Mahony, a white-haired man with a ruddy face like Tip O’Neill’s, was a popular local columnist at my old paper, the Journal, in Lorain, Ohio. He barely survived computerization. In fact, he barely survived. He suffered a heart attack that may or may not have been brought on by the added stress. His ordeal is a preview of what some companies may expect as small computers—or terminals like Mahony’s—become requirements instead of options in many businesses. It is a fitting argument for tutoring or other adjustments for key employees. Within the newspaper industry—more computerized than most fields by now—you’ll find few Jim Mahonys today. But many other businesses are now wasting the Mahony Advantage.
At the Journal, readership surveys showed Mahony’s column was one of the main draws. He was a native of his steel town, a perfect counterpoint in a newsroom dominated by young outsiders. He’d worked for the Journal—whether as a newsboy or an editor—since he was ten. The only break was time off for World War II service. Indisputably, on local matters, he was a human data bank. “There’s nobody who knows this town and the people and the relationships, the marriages, like Jim,” said Bill Scrivo,[Scrivo,] an ex-managing editor. “You just can’t store this kind of material. He knew who was a phony and who was likely to mislead you.” Jim doubled as the news editor (on the Journal the news editor’s job was more of a copy-desk function than an executive one in the fullest sense), and over the years he may have saved the Journal thousands of dollars in lawyer’s bills from the libel suits that never were filed. He knew, say, that the Phil Smith caught in a gambling raid was not the prominent black minister with the same name. If nothing else, his vast knowledge of Lorain, Ohio, and its people made the paper more credible. And Mahony loved the traditional newsroom as much as he did his city—the big, black wire-service tickers, the bulky Remingtons and Underwoods.
“A ticker gives a newsroom that certain flavor,” he told me. “You hear a bell, and that means an important story is about to be released and it puts you on the alert, makes you news conscious.” And typewriters? “I figured they were the backbone of newspapering all the way through.” Mahony obliterated, however, at least two of them. He would strike the keys so hard that the letters would fly off the arms. Appreciating the man more than the machines, his colleagues cheerfully wheeled in replacements.
Dapper Dan, however—Mahony’s name for a young computer expert with some flashy sports coats and a fondness for jargon—wasn’t so accommodating.
“His word was God’s,” Mahony said, “and he pressured us. He felt that the pupil should be stepped into a more advanced bracket. And evidently he misjudged the person who was possibly of an older era and not familiar with the computer field. He never appeared news interested. It appeared his whole life was wrapped around computers.”
“The training consisted of sitting down two hours every other day in this little room,” recalled Dick DiLuciano, the former editor handling state news, “and then we’d be told that when you hit this button, this activates this diode or that diode or whatever the term. And finally I decided they were wasting their time telling what happens when we hit a button. We didn’t have to know that. All we had to know was what buttons to hit to get our story into the computer and get it typeset.” Mahony himself complains that the paper didn’t start him out with real news stories on the terminal. Instead, he did boring exercises similar to those in typing manuals. “It was much like a batter in major league baseball taking batting practice,” he said. “You just stayed there while they threw curve-balls at you more or less.”
“The only thing Jim really put into the computer on the job itself was headlines and his column,” DiLuciano said, “but he really was getting frustrated and distraught. And I bumped into him in the washroom one day, and he was about to cry. He said, ‘Dick, I know I’m going to lose my job, because I can’t learn how to work that damn computer.’” He almost did lose it. Jim was out sick several months, and he had to leave his news editor’s post. The Journal let him continue the “Mahony’s Memos” column but assigned him to the “morgue,” the library, to file away old clips. The library was in a room apart from the city desk. No longer was Mahony so handy to editors wanting to know, say, if a home on East Twenty-eighth Street is on the “East Side” of Lorain. (It isn’t—contrary to what a story said.) Were it not for the mishandling of Jim Mahony’s training, he might still be vigilantly editing.
What could have been done to keep Jim Mahony there? Jack LaVriha, a cigar-chomping newspaperman of Mahony’s generation, had an idea. Why couldn’t the paper have hired a tutor for Mahony—maybe a journalism graduate familiar with computers who was waiting for a reporter’s job to open up? The young grad could have entered Mahony’s stories on the terminal, learning city-room ways while Jim gradually mastered computer ones. Computers and older people can get along fine. Even without a tutor LaVriha himself was one of Dapper Dan’s star pupils, and today, though retired, he still drops by the newsroom to write press releases for community groups on the computer.
Distilled, here are some lessons from the Journal’s experience with computer training:
1. Even the best-intentioned companies may fail miserably in easing some employees’ computerization traumas. The paper’s editor at the time was Irving Leibowitz, a Lou Grant-like figure beloved by many in the newsroom; I can recall Leibo once jumping up on the copy desk to lead a “Happy Birthday” tribute to Jim Mahony and barely missing the cake; that was Leibo. He died in 1979. Were he alive today, however, he would probably be the first to admit that the paper mishandled Mahony during the transition. Like many others, Leibo was in awe of Dapper Dan. And so he’d suspended the skepticism that usually served him well on the job.