“Newsrooms” 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

Big City Newspaper: Chicago Tribune in 1975

The Chicago Tribune Marketing Department, sometime in 1975 [my guess] produced a guide to the newspaper for the educational services department of the company. It was a look, written for consumers [young ones] about how the Tribune was created — from reporter to editor to presses. The guide even had instructions on how to fold a newspaper page into a pressman’s hat. What’s nice about this guide is the photographs of so many of the people I remember working with. [And it does have a picture of me looking at a picture page.]

The Tribune at this time was publishing both morning and afternoon editions.  We called it the 24-Hour Tribune.  There were even t-shirts. Here’s a bit about that unique time:

In 1974, the Chicago Tribune became a 24-hour newspaper with fresh editions morning, afternoon and evening. The shift from being a morning newspaper to the24-hour publication cycle meant that The Tribune was available whenever a reader wanted it.

The publishing cycle begins in late afternoon with the Green Streak edition which contains late stock market quotations. Next off the press is the Midwest edition, designed primarily for circulation outside Chicago and suburbs.

The Three Star Morning Final comes next–it’s the edition you’ll find delivered to your doorstep in the mornings. The Four Star Morning Sports Final follows; you’ll find it on the newsstands in the morning with the night’s sport results. The Five Star Morning Turf Final is available later in the morning. Completing the 24-hour publication cycle is the afternoon 7 Star Final for afternoon home delivery customers and afternoon newsstand sales.

The publisher at the time of publication was Stan Cook; the editor was Clayton Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick was the person who hired me in 1972. There a nice picture of Bill Jones, one of the best editors at the paper during my tenure. Jones, who became managing editor, died way too early at age 43.

If you want a look at what it took to produce a daily newspaper, this is a good guide. For me, it is fond memories.

Pagination and a Look Into the Future of Newspapers

In 1999 I was asked to contribute to a book about pagination being published by the Society of News Design and the Association of News Editors. You can download the entire book from here.

At the end of the article I made some “bolder, out-on-a-limb” predictions:

  • Design as a unique job function in newspapers will slowly dissolve into other editing responsibilities.
  • Editing will encompass more than the technical aspects of copy editing and take on more responsibilities for the entire infopacks.
  • Computers will automatically handle most of the routine production responsibilities, freeing editors to do lust what we have always wanted them to do – make journalistic choices on behalf of their readers and the community.
  • Most, if not all, maps and charts will be produced by software. There will be fewer artists at newspapers doing “art work.”
  • The presentation of information will be of such importance for the organization that the senior editor with such responsibilities will report to the publisher.

I like my final paragraph:

Newspapers are on the verge of freeing themselves from the limitations of their production equipment. While I would not predict the end of newsprint as we know it, the era of print-centric delivery is coming to an end. We need to look beyond technology to find the solutions to organize and motivate our workforce for the new millennium. If we are successful, this is the last pagination book you will ever read.

Technology and Pagination

In 1999 the Society for News Design and the American Society of Newspaper Editors published a book about how managers could more successfully integrate new technologies into their newsrooms.  This project include a number of chapters from the leading technologists in the newspaper industry, including:

  • David M. Cole
  • Heidi de Laubenfels
  • Olivia Casey
  • Ed Kohorst

While pagination, strictly speaking, is an outdated technology, the concepts about workflow and organization are still very valid. 

I wrote about Embracing Change when it came to future technologies. There were a few things I got right:

  • Working at home, even doing newspaper design
  • Always connected to a network
  • Using databases to edit and present content
  • Constant feedback on what consumers are reading

“You May Need to Rethink Your Whole Organization”

I wrote an article the American Society of News Editors [ASNE] in October 1996 about how organizations need to rethink their structures and workflows when the introduce new technologies, such as pagination. Here’s my lead:

Pagination is an “old” technology. More importantly, pagination will not help a newspaper in the “new media” landscape of today. What’s really important are the opportunities of a publication database system. We can develop all the online, fax, and other new media products in the world, but unless we are lucky enough to be hiring dozens of new employees over the next ten years, we need to figure out better ways of using our existing resources of staff and equipment.

The article was based on a speech I gave at a Seybold Conference earlier in 1996.

