“APME” Items

Newsroom Stress, 1995

Stress in the Newsroom: A Snapshot from 1995

In July 1995, the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME) conducted a survey to assess the levels of stress experienced by editors in American newsrooms. This was a follow-up to their 1983 study.  The 1995 APME Stress Survey offered a look at the emotional, physical, and professional tolls borne by editors at a pivotal time in media history. The report was chaired by Peter Bhatia, who was then at The Oregonian. [The following is a summary generated by AI.]

The world of journalism in 1995 was beginning to feel the tremors of the digital era. Pagination software was being introduced, newsroom resources were shrinking, and economic pressures were growing. But even amid these shifts, the most powerful insights from the survey remain deeply human: the pressures of responsibility, the desire for excellence, and the personal sacrifices made in pursuit of the truth.

Here are a few key findings that stood out:

A Job That Challenges—And Overwhelms

  • 90% of editors were highly committed to their work, and 62% felt highly challenged.
  • Yet only half reported having a sense of control over their responsibilities.
  • Editors were spending an average of 52 hours per week at the office, with an additional 5 hours at home.

What Fueled the Stress?

  • The top stressors: workload, understaffing, deadline pressure, and lack of resources.
  • Editors reported being “locked in” and feared being unable to change their lifestyle.
  • New pagination technology, while promising efficiency, increased stress for 67% of those who implemented it.

Mental and Physical Health Impacts

  • 41% of respondents had experienced a health issue due to job-related stress.
  • Hypertension (17%) and ulcers (9%) were among the most reported conditions.
  • Nearly half of editors said their job was “highly stressful,” with three-quarters experiencing high stress multiple times per week.

Stress at Home

  • 76% said their family was exposed to public scrutiny because of their editorial role.
  • Editors found it difficult to balance their jobs with family commitments, especially in dual-career households.
  • Marital conflicts, sleep disruption, and emotional burnout were common themes.

Coping Mechanisms

  • Editors turned to reading, music, exercise, humor, and spending time alone to decompress.
  • Alcohol and tobacco use were notably on the decline
  • Few turned to professional therapy—less than 10% reported seeing a counselor or therapist.

A Snapshot of a Changing Era

This survey, compiled and analyzed by Bardsley & Neidhart Inc., is more than just a stress audit—it is a time capsule of journalism at the edge of digital transformation. Editors were not only managing newspapers; they were managing expectations, shrinking budgets, changing technologies, and the growing emotional weight of their public roles.

As we look back from 2025, it is striking how many of the issues from 1995 remain relevant. Today’s media leaders still wrestle with technological change, financial pressures, and the challenge of maintaining editorial standards.

? Read the full 1995 APME Stress Survey here

History of Newspaper Design and Year 2000 Visions

As part of the 1989 Associated Press Managing Editors convention Des Moines, I developed a script for a slideshow about the history of newspaper design and the vision developed from the American Press Institute’s seminar on the future of newspaper design.  That seminar, “Newspaper Design 2000 and Beyond,” was help in 1988.

The goal of the APME slide show was “look back so that we might look forward.”  [The  slide show was videotaped.]  Douglas Ramsey, who was a vice president at the Foundation for American Communications, did the narration. The AP put the show together.  Nancy Tobin, who was at The Asbury Park Press, helped with the creation of the show.

I found a VCR tape of the show, which is visually terrible.  However, I’ve posted it.  One of my goals is to take the narration, which was quite nice, and recreate the show in digital format.  Stay tuned. [Update in 2021: Still the plan. Life happens.]

YouTube player

Year 2000 Viewed by 1988 Committee

Robert [Bob] Cochnar, whom I worked with at the San Francisco Chronicle, invited me to join his Associated Press Managing Editors committee about the future of newspapers.  Called the Year 2000 Committee, one of the goals of the group was to create a report for the 1989 APME convention in Des Moines.  Here’s some of what Bob wrote in a note to committee members:

To borrow an idea from Phil Meyer, who pioneered the notion that research could also be a reporter’s and editor’s tool, I’d like to divide our work into several broad segments.

