it
upon demand. Scotchy Sinclair, the longtime editor of the Santa Cruz Sentinel,
had a desk that I never saw with less than three vertical feet of paper on it
at any time. In multiple piles.
That’s
tradition, friend. You don’t mess with something like that.
Two Stories, Hold the Quality
A second
recommendation that died in my arms was that reporters be required to produce a
quota of, say, two stories a day. To someone who doesn’t understand the
business, that might seem reasonable, but to someone who does, it provides an
excuse for malingering.
If all a
reporter is being judged by is how many stories are turned in, it’s easy for
someone sharp to game the system. Just take two press releases you’re given,
make a phone call or two on each one, and write them up. You can meet the quota
in half a day and spend the afternoon on the golf course or wherever. On the
other hand, if a reporter is going after the stories that should be gone after, those stories may be more difficult to
complete, and some days, it won’t be possible to do two.
A good
editor ought to have a sense of whether or not a reporter is producing, and should
be directing reporters to the stories that really need doing. That can take
longer and call for some judgment and discrimination, but it’s what leads to a
quality news product. Story quotas satisfy the bean counters — not the readers,
who are, of course, the ultimate customers.
