TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

Talking Biz News has been reporting for the past three weeks about the Performance Improvement Plans within the Reuters newsroom.

The reporters believe that the PIPs, as they are called, are designed to push out long-time reporters so that the new management team can hire new staffers. The managers respond that the plans are designed to improve the performance of reporters who are not doing as well as they should. The union is now arbitrating their use in nearly two dozen cases.

Which leads us to the case of Glenn Somerville, a longtime economics reporter for Reuters in Washington who resigned last month rather than be subjected to one of the plans. His case calls into question the real objective of the PIPs.

Somerville covered the U.S. Treasury and economic affairs in Washington for nearly three decades, during which he was widely recognized as a pre-eminent reporter in his field. He is known among reporters on the beat as the “Dean of the Treasury,” not only for his mastery of a wide range of financial topics but also his constant willingness to help others learn.

Somerville, who did not return an e-mail or a voice mail from Talking Biz News on his last day at work, has been vacationing in Canada. But colleagues, competitors and even government officials wonder why he’s no longer on the beat.

A Dow Jones Newswires reporter told Talking Biz News that Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner wrote a personal letter to Somerville after hearing about his departure. “Definitely the kind of guy you want to force out,” snarked the reporter.

On Twitter, Martin Crutsinger, veteran AP Treasury reporter, wrote, “I cannot imagine covering Treasury without Glenn.” Tony Fratto, former White House and Treasury spokesman, wrote, “Had the pleasure of traveling the world with Glenn. Will really miss him.”

Peter Szekely, the secretary-treasurer of the New York Newspaper Guild who worked more than 25 years at Reuters, said that Somerville’s departure was a “huge loss” for the newsroom.

At Reuters, he was viewed as an anchor of economic coverage, traveling the world with various Treasury secretaries over the years and chronicling everything from the 1990s economic boom to the burst of the Internet bubble and the financial crisis of 2008-2009.

Somerville’s work was recognized in 2002 by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers,  which selected a series of stories titled “Bush’s economic housecleaning” that dealt with the firing of Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and the subsequent overhaul of advisers as the “best in business breaking news.”

To his colleagues, Somerville was someone they could consistently count on to chip in and help on anything, anytime.

Somerville may not have been doing what management wanted. But Reuters management could have handled his situation a whole lot better than they did. You don’t just push someone like Somerville out the door.

Reuters Americas editor Jim Gaines sent out the following announcement to the staff:

I’m very pleased to announce that after a long search for someone to replace the irreplaceable Kevin Krolicki as Detroit bureau chief, we have found the perfect choice in Paul Lienert, a man who, at least in Detroit, needs no introduction.

The son of a journalist who spent 30 years at Automotive News, retiring as editor, Paul has devoted his entire career to coverage of the car business, at Crain’s, at the Detroit Free Press and for the last 25 years on his own — as a syndicated columnist (“He Drove, She Drove,” with his wife Anita); as the author of books on the automobile industry in Russia, India and China; as the publisher of an industry newsletter; and as a frequent contributor to Edmunds.com. Along the way he earned an MBA from Michigan State and recently finished his doctoral dissertation at the UK’s Nottingham Business School (long story).

A lifelong resident of Michigan, Paul has a knowledge of the beat that is both broad and deep — from green technologies and the emerging markets of China and India to finance/M&A and design. We are very fortunate indeed to have someone with his background and talent to lead our coverage of Detroit.

Please join me in welcoming Paul to Reuters.

Talking Biz News received an e-mail Thursday night from a Reuters editor that provided a different perspective to the newsroom issue of the performance incentive plans.

We have known this editor for quite some time, and asked this editor if we could post the comments in the spirit of providing an alternative point of view.

Here they are:

As a manager who is involved in this process, I just wanted to say there are two sides to this story… Starting with the fact that I can’t think of anyone who has been unfairly targeted (perhaps, but not any I know of) and the fact that upper management made it very clear to managers who had employees on a PIP that the goal was improvement — and they have held us accountable for that. Many managers have spent many hours each week working with these reporters with a genuine goal of helping them improve, myself included. I know of at least two or three managers who have also spent hours outside the office writing up story ideas or creating source lists for reporters on PIPs.

 

Trust me, this isn’t fun for us, but it’s necessary. Managers aren’t robots who don’t care about the people who work for them or who don’t empathize with the fact that these reporters have families and mortgages. (And we certainly don’t lack integrity or honesty.) Most of us have taken very seriously the effort to help the reporters on PIPs improve because it’s the right thing to do and because we really need these reporters to get better at what they do.  But we also have a job to do delivering the news/insight/analysis that is expected, we have competitors to stay ahead of and we’re trying to raise the bar on quality. Many, many reporters have embraced that — and not just new ones — and some haven’t or can’t or won’t. We, as managers can try to help reporters improve their performance, but we can’t do their jobs for them or make sources for them or come up with every idea for them.