I.    Things We Know For Sure About Newspapers in the Year 2000 and Beyond.
II.   Things We Think We Know About Newspapers in the Year 2000 and Beyond.
III.  Things We Need to Know About Newspapers in the Year 2000 and Beyond.
IV.   A Summing Up: What We’ve Got to Do.

Somewhere, in some file is the report.  Meanwhile, in this PDF, is some of the correspondence from committee members.

[Bob didn't put a date on his letter, so I'm guessing it was in fall of 1988.]

 

Editors Told Big Changes Needed. Did They Listen?

Even though it was 2007, I was still making speeches to editors [and publishers] about the need to embrace change and transform the newspaper business.  One such plea for change was made at a Texas Associated Press Managing Editors convention in San Antonio. A fellow trouble-maker at the event was Michael P. Smith, executive director of the Media Management Center at Northwestern.

I said that not even popular online sites can rest easy and the challenge is young people who aren’t newspaper readers.  And I talked about “control”  of content and media.

From a story published in the San Antonio Express-News:

And editors can’t forget they’re dealing with an audience that’s “digitally equipped,” as more people own devices that give them control of a medium such as digital video recorders like TiVo.

These digital devices give control.

“No one wants to give up something that gives them control, Finberg said.  Young people, especially, “want to take somebody else’s content and add to it.”

 

 

Archival transcript of Hazel Reinhardt's newspaper readership demographics talk at the 1999 APME Conference in Memphis

Changing Readers: A Demographic Warning to APME, 1999

This is a set of excerpts from a talk given by Hazel Reinhardt at the 1999 APME Conference in Memphis. Reinhardt was president of Hazel Reinhardt Consulting Services and the former Minnesota state demographer, and her subject was the one part of the newspaper business that could be forecast with confidence. The document notes that copies of her slides were provided courtesy of the Northwestern University Media Management Center, and that the boldface in the transcript was added by Kees.

Her opening argument was that demographics, unlike almost everything else the industry worried about, were not a matter of speculation.

The numbers I’m going to show you for the next 10 years, outside of some major catastrophe, are the numbers that will be realized in the United States. There is almost nothing we can imagine that will happen to change that.

The readership numbers were the sobering part. Weekday readership had fallen from 78 percent of adults in 1970 to 59 percent; Sunday had barely moved, from 72 percent to 69 percent. Education and age were the two powerful predictors — 71 percent of college graduates read on a typical weekday versus 40 percent of those with less than a high school education, and 71 percent of adults 65 and older versus 45 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds. Broken into generations, the pattern was unmistakable: Pre-boomers at 70 percent, Baby Boomers at 58 percent, Generation X at 47 percent.

It’s a mystery to me that we could have known about this for so long but seemed to not want to talk about it: Each generation of younger people is reading less or less frequently.

From there she walked the audience through four population changes — an aging population, growing racial and ethnic diversity, a widening gap between rich and poor, and the concentration of population in certain regions and metros. She spent the most time on aging: Boomers were then 42 and 43, not 50; fertility was low; the number of Americans over 100 was projected to grow from roughly 37,000 in 1990 to about 137,000 in 2010 and 850,000 by 2050. Households with children would not grow; empty nesters would. Editors who had built their sections around “what’s of interest to families” were going to need another hook.

The hinge of the whole talk was Generation Y, which contributed only 15 million adults in 1998 but would add 65 million by 2010 — 29 percent of all adults. Everything depended on how that generation behaved.

If Generation Y reads at the same level as Generation X, overall daily readership will be below 50 percent by 2010 — 45 percent by 2015. Following that train of logic, the last American reading a newspaper would be observed in 2078.

Reinhardt offered a reason for hope — surveys showed Generation Y as more optimistic, more community-minded, more involved than Generation X — and then framed the challenge as a question the room had a very short window to answer:

The challenge to newspapers is how and what do we need to do to make a larger proportion of them newspaper readers than Generation X?

