Online staffers: Superstars or second-class citizens?

Newspaper Research Journal, Summer 1999 by Singer, Jane B, Tharp, Martha P, Haruta, Amon

Online newspaper staffs remain small, with salaries and benefits roughly commensurate with those paid to print employees in comparable jobs. Online editors express concerns about the pressure to turn a profit, as well as about how they and their staffs are perceived by many of their print colleagues.

The number of U.S. newspapers offering online products continues to climb rapidly, with the count topping 1,600 by early 1998 and nearing 2,000 a year later, including roughly a third of the nation's dailies.' But many of the publishers who are on the web do not seem certain they should be there. Their reasons for taking their papers online boil down to a set of related fears: fears of being left behind if they fail to protect their franchise, fears of losing existing readers and being bypassed altogether by new ones, fears of losing money especially retail and classified ad revenue - to new competitors.

Online dollars remain elusive. About a third of the papers with an online presence claim to be making money, but admittedly not much in relation to their up-front investments nor to the double-digit profits on the print side.2 Some admit they are doing it by keeping both expenses and online staff sizes to a minimum.3 While there are indications that web advertising may finally be picking up steam,4 no small number of people continue to predict that newspapers will never be profitable online, that the web is one giant black hole for publishers' cash and that their rush into cyberspace resembles nothing more than lemmings' rush over the proverbial cliff.5

So while some newspaper publishers express strong support of their online ventures,6 many are operating in a cloud of uncertainty, driven by the competing fears of becoming obsolete if they're not online and losing money if they are. Within the newsroom, those fears translate into a practical concern: how to maintain an online presence and maybe even learn something about the new medium - without bleeding the budget dry.

This study looks at how U.S. newspapers are staffing their web products and how those staffs compare with their print counterparts. Issues explored include salaries, benefits, experience and job duties.

Online newspapers

The meteoric rise of the graphics-based World Wide Web has quickly transformed the online audience into a truly mass, or at least massive, market in the late 1990s. As of the end of 1997,62 million adults, or 30 percent of the U.S. population age 16 or older, were online - a 32 percent increase in a single year. By mid-1998, about 20 percent of Americans reported going online at least once a week for news, up from just 6 percent two years earlier.7

The web has become a part of newspaper newsrooms in two ways. One has been a boom in its use as an information source. In 1994, the year web browsers attained visibility, 25 percent of print journalists reported using the internet or web in the newsroom; in 1997,92 percent said they used it, and more than half said they did so every day. More than 90 percent of journalists have individual access to the internet, and the web is increasingly used as a news source, especially during non-business hours.8

The other way journalists have become involved with the web is to start producing information for it. Pioneers in online delivery, who began combining the techniques and tools of computer-assisted reporting with multimedia formats almost as soon as they became available, initially were greeted with skepticism by many publishers who remembered all too clearly the costly videotex debacle of the 1980s. But as the decade rounded its midpoint, those publishers began opting to try again. Their commitment ranged from assigning a copy editor to send the day's stories online, to hiring someone to handle web updates and maybe a few links, to employing a corps of digital journalists to create interactive content that complemented rather than duplicated the print product.9

Little scholarly research into the working lives of these digital journalists has yet appeared, but personal war stories and trade press coverage provide widely varying accounts of everything from financial compensation to the degree of integration into the newsroom culture. A few examples:

At some newspapers, such as the Wall Street Journal, the print and online staffs are closely integrated; the Journal even reconfigured its newsroom to accommodate both staffs. Uptown, at the New York Times, the staffs are housed not just in separate newsrooms but in separate buildings.i Where the staffs do work in relative proximity, that work does not always go smoothly. Although the industry has tried to stress the benefits of integrating old and new methods and mind sets,' not everyone is convinced. "If you have full integration of online and [print] newspapers, it could be like the online bug integrating with the newspaper windshield, and I don't think it's going to be a healthy online business," says David Zeeck, executive editor in Tacoma, Washington.12