The Culture of a Weekly

By Henry Dubroff
October 15, 2008

The newsrooms of America’s weekly business journals do not operate in the same sort of institutional vacuum as our daily newspaper counterparts.

That’s partly because the news unit of a business weekly is a single, specialized operation involving a handful of people (up to 25 or so). There’s no separate sports department or living section to party with or play softball against. It’s also partly because a weekly business journal tends to operate as a fairly integrated business operation where departments are separated by partitions and corridors but not by floors or buildings.

In other words, when it comes to weekly business journals, size does make a difference. A newsroom of 10 to 20 journalists can easily fit into the footprint of a single floor in an office building and may be adjacent to or down the hall from the advertising department, which has about the same number of folks.

Because business journals also tend to outsource phone banks, printing, mailing and even accounting services, the circulation, production and administrative departments tend to be much smaller than those of dailies in a similar market.  And unlike daily newspapers, there are no delivery drivers and printers operating in a remote location. Instead, there is a contract relationship with a press operation and probably a love-hate relationship with the United States Postal Service, which delivers most of the weekly newspapers.

Also, even business journals that cover a large area tend to operate from a single main office. At the Pacific Coast Business Times, we cover an area more than 150 miles long (and 200 yards wide) from our single office in Santa Barbara—roughly at the economic center of our long, narrow territory. Our East Bay counterpart in Northern California and even the South Florida Business Journal also operate from one location.

That means the corporate culture is extremely collegial and management structures are very flat. There may be a little title inflation, but basically, the editor and a managing editor handle most of the supervisory duties. Departments like small business are run by a single multitasking staffer who has a small freelance budget, writes a bit, gets contributions from staff writers and builds a few pages.

Reporters often form social relationships with members of the advertising or circulation departments—they go out for drinks, go to ball games and celebrate special occasions.

At the Denver Business Journal, we ordered cakes and celebrated everybody’s birthday—an unheard of event at The Denver Post or the Springfield, Mass Union-News, where I worked previously.

At the Business Times we have a “top secret” festival committee that over the years has organized Halloween costume parties, United Way fundraisers and even once turned our offices into a miniature golf course to raise money for charity. I have had very little to do with this—it just kind of oozes out from our business journal DNA.

There are some downsides to this sort of culture, however, and they are often a good measure of how successful the organization really is in putting out a quality news product.

Being sociable with our co-workers is one thing, but the real test for a business journal is how effective the news operation is when the chips are down. That means not just getting the gang together to watch a Dodgers game but building a team that has a measure of solidarity. There’s the trust and confidence that everybody will get the job done when a big area bank goes under or when a major layoff takes place.

There really isn’t much room at a business journal for disaffected employees and malcontents. One really unhappy employee or one employee who clearly isn’t interested in pulling his or her weight is a real problem. That one person can wind up poisoning the atmosphere in the newsroom or in the whole company.

And the belief in a quality news product that is independent of advertising has to be ingrained in the attitude of every employee. Ethical conduct comes out of the respect that employees have for each other, rather than something that happens because advertising and editorial employees don’t ever talk to each other.

Everybody at the company, particularly in the news department but really across the entire staff, has to have an internal set of standards that just says no when an advertiser tries to apply undo pressure.

Because there is a lot of social interaction among staff members, the company’s policies on workplace conduct, use of alcohol, sexual harassment and the confidentiality of pay information really need to be spelled out in a handbook and reinforced from time to time.

And from time to time we also have to remind employees that there are limits to socializing and that work needs to be accomplished in a timely way or else everybody will feel free to slack off. We keep records of these incidents, and once in a while, we have to ask somebody to leave.

But, most of the time, we find ways to get along and week in and week out we rise to the challenge of getting a competitive newspaper out the door. Perhaps that’s why many successful daily newspaper employees have fond memories of their first job—at the weekly business journal.

And as the daily newspaper culture and creative environment breaks down, it is likely that more and more daily newspaper folks will return to their roots to end their careers.

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Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism