November-December 2004 newsletter
Have You Heard the News(letter) Today … ?

By Tim Porter

“The greatest problem in communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.”

– George Bernard Shaw

Any newspaper managers who don’t provide regular feedback and guidance to their staffs with an internal newsletter are ignoring an easy opportunity to address one of the most persistent and bemoaned bugaboos afflicting our newsrooms – lack of communication.

Lamentations abound of the lousy communications skills of people paid to communicate, as do exhortations urging newspaper managers to do a better job or risk losing the hearts and minds of the newsroom to naysayers.

Here, for example, is David Elbert of the Des Moines Register: “I have this theory that newsrooms are among the worst businesses anywhere when it comes to internal communication. Journalists are poor communicators from the top down and from the bottom up.”

Here is Sharon Peters, now editor of The Gazette in Colorado Springs: “Giving feedback of any type, constructive criticism in particular, is perhaps the most dreaded of all management duties. … Hundreds of newsroom employees who participated in ASNE’s 2001 Leadership study identified (lack of) feedback” as a major shortfall.

And, here is Jill Geisler of the Poynter Institute: “Those at the top need to present a vision for their team that is clear and compelling.”

Add me to the list. After looking over a generous sampling of newsroom newsletters graciously shared by their authors, I’m convinced there is no simpler and more direct tool for bridging the communications fault lines that divide many newsrooms into insular fiefdoms. At best, these operate without a common purpose under varying standards, and, at worst, they actively war with their neighbors across the aisle using defensive tactics to undermine any new initiatives seen as incursions into their turf.

While newsletters are no substitute for day-to-day feedback and coaching, they are vehicles that can:

• Reinforce the newspaper’s goals and values.
• Champion good work and the people responsible for it.
• Transfer expertise by offering training on craft and technique.
• Involve non-trainers or non-managers, thereby indicating their value to the paper.
• Humanize the staff through profiles.
• Create a neutral ground for thoughtful criticism.
• Provide a referable archive for all of the above.

There’s No ‘One-Way’ to Do It

Newsroom newsletters are as varied in format and frequency as the newspapers that spawn them. Some, such as Above the Fold, the work of Laurie Hertzl, the enterprise editor and writing coach at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, are “occasional” publications distributed as PDF files. Others, such as Word Witch, authored by Rusty Lang, the general editor for writing and training at the Tulsa World, come out weekly. Some newsletters take the simple form of email feedback, such as the twice or thrice monthly electronic missives on writing and leadership, while a few, such as Inklings, the quarterly newsletter conceived by George Rede, director of recruiting and training at the Oregonian, are elaborately designed publications.

The Birth of Inklings

It’s hard to replace a legend, so in March 2001 when legendary (ahem) Oregonian writing coach Jack Hart typed a “-30-“ at the end of his monthly newsletter, Second Takes, after a dozen years, the newspaper took a newsletter hiatus.

Inklings arrived in March 2004 with an unusual format (5.5 x 17 inches, printed at the local Kinko’s), a name chosen by popular vote from among 80 submitted by staffers and the goal of being a “worthy successor” to Second Takes.

The 12-page Inklings touches on all the crafts in the newsroom and focuses heavily on the people of The Oregonian, using various sections to introduce newcomers to the paper or to go “Behind the Byline” with a Q&A profile of a staffer that has questions similar to this one asked of writer John Foyston: “Bikes or beer? If you had to choose …”

A good half of Inklings is devoted to the accomplishments of the Oregonian staff. It chronicles their prizes, fellowships and election to professional boards and offers opportunities to tell, in the first person, how their stories, photographs and graphics came together. The other half of Inklings is craft-oriented, with articles on issues ranging from the meta (Tom Goldstein on reporting and writing) to the minute (keyboard shortcuts on the Harris pagination system).

Mixing Craft and Commentary

The inspiration for Inklings, says Rede, was The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s four-page monthly newsletter, Inside Scoop.

Inside Scoop is rich with craft information. Photographers tell how they captured the “photo of the month,” a reporter-turned-author discusses “making the leap to hardcover” and a report from an IRE conference offers nine suggestions for how to “dig deeper, dig smarter.”

Sheila Garland, director of newsroom training for The Journal-Constitution, says that in addition to Inside Scoop the paper also produces a weekly email, Around the Newsroom, that is sent out on Fridays and “is much more devoted to news about employees.”

What really makes Inside Scoop successful, says Garland, are “pieces by employees for employees.”

“Each month,” she says, “I ask folks to do a piece about: the story behind the story (How did you do this piece? What challenges did you face? What type of coaching/editing did you receive? What did readers say about it?), a story about a workshop or event we did here, a profile about a new employee, how did we execute a great photo or visual.”

