On Productivity...

The blogosphere, chockful as it is with disaffected journalists, has been all over the emerging story of Sam Zell's nittering capitalocrats bleeding the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune dry.

In the latest depressing development, a Zell underling told a group of creditors that the Tribune Company exeucutives had figured out a new way to measure the productivity of its writers, and, hence, cull the chaffe in a new, forthcoming round of newsroom cuts: just see who's writing the most words, and that person is the most best journalist!

Editor & Publisher has the specifics:

Michaels told listeners that in Los Angeles the average journalist at the Los Angeles Times produces about 51 pages a year, while in Hartford, Conn., the average is more like 300 pages a year....

...."You find you eliminate a fair number of people while not eliminating very much content," Michaels explained about the strategy.

Bearing this definition in mind, I went back to the Chicago Journal's archives to see where I'd fit in on Sam Zell's scale of efficiency during my brief stint as a reporter, in 2005. Before learning about Zell’s new analytical tool, I’d assumed I’d been an inexperienced, fairly naïve reporter, missing the point of my assignments or burying my lede about half the time. But maybe I’d been thinking about it all wrong.

Making my analysis was a little harder than I would've hoped: as Michael Miner points out, its unclear what Zell's lackeys mean by a "page" of journalism. Simple math rules out the definition you'd most likely expect from newspapermen: a page of newsprint. But most of these Tribune Company guys cut their teeth in radio, not newspapers, so that’s understandable.

Instead, I figure the execs probably meant a typed page of text, a measure they’d mostly like had to deal with in their college expository writing seminars. Using this definition, along with single-spaced, Times New Roman, 12-point, I found that a “page” works out to be about 600 words.

The results of my self-survey were relatively heartening. During a typical week, I'd been able to get about 6800 words into the paper, usually spread across 6 or 7 articles. Seeing as I'd been contracted to work 51 weeks out of the year, this meant I was on pace to produce about 580 pages a year.

The numbers don't lie: though I might have felt like a po-dunk, over-assigned cub reporter with little time to think deeply about much of what I was reporting on, I’d actually been quite brilliant. I was about twice as good as some random jerk from the Hartford Courant and six times as good as an LA Times writer! And that’s a national newspaper!