Publishers soon will find labor pool awash in higher costs
"It's not just pay. You need to move people into interesting jobs
and give them the soft stuff."
The New York Times Co. announced last month that it would offer a
tracking stock in Times Co. Digital, its Internet business division. It is expected that
other old media companies will follow suit as they try to finance what many of them see as
the necessary expansion into new media, made necessary as they try to protect old
franchises and prepare for the future.
As one company official said (long before the tracking stock was
proposed), "It's not a business -- yet -- but it's a cost of us staying in
business."
The dry legalese required of an SEC filing does little to hide some of the
enormous expenditures being made, with the company losing $11.7 million in the first three
quarters of 1999. Although not too shabby by Internet standards -- Amazon.com lost $175
million in last year's fourth quarter alone -- losses like that make old media
shareholders nervous.
Although the Times Co. is in an SEC-enforced quiet period and could not
comment, the filing said the income from the sale would go to "general corporate
purposes, including promotion and advertising, and domestic and international
expansion." Those general corporate purposes, according to water cooler gossip at the
paper, include keeping the staff at TCD happy.
Keeping new media staff happy is increasingly tough. The Washington Post
Co. recently promoted Christopher Ma to a corporate vice president spot from the post of
senior VP of its Internet business group. Across the country in Phoenix, Howard Finberg,
already director of technology and information strategies for Central Newspapers Inc., was
named to the additional post of vice president for CNI Ventures, the company's new unit
for managing investments in the Internet and technology.
These new jobs presumably carry enough extra bennies to keep these
high-powered employees -- and everything they know -- down on the digital farm. One of
Times Co. Digital's vice presidents, Chris Neimeth, recently bailed out. He took the chief
executive spot at Real Media, something Times Co. Digital would have been hard pressed to
counter.
Unfortunately, not everyone can be a veep or CEO. Are we out of luck? No,
for staffers in less rarified air, there are things newspaper new media sites can do to
keep underlings such as me happy. As Finberg puts it, "It's not just pay. You need to
move people into interesting jobs and give them the soft stuff."
Newspapers have interesting jobs, as well as enough soft stuff to go
around. For starters, we have real things to play with, interesting people to work with,
and the biggie, news.
"If you're selling shoes, you're selling shoes," Finberg said.
"You can add cool features [to a web site], but they're just cool features to sell
shoes."
Rusty Coats, who had an 80 percent churn rate as on-line editor at the Sacramento
Bee, where his staff was constantly poached by Silicon Valley companies, now runs the
web site of the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, where his churn is, as he says,
"at newsroom levels, a mere 15 percent."
Part of that he attributes to being in a less technologically demanding
culture and part to more of a feel for the industry.
"There's a huge level of ownership on media web sites," Coats
said. "These people are attached to it in a fundamental way, as reporters and
photographers are to the print product -- a low-level religion. When these portal-in-a-box
companies call, people say, 'That's not why I'm on this Earth.'"
Minneapolis, though not as competitive as Sacramento for tech wizards, is
tough enough, keeping Coats on his toes for staff retention. "Some days you can
listen to phones ring up and down the aisle," he said, "headhunters calling the
next number on the list, hunting for staff."
Elizabeth Osder is a print veteran who jumped to newspaper new media; she
left the precursor to Times Co. Digital for iXL, an Internet consulting company where she
helps newspaper companies come to grips with new media. Osder has her ideas on how to keep
staffers.
"You have to understand what work people are doing in this
business," Osder says. "You have to give them engaging work and the freedom to
do it. But if you don't keep compelling work in the mix, they will leave."
For Mark Swendra, on-line editor at SavannahNow, the web version of
Georgia's Savannah Morning News, soft stuff isn't enough. For him -- and his former
employees -- money talks.
"I'm staffless at the moment," Swendra said. "If they want
to stay in Savannah, there's not much out there in terms of competition. But particularly
the young, they look at Atlanta or Charlotte. We pay in low 30s, and jobs there pay in 50s
and 60s, with so many perks, so many incentives. And they are gone."
We've learned how to compete with other media for advertising. Maybe it's
time we learned to compete for staff.
-- Steven E. Brier
From NEWSINC.,
Feb. 14, 2000, Copyright © 2000,
All Rights Reserved.
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