Week One: Unorganized leadership styles

Weekly reflection 1: Organizational culture and adaptation

After completing my first week as an intern at Newsday, I confess myself to be superbly perplexed.

From what I can tell, Newsday seems to be an old-style newspaper — their business and editorial model seems to fit in better with the traditional newspaper structure than today’s web-based model. To be fair, adapting the traditional newspaper model to the 21st century is a challenge no major newspapers — from the New York Times to the Washington Post — have truly been able to overcome.

Our first day, we were greeted by the newsroom’s main leaders: the Managing Editor, the Vice President, and about three other people who said they had leadership roles. To be frank, they didn’t do a good job of explaining who was who, and what their roles entail. From that moment on, it became clear that I would struggle to understand the leadership layout of the company.

From what I understand thus far, within the newsroom, which is an expansive, sprawling sea of cubicles, there are specific cubicle clusters around which different parts of the magazine work. For example, I have been assigned to the “towns” section, so the reporters sitting near me are all covering towns. There are two reporters to a town, generally speaking, and about four editors who oversee the towns day shifts. They’re also sitting in a cluster nearby, overseeing the general reporting process. People around the office move around constantly, as reporters come and go all the time as they report from the field and come back to start writing. At the same time, however, there is very little team interaction, mostly because reporting and writing don’t really lend themselves to teamwork very well.

The editors, however, do seem to work as a team, sitting in their clusters and keeping track of which reporter is doing what. Even then, though editors take a pretty hands-off approach, letting reporters do their own thing and checking in occasionally to make sure they’re doing ok.

Since towns reporters have, theoretically, been covering a specific town for a while, they’ve all got sources that keep them updated and tipping them off about story ideas. Now, since I’m an intern and completely new to the Long Island area, I’ve got no sources or people tipping me off — which, editors say, is fine, because they can assign me things to do and provide me with some contacts. When I say editors, I mean editors, plural. This week I got assignments from no fewer than four different people, which is very confusing as I’m terrible with names. The assignments themselves were pretty straightforward — a couple 200-word stories based on press releases that required minimal reporting and editing. One of the interns, who has worked at large news organizations before, was quite angry that we’d only been doing short briefs. I was actually relieved they were easing us into the job slowly, since they have their own writing style that I still feel I need to adapt to. The following week they said I would probably be out reporting more, so I am looking forward to that.

On the downside, they finally told me what my schedule is going to be looking like, and it’s not ideal. I’ll be working Tuesday-Saturday, from 10am-6pm. It’s definitely an odd schedule, but I guess someone has to cover the weekend events, and if it weren’t mandatory for reporters to work weekends, I’m sure nobody would want to do it.