How to make your late culture early

By Don Fry

I like to divide morning dailies into “Early” or “Late” cultures, a helpful distinction for dealing with failure to get the paper out on time. Here are some characteristics of Late newsroom cultures:

• No reporter deadlines, or fuzzy deadlines (“8 to 9,” “eightish,” “early evening”)
• Nobody observing or enforcing deadlines
• Reporters coming to work in the late morning, usually elevenish
• Reporters awaiting assignments from the morning news meeting
• Reporters hanging around the newsroom into the night
• Editors suddenly remembering photos or graphics after editing the story
• Editors working until midnight, or later
• Inability to cover late-breaking news well
• Failing to meet off-the-floor deadlines
• Lots of family stress and divorces
• Failing to meet the trucks.

And here are some characteristics of Early cultures:

• Starting times determined by when business and government offices open
• Reporters and editors on staggered shifts matched to news rhythms
• Precise deadlines for each stage of story production: reporter, desk, copy desk, layout
• Negotiated deadlines for pieces that cannot make standard deadlines
• Discussion of photos and graphics in the assignment stage
• Story budgets include deadlines, lengths, photos, and graphics
• Making 90 percent of deadlines
• Fewer shocks on the copy desk
• Reporters and department heads eating dinner with their families
• Meeting the trucks.

Late as natural

Notice that the Late culture is not late because of slow people, but because of late frameworks. In a chain reaction, the whole system starts late, so copy and photos and graphics arrive late, so production starts late and finishes late.

Newsroom systems tend toward late culture. Journalists like to wake up later, hope to escape the morning rush hour, and naturally procrastinate. Managers with editor titles wait for something to edit. Planning, the essential management tool, seems uncool in a newsroom of allegedly creative spirits. And late cultures tend to get later and later, until the trucks leave without them and the yelling starts.

You can have a late culture in an Internet paper or a wire service; you simply publish news as fast as it happens and you can clear it. You can also have a late print culture if you own the printing press, the trucks, and the entire distribution system. A totally subscription paper with no competition can have a late culture.

Creating an early culture

Obviously, a competitive morning daily needs an early culture, or at least an earlier culture than most papers have nowadays. How do you shift from late to earlier?

You start at the beginning, by asking what time the sources open their offices. Then you get most of your reporters and assigning editors in early enough to start making calls in the first 30 minutes those offices are open. If your sources come in at 8:30 a.m. and you call them at 8:45, you get the person you call on the first try. If you call at 11:00 a.m., they might call you back at 2:00 p.m. They might return your call the next day.

Then you set a general reporter deadline for the entire newsroom, say, 5:00 or 6:00 p.m. Any story that cannot make that deadline, perhaps a night meeting, gets a negotiated deadline captured in the budget. Each production desk gets a deadline, right up to press start. Then you enforce the deadlines.

Those two measures begin the shift to an early culture. You can generate the other steps by comparing the two lists that started this column.

Dinner in Virginia

Now any fool can see that these two measures introduced by management into a modern newsroom would cause open rebellion, massive resignations, and picket lines.

But in Harrisonburg, Virginia, they didn’t. The managing editor of the Daily News-Record, Cort Kirkwood, decided to create a new culture by starting the working day early and introducing deadlines in a newsroom that never had any. With great trepidation, he proposed the shift to his staff and prepared to duck the rotten fruit and death threats. But his staff bought it, because they liked the idea of getting home at a reasonable hour.

Now the city editor and most of the reporters come in at 8:30 a.m., and they meet a 4:00 p.m. story deadline. Most of the reporters and the city editor go home by 6:30, and Cort enjoys dinner with his family soon after 7:00.

Wouldn’t you like to eat dinner with your family?

Fry, an affiliate of the Poynter Institute, is an independent writing coach in Charlottesville, Virginia: 804-296-6830; donaldfry@cs.com.