Aldam hired Myers for the job in the late summer of 2006. He told Myers he wanted her research to help guide the newsroom executive team’s decision on which CMS to select. Rather than choose a product and reorganize newsroom functions around it, Smith, Aldam, and an advisory committee made up of newsroom leaders wanted to design the ideal newsroom, and then find a front-end system that fit. But even more than a recommendation for technology, Aldam hoped Myers’ work would provide a platform for newsroom leaders to consider a total newsroom reorganization. “We wanted to be known as a content creator of value, not just a regurgitater of the same information you’d already heard or seen 24 hours earlier,” Aldam says.

One challenge, especially for those in the business for many years, was to break free of a deep-rooted philosophy that newspapers could not make mistakes. Accuracy and detail—getting it right—was the modus operandi for most newspapers, including the Times Union . Smith describes his own drive for perfection with a story about how he once spent weeks considering whether to change the size of the paper’s rule—lines separating stories—by a half point. “The culture of newsrooms and the drive for perfection inhibits creativity,” Smith says.

Myers began studying the Times Union ’s newsroom in August 2006. By November, she had conducted 69 interviews with staff, including managers and representatives from the photo, news, and Internet departments. She carried out most interviews in groups and others in individual, one- to two-hour meetings. Freely and anonymously, participants told Myers what aspects of their jobs worked well, and where they sensed the system suffering. It was the first time the staff had been able to pause and consider these issues. “Because people are trying to put out a product every day, it’s hard for them to see all the steps that they really go through,” ^[13] Myers says. “What really happens when you look at current processes is that everybody agrees that, ‘Yeah, this is complicated and complex,’ but it’s very hard for someone who is embroiled in it day in and day out to take a fresh look in terms of how it should be in the future.”

Myers also tracked the beginning-to-end path a story took in the newsroom. She studied how a fax, email or news tip came into the newsroom, was passed to an editor, who passed it to a reporter, who wrote the story, gave it back to an editor, and so on. “Every place is unique,” Myers says. “What was different [at the Times Union ] was how high the walls were in terms of people seeing their department as an island.”

At the same time, several Times Union managers traveled to another Hearst property, the Houston Chronicle , to discuss that paper’s pending decision to buy a new CMS system. The Hearst Corporation preferred the papers make a joint decision in order to lower the overall purchase price. By September 2006, the Chronicle was ready to approve a vendor, but the Times Union team wanted to wait. In a memo that month to the Chronicle ’s vice president of technology, Smith wrote:

At the beginning of this month we began a process mapping study led by Patti Myers... The results of this comprehensive study of how we produce the newspaper will help us decide what process we want to follow going forward, and it is from that conclusion that we’ll be able to then choose which vendor best serves that process. Without that study, I’m afraid we’d just be looking at various systems in the way someone going into a car showroom might be kicking the tires on one shiny car after another, without weighing whether that car will primarily be used for short commutes or long drives.

The findings . Myers presented the final maps of current processes to Times Union executives in early January 2007. At first glance, the process maps looked like hieroglyphics, with dots and squares and lines indicating flows of information and content . Some processes required several maps, long enough to wrap around the walls of a conference room outside Aldam’s office. The findings were surprising to the team: In some cases, Myers found it took as many as 213 separate steps to get a story on the Web or into print. This was clearly unacceptable. “The processes and technology shouldn’t interfere with doing good journalism for a newspaper, whether it was a print or an online newspaper,” Myers says. “If they continued to have roadblocks because of antiquated processes and roles, they wouldn’t attract the kind of journalists that were needed.” Adds Smith:

I was surprised at the level of complexity built into the newsroom. The number of manual steps was shocking, and I thought, "No wonder we feel behind."

As Smith and Aldam had hoped, Myers’ research helped newsroom leaders narrow their search for a new CMS by indicating the biggest bottlenecks in the newsroom process flow, and spotlighting which changes likely would yield the greatest benefits. The features section, for example, proved to be one of the most complex departments. Its production processes involved an average 164 steps, most of them manual, to produce a finished story. Part of the problem was that artwork and story copy passed through separate, cumbersome editing processes. Editors manually made changes and passed the marked-up page on to the next person. The features department looked like “a rope with many different twines,” Smith said. He felt that department would be a good candidate for early reform.

Listen to Smith talk about the problems in the process for features.