Inside Scoop is designed in-house and printed outside of the newspaper.

Drawing on the Staff for Expertise – and Work

Other newsletter authors echo Garland’s reliance on contributions of staffers to Inside Scoop.

“There’s a lot of expertise in our room and at other newspapers,” says Laurie Hertzel of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, who has been honchoing that paper’s newsletter, Above the Fold, for nearly four years (with a short interruption to oversee coverage of the Iraq war). “… I never planned on writing the thing only by myself. I would have to be out of my head.”

Hertzel began Above the Fold as a photocopied document that was passed out to the staff and contained one piece written by her and another by someone else on the staff. Today, the newsletter can run to six pages. Recent editions include summaries of presentations made by visiting speakers, such as Mary Hadar, writing coach for the Washington Post and Bob Baker, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and author of Newsthinking.

Baker not only shared his enthusiasm for newsroom learning – “There are only two kinds of journalists in the world,” he says, “bad ones and ones that are improving.” – but he brought along his lists of 10 Things Reporters Want from Editors (“Get off your butt and walk around … Don’t be a bureaucrat.”) and 10 Things Editors Want from Reporters (“I want you to respond with 100% effort to each assignment, whether it’s your idea or mine.”)

Like that of many newsroom newsletters, the tone of Above the Fold is primarily positive, concentrating much more on what’s right than on what’s wrong. “Pointing out things that didn’t work doesn’t work,” says Hertzl, “because there is too much you don’t know (about what happened) and it makes people defensive.”

Hertzel labors on the newsletter as time permits, spending altogether about two days a month writing and compiling it. She distributes it via the Star Tribune intranet as a PDF, but also produces a paper copy that is stuffed in staffers’ mailboxes because “people still like having a piece of paper.”

Rhymes with Rich

Word Witch, a weekly compilation of critiques, picks and pans of the Tulsa World, focuses on writing and reporting, laced with bold-faced names of staff members. Rusty Lang, the general editor for writing and training at the newspaper, puts Word Witch together.

First, let’s deal with the name. “I came up with that name,” says Lang, “because I figured that mentally everyone would be calling me the word that rhymes with ‘witch.’ I beat them to the punch and hopefully added some self-deprecating humor. The nickname has certainly caught on.”

Word Witch usually opens “with a short lesson on writing, grammar, ethics, issues, etc. then goes into the local part that everyone wants to read,” says Lang, referring to her comments on the best and worst of that week’s work “I hope they get something out of the top part before they move on to see if they’re mentioned.”

Lang doles out praise by name, citing “inviting leads,” a “catch of the week” by the copy desk (“so they can get some pats; they are so needy.”) and solid reporting. Lang spares the producers of less laudatory work the ignominy of being named, but she highlights their miscues in sections labeled Misfires, Clichés, Garbles and, my favorite, Jargon Basement. (“What is an outparcel?” she asks.)

Lang leads with the positive “so that people can just read the good stuff at the top and skip the negative if they are too sensitive to read it.”

“People in all newsrooms don’t get enough feedback,” says Lang. She views Word Witch as a partial solution to that shortcoming, one that permits criticism in a non-emotional manner. “Spontaneous and instant feedback is a good thing,” she says, but off-the-cuff comments from managers can sometimes do more harm than good because “they are not (said) in a thoughtful, polished form.”

Lang devotes about two hours a day to a critique of the World, which she presents in abbreviated form at the daily news meeting. She draws on those critiques as a basis for her newsletter, which she publishes on the paper’s intranet.

Small Doesn’t Have to be a Barrier

Of course, not all newspapers have the in-house resources of a large regional newspaper like The Oregonian or The Journal-Constitution, or even the luxury of a full-time writing editor like Lang.

In smaller newsrooms, however, newsletters may play even more important roles in professional development by enabling energetic editors to fill training gaps with the experiences of their own staffs or with the plethora of good journalism craft advice available on the Web.

Gregg McLachlan, associate managing editor, of the Simcoe Reformer in Ontario, Canada, produces a monthly newsletter entitled The Write Way. Its slick design, clever writing and utilitarian approach belie the circulation of the Reformer or the size of its newsroom – 9,000 readers and handful-and-a-half of news reporters.

