View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository TOPIC TEAMS IN THE NEWSROOM: A QUALITATIVE INQUIRY INTO HOW THEY WORK (OR DON’T) Leslie-Jean Thornton A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Chapel Hill 2006 Approved by Advisor: Patricia A. Curtin, Ph. D. Frank Fee, Ph. D. Steve May, Ph. D. Mary Alice Shaver, Ph. D. Ken Smith, Ph. D. © 2006 Leslie-Jean Thornton ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT LESLIE-JEAN THORNTON: Topic Teams in the Newsroom: A Qualitative Inquiry Into How They Work (Or Don’t) (under the direction of Patricia A. Curtin, Ph.D.) Newspaper newsrooms in the 1990s, hard-hit by financial pressures and steady declines in circulation, sought ways to be more efficient and attract more readers. One result was the creation of topic teams: groups of journalists assigned to produce reports on topics deemed to be of interest to targeted readers. As newspapers reorganized to enable such teams, newsrooms became more participatory and less authoritarian, altering decades of journalistic routines, culture, and job descriptions. Although the first experimenters were greeted with jeers and suspicion, topic-team newsrooms were widespread by the turn of the century. This study is the first to contextualize the adoption of topic teams in the United States in terms of history and journalistic experience. In-depth interviews with topic-team journalists yielded insights into management, professional values, newsroom practices, and the interaction of all three. Within a continuum, three types of teams emerged: negative, cohesive, and synergistic. Negative teams, which were the least functional, were associated with the highest degree of management control and the lowest degree of reward for the team member. Synergistic teams offered the highest reward with the least degree of management control. Cohesive teams were moderate in both regards. Management risk appeared greatest at both extremes. A model of topic team instrumentality, using these findings, is proposed. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Perhaps every researcher feels a particular tie to people who yield rich data and compellingly personal insights simply because they were asked to in the name of knowledge. This study bursts at the seams with their generosity, but it also speaks eloquently of the participants’ love of what they do, their belief that what they do matters, and their willingness to undergo rigors and challenges to continue doing their jobs. If there is any “takeaway” idea with hopeful meaning for journalism as a whole, it is that. I owe particular thanks to Meg McGuire, who pointed the way to this doctorate, and to the Freedom Forum, which gave me a fellowship to do it. It would not have been possible without the generous help of my chair, Patricia A. Curtin; committee members Frank Fee, Steve May, Mary Alice Shaver, and Ken Smith; Susan Keith, constant friend and research colleague; Deborah Gump, who was there from the beginning; and my husband, Randy Jessee, who was the first to say, “Why not research topic teams?” and the one to share a whoop of joy at the end. I am grateful to my colleagues at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University for encouragement and support. Particular thanks go to Marianne Barrett, associate dean, for protecting my time and urging me on. I close in loving remembrance of my mother, Jean DeVoe Ptacek, and with love to my father, John C. Ptacek, Jr., and brother, John C. Ptacek, III. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1 Newspaper as product 2 Profitability 4 Teams 6 Topic teams 7 Overview 9 Justification 10 BACKGROUND 16 Readership and topic teams 17 Readership studies, 1978-1991 20 Soft, not hard, is heard 21 Key topics 25 News topic clusters 26 Missing readers 28 Reader as editor 30 Changing content and presentation 33 The 25/43 experiment 35 v Reader friendly 39 Profitability 42 Targeted circulation 44 Newsroom anxiety and change 48 Protest 49 2 LITERATURE REVIEW 54 Topic teams 54 Focusing on one topic team 57 Topic teams at two newspapers 60 A national trend toward topic teams 64 Organizational change at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch 69 Organizational change at the “Range” 72 Summary 77 Newsroom structure and management 79 The changing newspaper 79 Structural ties between topic teams and public journalism 87 Newsroom structure 91 Newsroom management in practice 95 Shifting managerial roles 99 Summary 104 Journalistic routines and newsroom sociology 105 vi Organized reporting: the beat 106 Beat-related influences on news content 112 Newsroom sociology 119 Summary 124 Professional values 125 Characteristics of the profession 126 Overview of values 134 Orientation of the 1990s 141 Summary 149 Team management and dynamics 151 A business perspective 154 Groups, teams, and networks 158 Group and team dynamics 162 Teams in practice 169 Summary 175 Summary of the literature 176 Research