In 1997 The Boston Globe, the dominant newspaper in Boston and New England, faced mounting competitive pressure to move its home delivery time up by one hour from 7 AM to 6 AM. While the paper felt some form of competition from the other local daily, The Boston Herald, and also from smaller suburban papers, it was mainly competing for relevance in an industry with declining circulation. The plan to move delivery up by one hour was a strategic decision based on the fact that the paper needed to improve its service and reach its suburban commuter subscribers, who often left home well before 7 AM. The paper felt the earlier delivery time would not only attract new subscribers, but also retain current ones. The key goal for 1997 was 6 AM delivery for 80% of its home delivery customers. The protagonist of this real-life story, Anne Eisenmenger, the project manager, discovered that she faced a myriad of problems and challenges when she began investigating the situation. The objective of our paper and presentation is to examine and discuss the problems involved in the newspaper changing its delivery deadline, then to make recommendations for the best course(s) of action. The newspaper faced many complicated and far-reaching technical challenges that were so pervasive they threatened to obscure the underlying problem: lack of leadership from top management. This failure in planning and investment brought the newspaper to the dilemma they faced in 1997. The shortage of leadership also led to the underlying personnel problems that would make changing the delivery time so challenging. There was nearly no cooperation or coordination between the various departments (editorial, production, distribution, etc.). Instead of communication, there was infighting and finger-pointing. The newsroom was the starting point of the problems. The newsroom was where editors decided which stories and features would run in the following day’s paper. Time deadlines were set for stories to be written and filed. However, editors had become fast and loose with deadlines. Of the 92 pages in a typical weekday edition, it was not an unusual occurrence for up to 72 pages to be submitted to the initial production department during the final hour before the 10:30 PM deadline. This created an enormous bottleneck that set the production departments’ problems in motion. As a solution, the newsroom should set a series of prioritized deadlines based on the time sensitivity and nature of the articles to meet an ideal submission rate. The production department believes a submission rate of 10 pages per hour would avoid backups. The entire editorial department—not just managing editor Tom Mulvoy, should be educated on the importance of 6AM delivery and how their late submissions and large last minute workload affects the production departments. The newsroom has long enjoyed a flexible schedule to get late breaking news, but rather than a single deadline, several deadlines should be implemented in an attempt to even out the workflow in production. In the composing department, where the pages of the newspaper were laid out and typeset, there were numerous problems. One of the most troubling was that page design work was done on Macs incompatible with the PC-based “pagination” system used in the newsroom. As a solution, composing should use a compatible system to make the composing process flexible and eliminate unnecessary processes. Another major issue was that there were three different methods for making pages into negatives used for printing: a) bypassing the composing room by moving directly from editors’ computers to the engraving department as full-page negatives, b) fully paginated/designed on newsroom computers so that they arrived in the composing room as full-page positives, c) done electronically or manually in composing room. As a partial solution, The Globe should shift as much production as possible to utilize “method a” thus eliminating the composing stage entirely and reducing production time significantly. Regarding hands-on work by compositors, some of the work is technically impossible to do using computers, either for technical or political reasons (i.e. union rules and constraints). Both editorial and composing departments need to reach an agreement to combine these two paths. The engraving department was one of the few bright spots in the production process. One of the few fully automated processes, each page of the paper could be scanned and sent to the engraving machine in as little as 12 minutes. From there, the engraving machine could produce each plate in 30 seconds. The biggest technical problem facing the engraving department was the practice of each press printing a complete set of pages, thus not only requiring a complete set of plates but also that printing could not commence until at least one set of plates were produced and attached to the press. We recommend that each press print only 25% of the pages required for a full edition, that way only one set of plates would be required (saving 138 minutes). Further, once the plates for the first 23 pages were produced, the first press could begin printing rather than having to wait for the remaining plates to be produced. In this fashion, production of the four portions of the pages could be overlapped in parallel rather than using a serial production process. In our estimation, this could save another 30 minutes at the printing stage. However, for this technical solution to work there would need to be enhanced communication and coordination not only between the composing department, but also with