Twin Cities journalists' assessment of topic teams

At the Star Tribune, which implemented the team system a few months before the Pioneer Press and got most of the trade press coverage, thenPublisher Joel Kramer wrote that all employees should have a chance to influence how the company operates and how their work contributes to its goals. "Hundreds of supervisors were trained to interact in an empowering environment," he wrote.lb The "culture of empowerment" was an effort to build more teamwork. "[R]eorganization is unleashing employee energy in the cause of creating our own future, instead of letting the future happen to us.""7

The team system is not without its critics." Willis and Willis note that a contributing factor in the potential failure of a team system in the newsroom is the high turnover among editorial staff. "Three to five years might be needed to establish a true participative atmosphere," they said. With a change in management, a new level of trust is needed for each new editor, they said.19

Doug Underwood, an author critical of many management trends in the newsroom, said the language of empowerment and culture change is an attempt to subordinate the news to marketing goals of management. "The management says we must now work in teams. We are going to bring in design people and graphics people and reporters and have them all sit down with an editor - who has never demonstrated any great writing or journalistic skill - and spend a lot of time shaping a story. I'm sorry. That's just another way of reaching deeper down into the process and exerting more marketing control over your reporters."20

One might also argue that newsroom topic teams are not true teams. John Russial notes that "skills among newspaper team members tend to be more similar than complementary, and individual performance remains a key element in reporter assessment."21 Goal achievement is one critical function of the team system, and in a business where the product is information, measuring output can be problematic. What value can be assigned to a news story? A headline?

Russell's before-and-after content analysis found that when an Oregon newspaper instituted a health and science team, there was an increase in the amount of attention paid to health and science stories in the newspaper.22 He noted, however, that in the absence of an unrealistic expansion in the amount of newshole, all topic teams could not show the same sort of increase in coverage and play unless other areas traditionally covered in the newspaper were going to receive less coverage or no coverage at all.

Star Tribune, Pioneer Press teams

The Twin Cities newspaper market is highly competitive, despite the fact that the (Minneapolis) Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press are published in different cities. In fact, managers at the two newspapers routinely refer to the two cities as the "east metro" (St. Paul) and "west metro" (Minneapolis) as a way to indicate that their market really encompasses both cities and the surrounding suburbs. The Star Tribune opened a news bureau and began distribution of a St. Paul edition of the newspaper in 1987. The Star Tribune, purchased by McClatchy Newspapers in November 1997, circulates 393,800 daily and 678,000 Sunday newspapers, while the Knight-Ridder-owned Pioneer Press' circulation is 203,000 daily and 270,600 Sunday. The Star Tribune newsroom employs about 360; the Pioneer Press newsroom employs about 240. The Newspaper Guild of the Twin Cities chapter represents members in the two newsrooms.