questions 178 3 METHODOLOGY 181 Research procedures: qualitative methodology 181 Analytic induction 182 vii In-depth interview 184 Reflexivity and reactivity 187 The sample 189 Analysis 192 4 FINDINGS 197 Participants 197 Analysis 200 Topic team effectiveness 201 Individual ramifications 234 Professional dimensions 242 Summary of axial and open coding 252 5 DISCUSSION 256 Limitations of the study 257 Relating findings to research questions and literature 258 Relationship of business, management and journalism 262 Journalistic routines and professional values 265 Topic team instrumentality and a proposed model 268 Implications for management 273 Implications for the profession 276 Implications for educators 280 Implications of the model of topic team instrumentality 282 viii Directions for future research 285 BIBLIOGRAPHY 289 ix LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 4-1. Coding Levels for Topic Team Instrumentality………………………………. 255 5-1. Model of Topic Team Instrumentality………………………………………… 288 x CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION When editors at the Orange County Register began assigning reporters to “everyday” topics as a way to attract readers and help reprioritize the newsroom, the reaction from their peers wasn’t all that they had hoped. “New age” and “part of an attempt to create a feel- good-about-yourself environment” jeered Newsweek in a brief report on the Register’s innovation.1 But the Christian Science Monitor saw something more. It headlined its article “Experiment at California Paper May Redefine Journalism for the ’90s.” “It may be the only paper in America that covers shopping malls as a full-time beat,” wrote Howard Kurtz in The Washington Post. “Some of these malls get 50,000 to 60,000 people a day,” the shopping mall reporter, Jennifer Lowe, told Kurtz. “One mall here gets more people a year than Disneyland. We’re trying to reach people in their everyday lives.”2 Soon, newspapers across the country had teams of reporters doing the same thing. It was 1990. The Register, a 380,000-circulation daily in southern California, was locked in a fierce war for suburban readers with the 1,225,189-circulation Los Angeles Times, 1 “Periscope: New-Age News,” Newsweek, 5 March 1990, 6. Also William Glaberson, “The Media Business: Press,” New York Times, 10 January 1994, D6. 2 Howard Kurtz, “Slicing, dicing news to attract the young: Florida paper aims to buck trend of declining national readership, Washington Post, 6 January 1991, A1. See also “Pink Flamingo Journalism,” in Howard Kurtz, Media Circus: The Trouble With America’s Newspapers (New York: Random House, 1993), 376. as of that year the largest metropolitan daily in the United States.3 Newspapers nationwide were in a losing competition against multiple factors that included a burgeoning cable industry, a fledgling World Wide Web, rental movies, television, computer games, video cassette recorders, niche-market publications, waning interest in public affairs, increasingly busy lifestyles, changing family and job patterns, and a near exodus from urban to suburban life. Readership and profitability were watchwords of newspapers of the 1980s and 1990s in the United States. The quest to stanch further loss of one and to boost growth of the other led to evaluation, experimentation, and change in the industry and the profession. One 1990s innovation was a system of “topic teams,” wherein newsrooms were organized into semi- autonomous story-development teams of journalists grouped by the subject on which they were to report. As the topic teams’ names suggest, they focused attention on broad content areas tailored to readers’ concerns – as with the Register’s “Getting Around,” “Learning,” “Cities,” and “Southern California Culture” teams or the Virginian-Pilot’s “Body and Soul” and “Public Life” teams. But topic teams were also born of a new interest in adapting business management practices to benefit newspaper production during a time of downsizing, ownership changes, and economic challenge. Newspaper as product The newspaper industry relies on readership and circulation for the success of its “product” as a marketable commodity to advertisers: circulation figures are “sold” to 3 Circulation figures for 2005 place the Orange County Register at 303,419 daily (371,046 Sunday), and the Los Angeles Times at 907,997 daily (1,253,849 Sunday). In 2005, it was the second largest metropolitan daily in the United States, trailing The New York Times. 2 advertisers as an indication of how many people will see the advertiser’s message.4 In the early 1990s, as readership figures continued a four-decade decline, the editorial and business sides of the industry jointly and separately explored ways to attract more readers. Market research was employed to determine not just who was reading and who was not. Answers to questions as to what people wanted to read in a newspaper were factored into lists of desirable topics and services.