Get Me Rewrite!

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Under these conditions the line between telling and selling, citizen and customer, vanishes. In announcing an advertising campaign designed to change the newspaper's public image, the management of the Minneapolis Star Tribune announced that 'the goal is to change Minnesotans' perception of the Star Tribune from that of a newspaper to 'the brand of choice for information products.' To help consumers make the change, the memo continued, 'we need to move as far away from the newspaper as the point of reference as we can and focus on a product that's the most different from the newspaper. . . . And work will be done to create a personality that is positive, contemporary, and appealing to our customers of information.'

Viewed this way, the production of news becomes nothing more than a manufacturing process. Gene Roberts, editor of the New York Times, cites the example of the Winston-Salem Journal, now owned by Media General, where consultants introduced a system for classifying stories, and the amount of work each type of story should require: 'An A-1 story should be six inches or less. A reporter should use a press release and/or one or two ëcooperative sources.' He or she should take 0.9 hours to do each story and should be able to produce 40 of these in a week.'

The graphics revolution in the newsroom has hastened both the commodification and the industrialization of the newsgathering process. Following the lead of USA Today, which has pioneered the use of color graphics, newspapers have to a large degree transformed themselves from a narrative medium to a visual one. Images now typically take up about 50 percent of the the front page. Any information that is really important must be conveyed by the picture, the headline, and the graphic treatment. As on television, stories that don't lend themselves to strong graphic treatment are likely to get poor placement in the paper. The result is a bias in favor of dramaññor sometimes simply in favor of colorññand against ideas.

The increased prominence of the visual element in newspapers has also led to changes in the news production process that strangely resemble those in the auto industry. Traditionally, the graphic presentation of the news story was the final stage of the process. But that approach, which dates back to the early decades of the century, is as old-fashioned as Henry Ford's assembly line, argues Leland 'Buck' Ryan, a journalism professor at the University of Kentucky. Ryan has popularized the concept of the 'maestro session,' in which all of the members of the news teamññthe playersññare brought together under the 'baton' of a 'conductor,' who synchronizes their activity. Once the reporter has done some initial reporting, the assigning editor, the artist, the photographer, and the graphic designer are all brought together to plan the presentation of the complete package. At that initial meeting, decisions are made about the presentation of the package: What the headline and subheads are likely to say, the prominence to be accorded the story, and the appropriate photographs and illustrations. Team journalism of this kind, which, under various labels, is becoming more and more widespread in newsrooms, was modeled on widely publicized Japanese innovations in auto production.

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