Goodbye copy desks, hello trouble?

Newspaper Research Journal, Spring 1998 by Russial, John

Reengineering

The impetus to eliminate the copy desk is consistent with broad organizational changes that have been sweeping through corporate America for more than a decade.l9 To understand what's driving this idea, one must look into the area of business management, particularly the idea of reengineering. The term itself is one of those neologisms that copyeditors love to hate, but the idea is key to much of what is happening in the newspaper industry and to some of what is happening to copyediting. What exactly is reengineering, and why do people think it's such a good idea?

The concept comes from the wider world of business and industry, where managers are reconfiguring their organizations to meet new market demands. Management scholars, such as Michael Piore and Charles Sabel, and business consultants, such as Michael Hammer and James Champy,20 point out that many business processes in use today were designed to meet the needs of an earlier era. Elaborate command and control bureaucracies with clear lines of supervision enabled corporations to keep track of production and distribution in an era of rapid growth and increasing demand.

In traditional organizations, workers perform highly specialized tasks and supervision is highly structured. Information flows up and decisions flow down. Consultants say that this highly bureaucratic form of organization is inefficient and counterproductive in an era of rapidly changing global markets, such as the 80s and 90s have brought. They argue that a variety of organizational changes, such as flattening of hierarchy through elimination of management levels, cross-training of employees and team approaches to work, enable companies to dramatically reduce planning and production time and thus add value more quickly. Reengineering is a form of reorganization that makes use of these and other approaches.

Consultants point to reengineering case studies that show dramatic gains in productivity, profit, quality and cost reduction. Before a successful reengineering, work typically is divided into highly specialized tasks with one job classification handling one task. After reengineering, the same (or more) work is done more quickly by fewer workers. A fundamental idea is that computerization can make it possible for employees to handle a much wider range of tasks. The crucial point is that specialization added little value to the product that could not have been added by a single worker equipped with the proper information, tools and training.

Reengineering challenges assumptions about what needs to be done and who needs to do it, and if it finds those assumptions wanting, abandons them and creates new processes based on new assumptions. Another element, which consultants acknowledge but typically do not dwell upon, is that reengineering often means loss of jobs. Reengineering newsrooms

It is difficult to pick up a newspaper trade journal these days and not find somebody arguing that newsrooms are ripe for reengineering. Topic teams and design / presentation desks are two examples of, if not exactly reengineering, something approaching it.