The Cole Digest, September 27, 1995

To produce the Plain Dealer of tomorrow, "everyone would need to be tied together with hardware, software and mindsets," Smith said. "People would need to work closely together, consolidating functions and crossing existing department boundaries.

"All the walls would have to come down," he said.

Today, the Plain Dealer paginates more than 800 pages of its weekly total of 1100.

Executives were surprised at how quickly users embraced the new technology.

"We subscribe to training enough to get users on a workstation and producing," said Smith. "Then we enhance the training as users become proficient.

"Users constantly ask for more training and less time between the presentation of levels of training," he said. "In other words, they want to know how to use the tools we have provided to produce a quality product."

Because "training should not be one way," the Plain Dealer takes advantage of its users as "a giant resource pool for tips, tricks and shortcuts," Smith said.

Users are encouraged to "pass along information on any new hardware or software they find that will help them do their job easier, quicker or more effectively," he said.

Pagination seems to provide an emotional boost to some newsroom employees, according to Betsy Cook, an assistant professor in the department of communication at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

A former reporter and editor, Cook has specialized in assessing job burnout and stress in the newsroom. In the last few years, she has interviewed 326 reporters and copy editors at 31 daily newspapers, using a psychological questionnaire that measures burnout and stress.

Her findings are self-evident to anyone who has worked in a newsroom: One in four journalists plans to quit the paper within five years.

This figure was even higher among copy editors, of whom 39 percent said they planned to leave within five years. Not surprisingly, copy editors had higher job burnout scores than other newsroom employees.

"Copy editors have higher levels of emotional exhaustion and depression than other newsroom workers," Cook said. "They have lower levels of personal accomplishment."

The good news about pagination, Cook said, was that it "seems to increase personal accomplishment."

Pagination seems to decrease emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, she said. In other words, copy editors who paginate seem to have less job burnout than those who don't.

Cook concludes that when it comes to pagination, "copy editors want to be in on planning stages and want adequate training."

Onward.

\dmc

[THE COLE DIGEST is written by consultant David M. Cole, editor and publisher of the industry newsletter THE COLE PAPERS. The DIGEST is made available to PressLink subscribers every Wednesday at no extra charge. Send comments by e-mail to cole@plink.geis.com. The COLE DIGEST is the property of The Cole Group, a California sole proprietorship. Reproduction in whole or in part without the written permission of The Cole Group is prohibited. Copyright (C) 1995, The Cole Group. Opinions expressed are those of The Cole Group, unless otherwise noted.

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