on the death of quality...

[acroyear]

Harold Meyerson - The L.A. Times's Human Wrecking Ball - washingtonpost.com:

On Oct. 1, 1910, a bomb set by James McNamara, an operative of the Iron Workers union, then embroiled in a ferocious dispute with the Los Angeles Times, blew up the Times building, killing 21 pressmen. McNamara was arrested the following April, convicted and later sentenced to life in prison. He died in San Quentin in 1941.

The question for today is: Would a similar sentence be appropriate for Sam Zell?

Zell, for those of you fortunate enough not to follow news of the newspaper business, is the Chicago real estate magnate who last year purchased the Tribune Co., which owns the Times, the Chicago Tribune and a number of smaller papers. At the rate he's going, he's well on his way to accomplishing a feat that McNamara didn't even contemplate: destroying the L.A. Times.

And how might this be accomplished? By judging writers based on a metric that compares directly to the most useless metric of productivity in software: lines. How much copy do you have?

Doesn't matter if you actually are a concise writer who can present what needs to be said in 1 column rather than 3 columns over 2 pages, or any other useful measure of quality of work. Doesn't matter if you do weeks or months of real journailism (which is certainly a nice change of pace to the "lets just paraphrase the AP and cap it off with he-said-she-said filler and call it "objectivity", which any cheap hack can and does put out regularly out there) before putting a word to print, knowing that it's the right word, the word you can back up with real evidence.

Only quantity matters.

Harold Meyerson - The L.A. Times's Human Wrecking Ball - washingtonpost.com:

As the company prepares to shed more reporters, it has measured writers' performances by the number of column inches of stories they ground out. It found, said one Zell executive, that the level of pages per reporter at one of Zell's smaller papers, the Hartford Courant (about 300), greatly exceeded that at the Times (about 50). As one of the handful of major national papers, however, the Times employs the kind of investigative and expert beat reporters not found at most smaller papers. I could name a number of Times writers who labored for months on stories that went on to win Pulitzers and other prizes, and whose column-inch production, accordingly, was relatively light. Doing so, I fear, would only put their necks on Zell's chopping block. So let me instead note that if The Post's Dana Priest and Anne Hull, who spent months uncovering the scandalous conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and whose reporting not only won a Pulitzer but caused a shake-up in the Army's treatment of wounded veterans, had been subjected to the Zellometer productivity index, they'd be prime candidates for termination.

Which is precisely, unfortunately, what's been happening at the Times. Voluntarily or not, large numbers of highly talented editors and reporters have left. The editorial staff is about two-thirds its size in the late 1990s, with further deep cuts in the offing. A paper that is both an axiom and an ornament of Los Angeles life, that helps set the political, business and artistic agenda for one of America's two great world metropolises, is being shrunk and, if Zell continues to get his way, dumbed down.

Comments

[tchwrtr.livejournal.com]

Writers run into that "measurement" all the time. Most of our work is subjective, so it's hard for managers to really get a handle on whether we're good or not, unless they're also a writer.

I found ways to use Six Sigma to prove value beyond volume, but I've had managers to whom volume was more important. *sigh*

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

In software, we call it "k-locs" - thousand lines of code. IBM used to judge things on klocs in the good-old-days, and often you would end up with very inefficient, tons of cut-n-paste repetition (which was horrid if you cut-n-paste the code block with the bug in it to 30 different places).