 

We, as managers, have a lot to lose in this process. It’s not a given that if a reporter who leaves or is dismissed that we will be able to replace that person. And the union grievance process at Reuters is, by most accounts, grueling for managers. What’s more, the union leadership has made it pretty hostile for managers day-to-day already. From placards they’ve handed out to reporters to tape to their desks to the secret taping of all conversations with managers by employees on PIPs (managers who figured it out mostly asked reporters to be upfront about it, no need to hide) and twisting facts publicly. A story got held? Well, perhaps it’s because an editor asked for it a month ago and it took so long to get it ready that now it isn’t news anymore.

 

But again, above all, I’ve not seen a punitive attitude here or any objectives assigned to reporters on PIPs that aren’t already expected from – and being delivered by – other reporters. In some instances, I have heard that PIPs have been extended because reporters were making progress and the expectation is that some of those  reporters will sustain that improvement enough to be off the PIP entirely.

 

Reuters will probably will remain silent publicly on this and the union will continue to spin its side of the story. I wish the union would put as much energy behind helping these reporters improve as they do the efforts to discredit management. Then we’d all be more likely to get an outcome that was good for everyone and this would be a non-issue.

TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

Reuters and the New York Newspaper Guild are locking horns over performance incentive plans that the union believes are unfairly targeting some of its journalists.

The guild says that 28 journalists have received these performance incentive plans, or PIPs, which the company says is designed to improve their newsroom performance. The union, however, says that the goals in the documents are not easily obtainable and that they include threats of discipline.

The larger issue here is changes being imposed by the new management team within the Reuters newsroom, led by editor in chief Stephen Adler, who is trying to overhaul the wire service and has been emphasizing more investigative business journalism. Some long-time staffers at Reuters now feel threatened by the changes being instituted. Of the 28 journalists that have been targeted, 22 have filed grievances that are likely to go to arbitration, a union representative said Friday.

“I have never seen such a broad-based attack on people in the organization,” said Peter Szekely, the secretary-treasurer of the guild who worked more than 25 years at Reuters, in a telephone interview with Talking Biz News on Friday. “This is something unprecedented. This is not an ordinary dispute.”

The company disputes the union’s version of events and says it is doing what it needs to do to improve the newsroom’s performance.

“Our efforts to maintain high editorial standards and thus serve our readers better comply with all of our contractual obligations,” said Barb Burg, vice president of corporate affairs at Thomson Reuters, in a statement e-mailed to Talking Biz News. “We are working constructively with staff members whose work needs improvement to ensure that they have clear performance goals and our support in achieving them. While we expect, and readers require, high performance from Reuters journalists, our expectations are reasonable and appropriate. We have worked cooperatively with the Guild on many issues, and look forward to continuing to do so.”

Szekely claims that the PIPs violate the union’s contract with Reuters because the company is using performance reviews as a basis for discipline. In addition, he says that the company is not giving the journalists targeted a fair shot.

“What’s happened here is that people have had two steps of discipline heaped upon them at the same time,” he said. “You need to give the person an opportunity to improve. Every one of these 28 people that received a PIP had a disciplinary notation, and on top of that they received a verbal warning. We consider that to be a violation. The mixing of the performance appraisal process and the discipline is a violation.”

The PIPs have forced some long-time business journalists from the Reuters newsrooms in Washington and New York, according to their colleagues.

Szekely says he has no problem with journalists losing their jobs if they are not performing. But in many cases, he argues, it’s been punitive.

The journalists are “given certain goals that at least on the face of it are not easily obtainable,” he said.

Reuters Americas editor Jim Gaines made the following announcement on Tuesday:

I am thrilled to announce that Fred Barbash, one of Washington’s best known and most distinguished journalists, will join the DC Bureau next month as Editor, Domestic Policy, reporting to Bureau Chief Mary Milliken.

Fred is currently managing editor of CQ Weekly, the magazine about Congress published by CQ Roll Call, a division of the Economist Group. Before that he was a senior editor at Politico, where he was creator and moderator of The Arena, a popular forum for debate on national policy and politics.

But Fred is best known for his work at The Washington Post, where he was a creative, aggressive and thoughtful editor and reporter — an important influence on the work of our own Marilyn Thompson and Joan Biskupic, among many others. Along the way, Fred was the Post’s National Editor, London Bureau Chief, Deputy Metro Editor (not in that order) and reporter on a variety of beats, including the Supreme Court.

Fred has always been an effective teacher in his editing roles, and from 2006 to 2008 he taught at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. He is also the author of The Founding: A Dramatic Account of the Writing of the Constitution (Linden Press/Simon & Schuster), as well as numerous articles on constitutional history.

As we head toward what promises to be the most eventful lame-duck Congress in recent history, our Hill coverage will be in very capable hands.