Which is the better place to work: or?

One of my favorite factoids in "News Improved: How America's Newsrooms Are Learning to Change" tends to belie the book's hopeful title: Starting newsroom salaries now average about $20,000 a year, authors Michele McLellan and Tim Porter report. They say that's about equal to what a Starbucks barista makes in a big-city franchise.

No wonder news execs are handing out buyouts faster than needles at a methadone clinic these days. What green-eyeshade type could resist replacing older, high-priced talent with at such bargain basement rates?

Perhaps quixotically, McLellan and Porter attempt to argue against the trend. The best way to re-invent newsrooms for the digital age, they contend, is to retrain the people who are already in them. Their book examines the results of the Newsroom Training Initiative, a four-year, $10 million effort by the Knight Foundation to determine whether old dinosaurs can learn new tricks. They can, the book concludes, but not enough news executives are trying to teach them.

The Knight Foundation's experiment came in a time of discombobulating upheaval: While they were writing their book, McLellan and Porter note, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain -- once a veritable Pulitzer Prize factory -- vaporized, and Google became the world's largest media corporation.

In many news organizations, the reaction has been what McLellan and Porter describe as disinventment. Between 1994 and 2000, overall newspaper industry employment dropped by 18%, the book reports. In 2005, more than 2,000 newsroom jobs were eliminated.

More ominous, perhaps, is the difficulty one encounters trying to quantify what has happened since. McLellan and Porter cited Newspaper Association of America for their figures. When I called for an update, an NAA spokesman referred me to the American Society of Newspaper Editors' newsroom census, an annual tally that's not really on point, because it's designed to track minority employment in newsrooms. The overall numbers don't provide a good guage of industry-wide employment over time because the ASNE keeps changing the baseline. In 2007, the association decided to start counting online jobs as part of the mix. A few years before that, they suddenly added weekly newspapers. As a result, overall employment at newspapers appears to be going up slightly, despite widespread reports of layoffs and buyouts. Is it just me, or does this seem like a pathetically transparent effort to cover up the generational purge that's going on in newsrooms across the country? Can you imagine how the newspaper editors would react if a corporation in their community, or a government agency, tried the same trick?

I'm not the only one who's suspicious: Former newsman Alan Mutter accused the ASNE of "fuzzy math" in his "Reflections of a Newsosaur" blog when the 2007 newsroom census was released.

Instead of panic and blood-letting, McLellan and Porter argue, the industry would be better served by rethinking and retooling. The most successful innovators in the Knight Newsroom Training Initiative are not freshly tattooed, 20-something computer geeks, but veteran journalists who were willing to transform not only their newsrooms but themselves.

One of the most striking lessons of the Knight study: The newsroom leaders who managed change best were those who micromanaged least. McLellan and Porter approvingly recount how Libby Averyt, editor of the Corpus Christi Caller Times, consulted with editors by phone but didn't interrupt her day off the Sunday her paper broke the story about Vice President Cheney shooting a fellow hunter on a south Texas ranch. Averyt trusted her staff to handle the story.

"Senior editors must learn to let go of details and instead focus their time, energy and credibility leading newsroom change," the authors write. Those who have successfully done so say it takes discipline not to get distracted.

Mike Jenner, executive editor of the web-savvy Bakersfield Californian, talked about how difficult it was for him to divorce himself from daily newspaper production, work he was used to doing -- and knew he could do well -- so he could think about more than the next days news cycle. Others talked about the difficulty of leaving behind familiar routines and the daily adrenaline fix. "It takes every fiber of my being when I walk by the city desk and hear them talking about a breaking story not to stop and insert myself," said Dana Robbins, who has editor of The Hamilton Spectator led a sweeping revamp of the Canadian paper.

Retraining can happen in any newsroom, say McLellan and Porter. They offer examples from big-budget operations such as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, to smaller shops, such as the Waco Tribune-Herald, a 38,000-circulation daily in Texas. The biggest obstacle, they argue, is not money but time and 'tudes. Buyouts and layoffs are only going to exacerbate what McLellan and Porter aptly describe as "the mindset of time deprivation that pervades newsrooms." And then there's the fear factor. One reason newspaper people are reluctant to try something new is that they might -- horrors -- get it wrong. "The obsession with avoiding mistakes is one of the prime characteristics in the organizational culture of the newsrooms," McLellan and Porter write. "Catching errors is good. Paying so much attention to catching errors that it paralyzes your organization is bad."

A few quibbles:

For this ink-stained dinosaur's taste, the book includes a bit too much corporate-motivational-speak. I find the emphasis on "business literacy" a little creepy: Having reporters and editors buy into a news organization's business goals raises huge ethical and conflict-of-interest questions that the book never examines.

The emphasis on getting away from "institutional, turn-of-the-screw stories" is understandable, but in all too many newsrooms that means getting away from the kind of institutional turn-of-the-screw coverage, and falling down on beat surveillance. At a conference I attended a couple of years back in Texas, high school teachers complained to me that they can't find out about important legislation pending in Congress or the legislature until it is ready to pass -- far too late for citizens to affect the outcome.

Not all of the book's suggestions seem practical: McLellan and Porter report that the Minneapolis Star-Tribune gave staffers a book with 20 -- that's t-w-e-n-t-y potential story forms. Who has time? Others need qualifiers: Brown-bag-lunch training sessions can be great if they really are free-wheeling forums where colleagues can swap ideas and information. Not so great is when they become tacitly mandatory forums for paying homage to the boss. Did The Oregonian's session on "how to write a nut graf" draw a capacity crowd because the topic was so compelling or because the managing editor was running the session?

OK, maybe that's a cynical view. But I am a journalist. So far. If McLellan and Porter manage to keep me and my colleagues guzzling coffee, rather than pouring it, they've done a great service for the newspaper business and -- who knows? -- maybe even for democracy. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go check out my neighborhood coffee house -- for java, hopefully, and not for jobs.