Recent editions of The Write Way included the ungarnished story of a reporter “on the trail of a bunless burger,” a feature on offbeat questions, a plea (borrowed from the Los Angeles Times) for more details in stories (“Details. Get them all. Not just black shoes. Black shoe with laces and little heels.”) and the cover page anchor, Groaner Watch, which McLachlan writes with Garrison Keiller-esque wit to deflate the value of a given cliché. Here’s a Groaner Watch skewering the phrase “hold the fort”:

“Never write that someone or some group will ‘hold the fort.’ Nobody holds the fort. OK, some people try. Davey Crockett tried to hold the fort. He died. The outlook is not good for people who try to hold the fort.”

McLachlan has been publishing The Write Way for two years. It grew out of tip sheets he handed to reporters for years, many of which ended up in the trash cans at reporters’ desks.

“I started the in-house newsletter because it has an immediate connection with the staff,” says McLachlan. “It addresses stuff that's happening in our newsroom and it speaks to them. Sure, some still end up in the waste basket, but many more are retained by the staff. In fact, some will even ask when the next issue is coming out. I even have some staff asking if they can contribute to it.

“One of the biggest strengths of doing a newsletter is that it reinforces daily coaching. When you see a problem recurring with a reporter, you can ask them in a friendly tone if they remember the article in the X issue. They may say no, so you can just give them another copy.”

Using Newsletters to Remind – and to Recruit

Laurie Hertzel of Minneapolis also says newsletters, whether stored on a newspapers’ computer system or lying in the clutter of paper piled on a reporter’s desk, provide an archive of readily retrievable advice. Above the Fold, she says, “seemed like one way to get things down so people can refer back to them.”

McLachlan says The Write Way not only contributes to a growing library of tips, tools and techniques, its presence in the newsroom causes a secondary influence even on the staffers’ who don’t read it.

“Even when you have the reporters who throw stuff in the waste basket after they receive it, you can see changes because they notice the newsletters on other reporters' desks long after the issue date. It's the peer thing,” he says. “If the other person is reading it, maybe I should too.”

Finally, George Rede of The Oregonian supplies the reason why every newsroom should be publishing a newsletter devoted to improving journalistic quality and staff morale – those who don’t do it could be losing out in the recruiting game.

“Although this (Inklings) was conceived as something by and for The Oregonian newsroom,” says Rede, “I've found that it's become a recruiting tool for us. I think it shows in a very tangible way what our newsroom does to walk the walk when it comes to newsroom training.”

back to top ^

September-October 2004 newsletter
Freeing the Prisoners of the Newsroom

By Tim Porter

Carol Nunnelly

Lil Swanson

If some day you happen to be talking on the phone with both Carol Nunnelly and Lil Swanson, and perhaps are discussing their latest project, NewsTrain, do not be concerned about telling their voices apart.

Nunnelly’s words arrive one at a time, slowed to such an orderly cadence by the weight of her Alabama diction. They don’t fall on the ear so much as they brush by it. Swanson, by contrast, declares herself holder of a Philadelphia accent (Is there one? I ask. “It’s in your face,” she says.) She packages her thoughts in complete paragraphs, delivered so articulately and grammatically that no matter how hard I listen for remnants of Rocky in her voice, I hear more Main Line than South Philly.

Geographic inflections aside, when Nunnelly and Swanson speak about NewsTrain and the need to rescue “front-line editors, middle managers, the people who are usually prisoners of the newsroom,” they speak in unison.

For the most part, these desk-bound “inmates” are former reporters who have been awarded the all the responsibilities of management but none of its preparation and few of its rewards. This middle tier of editors represents the thorniest training challenge in the newspaper industry. Some newspaper companies are developing their own training programs for these editors (see Training for managers: forget the beast. let's deal with those ducks, May 2004), but NewsTrain is the first industry-wide effort to tackle the problem head on.

Funded primarily with a $1 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation (which also funds Tomorrow’s Workforce) and sponsored by the Associated Press Managing Editors, NewsTrain intends to stage 45 regional workshops for mid-level editors in the next three years. Nunnelly, the former managing editor of the Birmingham ( Ala.) News, is the director of NewsTrain. (She also oversees the National Credibility Roundtables, another APME project). Swanson, the former Features editor and senior editor for training at the Philadelphia Inquirer, is NewsTrain’s project manager.

NewsTrain’s goal, says Nunnelly, is “to get top quality national training to regional sites so that more people will have a chance to have exposure to that kind of training both because it will help them and help their newspapers. … The short-hand is we’re going to try to put one within driving distance of every editor in the country.”

The NewsTrain program spans two days and brings together 60 to 70 editors for sessions that concentrate on management and editing skills and are taught by a variety of people, some of them working editors or newsroom managers, others full-time trainers. Participants pay only a $35 registration fee.

Swanson says the “fundamental direction of both the editing and management sessions is that we’re telling editors they need to be teachers in the newsroom.”