She also dismissed the industry’s favorite consolation, that people pick up the habit as they age. Asked exactly that in the Q&A, she was blunt:

If you did not read a newspaper when you were 35 and you did not read one when you were 45, why would you suddenly take it up at 55 or 65? You have established patterns.

You have a few safe years. Do not be lulled. You have a few years when you have the Boomers and Pre-boomers who are big readers with you. The future is whether you can get Generation Y.

Reading this in 2026, the arithmetic has long since resolved itself, and not in the direction the hopeful reading allowed for. What stands out now is not the forecast but the framing: Reinhardt was telling a room full of editors that the crucial period was the next five to 10 years, and that working on it that day was “none too soon.” Those were the same years the industry spent arguing about what to put on its websites. The demographic clock she described was running the entire time.

Typewritten memo from editor Robert J. Cochnar to the APME Year 2000 Committee outlining a study plan for newspapers

Focusing a Committee on the Year 2000

This is a memo from Robert J. Cochnar, vice president and editor of the Anderson Independent-Mail in South Carolina, to the members of the Associated Press Managing Editors Year 2000 Committee. He had asked the committee what it should study during its year of work, and the replies — enclosed with the memo, from papers all over the country — make up the bulk of the packet.

As I suspected, any discussion centering on the future is opening a very large can of worms. I asked you for your thoughts on the projects we might take on during the study year and you have responded. Boy, have you responded.

I’m in this document twice: once as a new addition to the committee, and once in the membership list, at 120 E. Van Buren St. in Phoenix.

Incidentally, I’ve expanded our committee a bit with some distinguished folks who have expressed their willingness to add their expertise to the hopper. They are Bob Haiman, who runs the Poynter Institute, and Howard Finberg, assistant managing editor for graphics at the Arizona Republic.

Cochnar’s first concern was not duplicating the work of the ASNE Future of Newspapers Committee, chaired by Ron Martin, or New Directions for News. So no prototypes. Instead he proposed a structure that still strikes me as a smart way to organize thinking about the future:

I. Things We Know For Sure About Newspapers in the Year 2000 and Beyond.
II. Things We Think We Know About Newspapers in the Year 2000 and Beyond.
III. Things We Need to Know About Newspapers in the Year 2000 and Beyond.
IV. A Summing Up: What We’ve Got to Do.

Not essays. An introduction, a conclusion, and in between, well-organized snippets from the literature and from smart people inside and outside the business — contradictions allowed, sources required. Cochnar described the goal as “a sort of extended data bank, or almanac, of facts, ideas and notions” that an editor could cherry-pick from a table of contents. He also liked a committee member’s suggestion that it all be treated as an interim report, with annual updates from future committees on the future, which he thought should adopt Satchel Paige’s line:

“Don’t look back; something may be gaining on us.”

The work was split into two groups: George Blake of the Cincinnati Enquirer on content and production, Susan Miller of Scripps Howard on everything else — circulation, advertising, competition, legal trends. Doug Ramsey at the Foundation for American Communications had proposed a co-sponsored committee meeting; Cochnar was thinking June, in Atlanta.

The enclosed correspondence is the real reward here. Tom Stites of the Chicago Tribune argued for starting with the underlying trends, a point Cochnar quoted back to the committee:

“the trends that underlie all the other trends are demographic and psychographic. This will tell us more about our readers than almost anything else, and who our customers are will affect many other trends.”

Stites also noted that Alvin Toffler wrote “Future Shock” on a personal computer but never mentioned personal computers in the book — a warning I’ve repeated in one form or another for most of my career. Others wrote about pagination and electronic photo handling reshaping newsroom structure, about classified advertising eventually moving to interactive electronic media, about retailing shifting away from the big department stores, about recruiting and keeping women and minorities, and about owners with no history in journalism buying profitable newspapers.

Reading it now, what stands out isn’t what the committee got wrong. It’s how much of it the industry saw coming and how little of it changed anyone’s behavior in time. And a small note of personal history: Bob Haiman joined this committee running Poynter, an institution where I’d spend a good chunk of my later career.

