That’s the way we do things here
By William M. Hartnett on Apr 12, 2007 in newspapers
Following up on my thoughts about the urgent need to flatten newsroom management structure: The next time someone in your newsroom justifies an obviously inane decision or comically outdated policy by telling you “because that’s the way we do things here,” please throw them off the roof of your building.
Seriously. If the best your manager can do to justify his or her decisions, or lack thereof, is “because that’s the way we do things here,” you owe it to the future of the newspaper industry to throw that person off the roof. Lure them up there with a memo scheduling, I don’t know, a meeting about the daily meeting schedule, then just chuck ‘em off. We’ll have our bloated newsroom bureaucracies sorted out in no time.
