AN EDITED WORK BY GEORGE SYLVIE

Title Newsroom Decision-Making: Under New Management

Author George Sylvie

Layout Design Diana Esteves

Cover Art Ana Lisboa

Publisher Mediaxxi Formalpress

Collection Coleção Mediaxxi

e-book version Mediaxxi | Formalpress

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1st Edition - 2012

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Ficha Técnica

CHAPTER 1

PREFACE

INDEX

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

Media Decision-Making: Under New Management BY GEORGE SYLVIE

Digital Decisions in Online Newsrooms BY AMY SCHMITZ WEISS

Building New Cultural Mindsets: The Editor & The New Ecosystem BY GEORGE SYLVIE

Burnout in The Newsroom: Measuring The Effects of New Media Tasks on Journalists BY BRAD L. RAWLINS AND RAMONA WHEELER

16

09

45

77

127

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

Managing Work Identities in The “New” Newsrooms BY AMBER HINSLEY

Implications of Meta-Analysis Findings for Newsroom Decision Making: A Proposal BY LI-JING ARTHUR CHANG

One Product, Three Markets: How Market Segmentation Informs Newspapers About Their Online Readership BY HSIANG IRIS CHYI, MENGCHIEH JACIE YANG, GEORGE SYLVIE, SETH C. LEWIS, AND NAN ZHENG

Systemic Selection BY GEORGE SYLVIE

257

223

193

159

9

I am not the most innovative person I know. Ideas usually just do not simply dawn on me. They take their time, arriving in bits and pieces, quickly and slowly, until they seem to somehow magically crystallize. And even then, I never know to what they will lead; I only know that the adventure usually is worth the trouble. That’s the case with Newsroom decision-making: Under new management. Several incidents constitute signal occasions. For example, there was August 2006 – when as a visiting scholar at the Media Manage-ment Transformation Centre (MMTC) at Jönköping University in Sweden – that I was able to be a student again in Robert Picard’s seminar discussion on distribution and media retail value chains. I didn’t just learn how stationary my mind had become as it viewed the declining state of newspapers, I started to see that newspapers could only blame themselves – and their managerial inertia – if things continued to flag. Freedom was theirs for the taking and, sud-denly I, too, was free. I wondered why the industry wasn’t grabbing its opportunities. Trained as a free-will Catholic, I read about all the things that influence people’s decisions. Frank Fee’s application of the sense-making concept to the Pittsburgh newspapers’ merger struck a particular chord, as did the chance to work with Peter Gade of Oklahoma for a piece on the coming convergence and digitiza-tion’s impact on newsroom management in Journal of Media Busi-ness Studies. It didn’t hurt to be invited to discuss ecosystems for Eli Noam’s conference at Columbia University on transformed media professions.

But putting together a book takes good luck as well. First, I was

PREFACE

10 GEORGE SYLVIE

asked by the wonderful people at Media XXI to do the book. Sec-ond, my peer network tree was fruitful enough to yield some nifty colleagues who were working on decision-related studies, agreed to contribute, and were gracious enough to respond positively when critiqued. Third, I was blessed by the University of Texas at Austin and the MMTC with a fortuitous work schedule and travel funding, respectively, that allowed me to devote time to this work and others. Fourth, I have an understanding family that knows that when I’m writing a book, I’m usually deep in thought and interruptions should be kept at a minimum. Finally, Kathleen Looney Sylvie, the greatest wife in the world, lets me bounce crazy management ideas off her no matter how late at night or how busy she is. LESSON LEARNED

Aside from the value of good editing skills honed by my years as an editor at The Shreveport Journal (may she rest in peace), I under-stood the wisdom of being flexible. At least two authors backed out of this project at the last minute; replacing them tested not only my patience but my ability to fit diverse ideas into a book focusing on the minds of editors and managers.

Asking the contributors to entertain that thought in their work plumbed the depth of their perspectives and my own. In 1983, for the late Alfred (“Fred”) Smith’s “Practice of Communication Schol-arship” class back at Texas, I argued that a newsroom also is, in the broadest sense, a classroom – complete with its own petty rules and regulations and a teacher in form of the mid-level editor. Such “teachers,” I reasoned, required professional training if the newspa-per’s content was to ultimately improve. “It is the decision-making process,” I wrote, “that is at the heart of the argument for increased newspaper management training … (and) the necessity of knowledge