Cover pages of the Associated Press Managing Editors 1995 committee report on journalism education

APME’s 1995 Report on Journalism Education

The 1995 Journalism Education Committee of the Associated Press Managing Editors set itself a straightforward assignment: go back to the committee’s own 1984 study of journalism schools and see how it had held up. Ham Smith of Washington and Lee University, who wrote the lead section, answered in five words — “Mostly, it seems, not much has changed.” The committee was chaired by Deanna Sands of the Omaha World-Herald, with vice chairmen George Kennedy of the University of Missouri, Marcia Bullard of USA Weekend and Mary Dedinsky of Northwestern.

The report opens with a line that still describes the terrain pretty well:

Journalism education has been called everything from an oxymoron to the last best hope for professional ethics. The truth, as usual, lies somewhere between the extremes. One sure thing, though. Thereu2019s no better way to stir up a passionate discussion than to ask educators and professional journalists whatu2019s ahead.

Smith lays out the structural mismatch between newsrooms and J-schools: about 80 percent of entry-level daily newspaper jobs went to journalism majors, while fewer than 20 percent of journalism students were in the news-editorial sequence. Small papers wanted graduates who could work the first day; big papers wanted an education and hired five years later from the small papers. Paul LaRocque reports on a survey the committee mailed to 202 journalism schools, accredited and non-accredited, which drew 128 responses u2014 a 63 percent return u2014 measuring schools against the 1984 recommendations.

The sharpest material is about accreditation. Bob Giles, then editor and publisher of The Detroit News and president of the accrediting council, had told a February gathering of deans at the University of Maryland something the American Journalism Review called an extraordinary statement:

u201cJournalism education still seems to fall uncomfortably between universities and the industry. Neither has embraced journalism education. Too many universities seem more comfortable with the idea of mass communications as a research-based discipline, while the industry wants graduates who can do journalism, but is not willing to make a full commitment of support.u201d

u201cAs the number of accredited programs has increased … it is clear that we can no longer give that assurance.u201d

George Kennedy’s chapter tracks the fight over Giles’ proposal to recognize merit beyond the minimum standards u2014 first framed as a u201ctwo-tier system,u201d a phrase quickly abandoned. Florida A&M Dean Robert Ruggles: u201cYouu2019re either accredited or youu2019re not. Degrees of accreditation make no sense.u201d Jerry Ceppos of the San Jose Mercury News, APME’s representative on the council, was on the other side: u201cAny time you can get journalism education to raise standards, thatu2019s a good thing.u201d Maryland’s Reese Cleghorn had advice for editors who wanted to help u2014 get to know the programs, support the good ones, u201cAnd increase starting salaries.u201d

Berl Schwartz of Michigan State interviews Giles at length. Carol Nunnelley of The Birmingham News profiles the University of Alabama’s Institute for Communication Research, whose biggest customer was Southern Progress Corp. And Dick Thien of Nebraska closes the report with u201cA Dangling Conversation,u201d a bus ride in which an editor and an educator answer for each other’s sins without knowing they are seated side by side. It ends with both of them giving the same answer to the same question:

u201cI love it u2014 and if I do it right I can make a difference.u201d

Two passages date the document usefully. Lawrence McConnell of the Tampa Tribune, whose paper u201cled Media Generalu2019s leap into cyberspace with Tampa Bay Online on Prodigy,u201d says flatly: u201cIf there is such a thing as journalism school graduates prepared for this field today, I have yet to meet them.u201d And John Driscoll, retired from The Boston Globe, notes that ASNE offered a videotape on the future of journalism at cost, $10, hoping it would spark curriculum discussions. u201cAlas, only 70 were sold.u201d

I keep this one because the argument in it never ended. A decade later I was at Poynter building News University, and much of that work was aimed squarely at the gap this committee was describing u2014 professionals who wanted training and educators who wanted respect, with not much traffic between them. Reading it in 2026, with journalism programs still being merged, renamed or closed, and with AI now doing to the newsroom what the Internet was doing in 1995, the committee’s central finding holds up better than anyone should want it to.