Friday, April 16, 2004

Iraqi Freedom Truck It's not really an American operation until there's an SUV designed and named after it: America's Truck and its owners, Ed and Tonie Negrin, visited US Central Command last year to show support for the servicemembers participating in Operation Iraqi Freedom. After the September 11 attacks, the Negrins left their home in Scottsdale, Ariz. and visited 38 states in 39 days in two patriotic trucks; one painted like an American flag, the other featuring images to support Operation Enduring Freedom. This year, the Negrins are driving a new truck and supporting America's efforts in Iraq. In a newspaper interview, Ed said, "It's my aim to have people not lose that sense of patriotism." And how do the Negrins view their America's Truck project? It's our hope and prayer that this truck serves to bring you both, to your knees in gratitude to the God who loves you, and to your feet to cheer on those who have gone before you. [Thanks to EA.] 1:28:44 AM    comment [] Burning Down My Master's House, Part II As the Daily Howler continues to document the woeful decline of the New York Times, its former editor, Howell Raines, explains in the latest Atlantic Monthly some of the problems he discovered during his tenure. Some eye-opening excerpts: Oddly, this paper, which is a great engine of truth, has operated as long as anyone can remember on an internal personnel system I came to think of as management by mendacity. Great work gets the great praise it deserves, but routine work, too, is praised as excellent at the Times, and sloppy work is accepted as adequate. Some departments hastily and explicitly school impressionable reporters in shrugging off scoops by other news organizations, with the reassuring but dangerously outmoded Times maxim "It's not news until we say it's news." The debilitating corollary to this idea is that it's all right for the Times to get beaten on big stories, because when it gets around to doing them, it'll do them better. [M]y predecessor, Joseph Lelyveld, warned me that I was inheriting a generation of national correspondents who resisted traveling to news events in their assigned regions. One of this lot was quoted to me by an editor as having said he didn't need to make reporting trips because he could learn more about what was going on in his territory by using the Internet. About a decade ago several dozen Times editors convened for a retreat at Arrowwood, a sleek, soulless conference center in Westchester County. Arthur [Sulzburger] had brought along a management consultant named Doug Wesley and introduced him as our coach and facilitator. In his introductory seminar Wesley announced the lesson for the day: how to fire people. [snip] I asked why we were being given this exercise, since at the New York Times we never fired anyone. Wesley seemed surprised. What do you do with unproductive employees? he asked. We just give them less work to do, I said, to a laughing burst of assent from the other editors in the group. For people who have worked at other newspapers, the biggest shock upon coming to the Times is that the level of talent is not higher than it is. Actually, it would be more accurate to say the level of applied talent. Very few unintelligent people get hired at the Times. So what's shocking to the newcomer is the amount of coasting. Newspapers with slimmer resources and no union rules inhibiting dismissal somehow manage to closely monitor productivity. At the Times, as at Harvard, it is hard to get in and almost impossible to flunk out. All this was certainly a surprise to me, coming as I did from highly competitive, strictly supervised papers in Atlanta and St. Petersburg, as was the fact that the motivation and energy of the staff were so low. Hiring mistakes are rarely shown the door at the Times, and the paper can be stuck with them for years. After a probationary period of fourteen weeks would-be staff members get tenure for life. In one famous case a supervising editor missed the fourteen-week deadline for dismissing an unproductive newsroom staffer. The supervisor told the staffer that surely he did not want to stay, on account of a technicality, where he was unwanted. The employee disagreed, said he could live with that, and is still there a quarter of a century later. Even highly motivated people can find themselves adjusting to a slower beat. Over time the enveloping attitude on the newsroom floor has become "We can do it slower because by and by, someone on this great staff will do it better." The tendency towards manana journalism can infect newcomers as if it were carried in the air ducts, like Legionnaires' disease. Thus the pernicious world view - "It's not news until we say it's news" - gets inculcated with amazing speed, even at the news-clerk level. I worked alongside James B. "Scotty" Reston in Washington, and came to know him well as an avuncular figure who was as tough as goat guts in his analysis of staff weaknesses. When a correspondent who had clerked for Scotty and later boasted of their closeness left the paper to prtest a reassignment, Scotty dropped by my office. I was then the Washington editor, and I assumed he was going to chide me for not giving the fellow the prestige beat he thought he deserved. Instead Scotty blew out a cloud of pipe smoke and said, He never had it, did he? At its highest levels the Times operates by that kind of brutal managerial shorthand; nevertheless, established, clubbable underachievers are usually given sinecures rather than being encouraged to leave. As a professor, I was struck by the academic atmosphere at the Times as described by Raines (with all the negative connotations that the "academic" atmosphere suggests). Question: Has the Los Angeles Times surpassed the New York Times? It seems that the LA Times has broken so many more big stories recently. 12:03:20 AM    comment []

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