the printing department as well. Since the paper would be printed in sections and would need to be assembled at some point, engraving, printing, and mailroom would have to work together towards a common goal. As the printed papers emerge from the presses they feed directly to the mailroom. The main functions of the mailroom are to wrap and label papers for mail subscribers, insert preprinted advertising on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursday during holiday seasons, and strapping the papers into bundles for loading onto delivery trucks. The mailroom is full of conveyors, stacking machines, strapping/bundling devices and insertion machines all of which are prone to breakdowns. On the busy insertion nights the insertion machines cause major headaches due to their being directly fed by the presses at press speed. Most big market newspapers utilize buffers which allow the presses and insertion machines to function independently, allowing for more control of the process. Surprisingly, The Boston Globe does not have these buffers—it was deemed “too huge of a capital investment.” However, without buffers, any problems in the mailroom caused a “bluelight” condition forcing the presses to shut down until the problem(s) were resolved. The lack of critical, useful communication between the mailroom and the distribution and delivery department further impedes on-time production and delivery. We recommend that The Globe bite the bullet and make the huge but necessary capital expenditure by installing buffers between the presses and insertion machines (just like every other big market newspaper). Without them, the mailroom does not have the tools needed for contributing to the success of the 6 AM Project. The next stage after the mailroom was the distribution and delivery departments with their 60 big rigs (“relays”) and 54 smaller trucks (“wagons”) ready to drive the papers all over New England. However, by waiting to deal with this aspect until the papers were already stacked on the loading dock eliminated the possibility of detecting problems and correcting them before it was too late. Due to malfunctioning bundling machines, some bundles had irregular numbers of papers. Also, the order in which the various customized, advertising region-specific bundles were stacked on the loading dock had no correlation to the loading sequence required by the appropriate delivery trucks. This invariably caused major delays as the delivery foremen and drivers sorted out the chaos of the randomly stacked bundles.
Our recommendations are: 1) move bundle inspections to the mailroom stage so that preemptive action can be taken to remedy malfunctioning bundling equipment, and 2) assign a senior foreman in the delivery department to coordinate production and loading with the mailroom. To conclude our specific technical and personnel recommendations, we believe that to further add to the cohesiveness of the various departments, further recognize the complexity and difficulty, and to keep a realistic timeline, the newspaper should require each department to advance final performance deadlines by 12 minutes total in 4 minute increments in order to achieve the 80% home delivery by 6 AM goal. With six departments (newsroom, composing, engraving, printing, mailroom, distribution and delivery) this will net 72 minutes (possibly more given the exponential nature of some our recommendations) and by expecting the improvements to be achieved in three manageable and obtainable stages this should signal a reasonableness to the concerned departments and engender their participation and consent. The process of publishing a daily newspaper such as The Boston Globe is akin to a relay race, where as each runner finishes their portion of the race they hand off the baton to the next runner. In the end, the team’s success is the result not only of individual efforts but that of coordinating and strategizing the efforts of the individual runners. They need to develop organizational capabilities, set direction from the top while at the same time engaging the staff below, and focus simultaneously on the technical systems and a culture of shared goals. Clearly, leadership will need to use the right tools to help foster this cooperation and change. The staff at The Globe shared a broad consensus of what they wanted. Everyone agreed that the 6 AM delivery goal was necessary, but minimal consensus existed for how to achieve it. This put them solidly in the upper left quadrant of the Agreement Matrix. As such, the most effective tools available to management are those of leadership. Charisma, salesmanship, and role modeling should be employed to encourage the staff to reach agreement on how to achieve the organization’s 6 AM delivery goal. With this premise in mind, it is our belief that a democratic style is the most appropriate leadership style that top management should take to achieve its objectives. The middle managers and staff in each of the departments need to feel involved in the process and their input valued. This will encourage them to get on board with the project since it would be they themselves who would be planning the specific means for achieving the objectives. An emphasis on inclusiveness and openness will be necessary and also highly effective at the execution phase of the project. Early in the process, full and representative involvement in the task force by not only the managers in each department but also rank and file staff will be slow and unwieldy. However, the bonds and trust developed at that stage will pay off in the implementation stages.