Financially, the paper is quite healthy. The paper’s
timberlands, mining interests, pulp and paper operations, book, magazine,
corrugated-box and greeting-card division, film, radio, television, and cable
companies, and data- processing and satellite-communications group are all
flourishing, with overall return on invested capital increasing at about eleven
percent a year. Compensation of the three highest paid offices and directors
last year was $399,500, $362,700, and $335,400 respectively, exclusive of profit-sharing
and pension-plan accruals.
But top management is discouraged and saddened, and middle
management is drinking too much. Morale in the newsroom is fair, because of
recent raises, but the shining brows of the copy boys, traditional emblem of energy
and hoe, have begun to display odd, unattractive lines. At every level, even down into the
depths of the pressroom, where the pressmen defiantly wear their square dirty folded-paper caps, people
want management to stop what it is doing before it is too late.
The new VDT machines have hurt the paper, no doubt about it.
The people in the newsroom don’t like the machines. (A few say they like the
machines but these are the same people who like the washrooms.) When the machines
go down, as they do, not infrequently, the people in the newsroom laugh and
cheer. The executive editor has installed one-way glass in his office door, and
stands behind it looking over the newsroom, fretting and groaning. Recently the
paper ran the same stock tables every day for a week. No one noticed, no one complained.
Middle management has implored top management to alter its
course. Top management has responded with postdate guarantees, on a sliding
scale. The Guild is off in a corner, whimpering. The pressmen are holding an
unending series of birthday parties commemorating heroes of labor. Reporters
file their stories as usual, but if they are certain kinds of stories they do not
run. A small example: the paper did not run a Holiday Weekend Death Toll after
Labor Day this year, the first time since 1926 no Holiday Weekend Death Toll
story appeared after Labor Day (and the total, although not a record, a
substantial one.)
Some elements of the staff are not depressed. The paper’s
very creative real-estate editor ha been a fountain of ideas, and his sections,
full of color pictures of desirable living arrangements, are choked with advertising
and make the Sunday paper fat, fat, fat. More food writers have been hired, and
more clothes writers, and more furniture writers, and more plant writers. The
bridge, whist, skat, cribbage, domino and vingt-et-un
columnists are very popular.
The Editor’s Caucus has once again applied to middle
management for relief, and has once again been promised it (but middle management has Glenfiddich
on its breath, even at breakfast). Top management’s polls say that sixty-five
percent of readers “want movies,” and feasibility studies are being conducted.
Top management acknowledges, over long lunches at good restaurants, that the
readers are wrong to “want movies” but insists that morality cannot be
legislated. The newsroom has been insulated(with products from the companies
Echotex division) so that the people in the newsroom can no longer hear the
sounds in the street.
The paper’s editorials have been subcontracted to Texas
Instruments, and the obituaries to Nabisco, so that the staff will have “more
time to think.” The foreign desk is turning out language lessons (“yo temo que
Isabel no venga,” “I am afraid Isabel will not come”). There was an especially
lively front page on Tuesday. The No.1 story was pepperoni – a useful and
exhaustive guide. It ran right next to the slimming-your-troublesome-thighs
story, with pictures.
Top management has vowed to stop what it is doing – not now
but soon, soon. A chamber orchestra has been formed among the people in the
newsroom, and we play Haydn until the sun comes up.
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