Chicago Tribune Photo Request Form, 1985

An example of the Chicago Tribune’s photo request form used in 1985. Picture assignments were made through the picture assignment desk, either in the main city room or in the suburban Hinsdale, IL, bureau. Assignments were requested by either the reporter working on a story or by the source editor who is handling the story.  However, according to note Howard Finberg wrote in 1985, “the picture assignment editor of the picture editor controls photo assignment traffic and determines which story takes precedent when time and manpower are short.“

Changing The Chronicle’s Visual Image. Or Not.

In late 1986, I wrote a memo to the paper’s publisher (Richard Thieriot) and editor (William German) urging a discussion about the design of the San Francisco Chronicle.  It was a memo deeply rooted in understatement as both Thieriot and German saw little need to change the appearance of the newspaper. I urged a gradual approach, an evolutionary method of updating the typography and design of the newspaper.  Part of the argument for change involved addressing the weakening economic aspects of the paper.

However, now is the time in which we must look ahead and decide on the type of newspaper we wish to present to our current readers over the next several decades. And we need to decide on what type of paper
will be necessary to attract new readers among those who live in the Bay Area but do not read The Chronicle.

While change would eventually come to the paper, the reaction to the memo was mostly silence.

I did like making this point about the importance of design:

While design cannot keep readers, but it can attract them to the paper and let the content and editing hold them. We are missing out on readers who move to the Bay Area from other parts of the country who are accustomed to a more organized, easily readable design in their daily newspaper.

To the casual reader, the images in the memo aren’t very dramatic.  However, if you knew the Chronicle from that period, you would remember they were still using wavy rule boxes around photographs.  Yuck. Kudos to John Sullivan for his work on the prototype pages.

How the Arizona Republic Installed its 2nd Gen Pagination System

One of the most read newspaper industry technologist is David Cole, who published “The Cole Papers.”  In 1997 he sent one of his reporters, John Bryan, to write about how Phoenix Newspapers replaced its first generation of pagination with a new system from CCI Europe.  One of the reasons we selected CCI in 1995 was its ability to hold items in a publishing database. Here’s one of my quotes from the article.

Chief among the Republic strategist is Howard Finberg, longtime industry pundit, designer and evangelist who professes to be interested in pagination only as a means to an end.

“We don’t want to paginate anymore,” the paper’s director of information technology said. “I believe in publication systems that slice information into smaller and smaller pieces,” which can be used by an infinite number of information “products,” such as a web site, CD-ROM or whatever comes down the pike.

The article described how we made the transition [not quite complete when the reporter visited] and our vision for the future of newspaper publishing.

The New Newsroom

One of the challenges for newsrooms in the 1990s was the introduction of pagination technology.  While it was clear that pagination equipment would change how the newspaper would be produced, many managers failed to recognized that installing the new software (and the computers to run it) was an opportunity to rethink the workflow of how a newspaper is produced.

At 1993 Seybold* conference in San Francisco, I gave a talk titled “The New Newsroom.” The subtitles on the PowerPoint reflected my focus:

  1. How technologies are changing organizations.
  2. How organizations are changing technologies.

I argued there was a need for a new type of worker and that managers should worry more than print — audio, fax and video.  Remember, online services were just starting.

My last slide called for “techno-evangelism” and finding the leadership within the newsroom to make the changes needed.  And is a foreshadowing of my future, the slide had these bullet points:

  • Teaching yourself.
  • Teaching your staff.
  • Teaching your boss.
*Seybold Seminars was a leading seminar and “the premier trade show for the desktop publishing and pre-press industry.

How a Graphics Editor Works at the Chicago Tribune

The first edition of the journal of the Society of Newspaper Designers (SND) featured excerpts of a speech I gave the the organization’s first convention.  The gather was held in Tribune Tower, in a meeting room called Campbell Hall (if memory serves).  That meant we probably had no more than a couple of hundred folks in the room.  The editors of Design took a transcript of my speech and turned into an article.  However, I didn’t know any of this until publication.

Reading it over today still gives me lots to cringe about — I was a bit arrogant.  OK, I was a full of self-importance about this new role.  The Chicago Tribune was the leader in informational graphics.  And I was the Graphics Editor.  I wished I had remembered to talk about how this was a team activity, not a solo sport.

However, I still like my conclusion, that all of the work we do is about making it better for the audience:

You can have the prettiest looking graphics in the paper and it doesn’t mean anything  if  it doesn’t  communicate with readers. That’s the most important thing as far as the Tribune and the graphics editors go. If we’re not communicating  with  the reader, we’ve lost it all. It’s my job to go for it.

Not sure what I was going for, but I guess we did.

Here’s the article from Design