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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Relations on the Africana staff deteriorated further with the arrival of Microsoft project manager Keith Senzel in November. Senzel, a 26-year-old from Yale who graduated a year behind Hendricks, had a mandate to improve efficiency with the greatest attention to quality. Or, in other words, whip the staff into shape. Senzel had fulfilled this kind of role for Encarta for its French and Italian CD-ROMs, both of which were completed in one year. "He was a Microserf before he got made," Hendricks said of his old schoolmate. Senzel said that compared to other Encarta products, Africana did not have an unusually rigorous set of deadlines. "There's a pretty aggressive schedule on all of them," he said.
Nonetheless, Senzel found some difficulties. "They hired so many people all at once and so many of the people were not that good," he said. "The writers were not very good. They couldn't write in an encyclopedic style." Yet some staffers told Salon Books that Senzel talked down to the writers. "We were like, 'Who are you and where are you from?'" the senior employee recalls. "Their attitude was, your content sucks." When it came time for the staff Christmas party, Senzel received a last-minute invitation but did not attend. During the party's Secret Santa exchanges, Peter Glenshaw -- who had won no popularity points as Gates' henchman -- received Dale Carnegie's personality primer, "How to Win Friends and Influence People," from an anonymous staffer. Glenshaw left the party soon after.
Even though the Oct. 3 memo was a flop, employees received a $500 Christmas bonus. They also received a one-week vacation. "It defused the tension a bit," someone on the project recalled. But after the break the malaise intensified. A new system of editing software was implemented, which slowed down the process. While Microsoft contends that the program, E-Edit, was an improvement, some staffers contend that it was a bad replacement for some new technology that didn't roll out on time. Production fell off by an estimated 80 to 90 percent.
When Gates returned from a trip in April, he asked for three staffers to meet with him -- a group he facetiously called "the bitch-and-moan committee." As a result of the negotiations, Gates implemented a new incentive program for the writers: If they exceeded the 2,500-word-per-week minimum by 80 percent they would receive a bonus equal to 5 percent of their weekly salaries. If they exceeded by 100 percent, they would receive a 15 percent bonus. Although this amounted to minuscule sums for most writers and just made the work harder, it successfully disarmed the writers and set Africana back on track. Gates found a silent fifth partner to fund the peace treaty.
Pat Sullivan had her own take on the strife. "You have to be committed to the idea of the project. Only that could get you through the rough months." Indeed, Africana seemed to punish its staff with the rigors of a high school yearbook in which the editor or editors receive most of the glory. "Africana was very good about what it accomplished with the text," says Friedberg. "It was the first thing of its kind. It filled a hole. In that sense I'm glad I worked on it. It was just riven by bad management."
Was that all it was -- a case of bad management by admittedly neophyte corporate executives? From an internal point of view, Encarta Africana seems like a collision of too many interests, a confluence of paradoxical intentions. "It is an excellent example of the broad convergence of the recent trends, all sinister: target marketing, identity politics and the academic star system," observes New York University media professor and corporate critic Mark Crispin Miller. If an ivory tower company reaches out to fresh-faced graduates for employees, it will face the culture it wrought. If you start a company at Harvard and need some sharp young workers, no doubt you will hire egalitarian idealists nurtured on the idea of multiculturalism -- and conversely, a sense of their own entitlement. Another paradox: If this joint-venture has a target market for African-Americans, is it hypocritical or democratic that it is not prepared by African-Americans?
Even among the so-called target market, not everyone is pleased about the outcome of Africana. Dr. Raymond Winbush, a professor at Fisk University, Du Bois' alma mater, had trouble with the product. Winbush takes exception to what he sees as the encyclopedia's underrepresentation of Afrocentrics -- a large black constituency who believe that Africa should be the focus of all African-American study. "It's like a modern history of computing without mentioning Bill Gates," he says. Winbush is working on a rival project, Encyclopedia Africana, due in 2009, which he claims has its real roots in Du Bois' ultimate dream.
Masao Miyoshi, a literature professor at the University of California at San Diego, sees the Africana model as symbolic of a greater problem. "This is simply outrageous. When you work for a professor, you get paid -- what -- $10,000 or $20,000 a year for a 40-hour week? But this project exists outside the university. No claim could be made that this is an instructive program. Many people with skills and graduate degrees who don't have jobs gravitate towards these kind of work," says Miyoshi, who edited "Cultures of Globalization" with Marxist critic Fredric Jameson. "That's where Skip has an opportunity. This is the kind of thing that goes on today at universities."
Despite the 15 months of upheaval, the interactive CD-ROM changed the stodgy image of an encyclopedia. Rather than an old-fashioned A-Z set of volumes, it features live video, virtual tours and more than 3,300 entries. Africana's arrival was greeted with great exultation. "I wanted to hug the FedEx guy," a Time writer gushed in her review. Gates also seems happy with the way Africana turned out. "I'm really proud of this product. I would do it the same way over again." As universities and their star professors become more involved with these kinds of quick and furious projects, and more overeducated young men and women float in postgraduate limbo, no doubt Gates will still have many willing takers for the next time around.