Jacqui Banaszynski, Associate Managing Editor at The Seattle Times and occupant of the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of Missouri, helped shape NewsTrain during its beta phase in 2003 and leads sessions on helping editors transition from doers to teachers.

“The editor almost always has the right instinct about what’s wrong with the story, but they don’t necessarily have the language to articulate what’s wrong, why it’s wrong and options for how to address it or fix it,” says Banaszynski, “which means what happens is that they start weighing in on the keyboard and editing with their fingers instead of their brains and their mouths because their fingers know what to do. They know how to get in and make the story work.”

Most mid-level editors do not know how to diagnose or assess stories at “a very fundamental level so (they) can then translate that to a reporter,” says Banaszynski, “so, it’s basically becoming a teacher. I think that’s where I would put the biggest issue: … Not a lot of them have been coached or have experience in teaching and teaching requires that you understand something enough to articulate it so the person you are talking to can take and make that information their own.”

This journalistic tendency to head for the keyboard when trouble arises with a story can inhibit deeper learning about story form, structure or development, so NewsTrain had adjusted its teaching techniques to let the editors learn more by doing than by listening.

“Adult learners insist on, demand an interactive kind of approach,” says Nunnelly, “so with all of the presenters we have increasingly made sure that that’s the kind of presentation that gets made. I hope that’s of some use and influence to the whole training picture because this is a tough crowd. … I think we have learned something about teaching techniques for adult journalists.”

Banaszynski frames the balance another way – as tools vs. theory.

Editors “want something they can take in their hands and walk back in their newsroom the next day and apply,” she says. “They do not want to go back to their newsroom and say ‘I was just off at this weekend workshop and blather blather blather’ because they are aware that unless they have something concrete to take back with them the rest of the newsroom’s going to roll their eyes at them. .... You don’t want things to sound like management, human resources, organizational effectiveness, Yahoo spin.”

That said, “we also have to apply the tools to theory so they can figure out other tools they can make their own. So it isn’t just ‘I’m going to give you this one tool and I’m going to teach you how to hammer a certain way.’ You have to really teach them how to build the house, right?”

Glenn Rabinowitz is managing editor of the 75,000-circulation San Bernardino Sun in Southern California. He sent three of the paper’s six assistant city editors to the inaugural NewsTrain seminar in San Diego in May and became possibly the project’s biggest fan.

After talking for several minutes about the “immediate” changes he saw in his editors and their approach to their jobs and how “if NewsTrain came every year, I would send (more) editors.” Rabinowitz stops and adds, “I’m kind of gushing about it, but that’s really my assessment of it. It was successful beyond my expectations.”

The ACEs Rabinowitz chose for NewsTrain were among his least experienced editors, he says, and they struggled in finding a productive way to interact with reporters, ultimately “functioning more as bookkeepers than editors.

“There wasn’t a whole lot of interaction between the ACEs and the reporters in terms of developing the stories,” he says. A couple of the editors “had been more or less desk-bound, more through just routine than anything else, never really got out of their chairs and just walked around and talked to the reporters. Some of these people wouldn’t talk to the reporter at all during the day, would just send emails back and forth.”

After NewsTrain, says Rabinowitz, “suddenly, I saw these editors walking the room, engaging reporters in conversation, bringing other people into it, a lot more meetings for brainstorming, a lot more planning going on, a lot more teamwork, just a real sea of change in terms of their whole approach to the job. … It was almost as if somebody had opened their eyes to the world.”

When I talked with a couple of editors who had been through NewsTrain, they spoke about two types of change influenced by the program – institutional and personal.

James Meier is the deputy metro editor at the Sun. When he returned to his newsroom after two days in San Diego he brought with him a reader-focused credo for story assignment and development: news, context and impact.

“I don’t think I realized going into it how we weren’t really serving our readers as best we could, of providing the impact in our stories,” he says. “We had the news, we had plenty of context, but we really didn’t get to the heart of the impact. That was one thing that really opened my eyes. … It was something you think about a little in J-school, but after that you kind of forget about it.”

At the urging of the NewsTrain graduates, the Sun changed how stories are budgeted and adopted a NewsTrain exercise based on color-coding stories for their news, context and impact.

“We decided to turn our bud lines into the same thing where we spell out the news, context and impact (in order) to reinforce to the reporter working on the story what’s important here,” says Meier. “If your sked line is missing that … we question whether the story is worth as much as we think it is.”

Kim Galliano, editor of the 12,500-circulation Daily Republic in Mitchell, S.D., had a NewsTrain experience similar to that of Meier.

After two days of workshops in Sioux Falls, 65 miles to the west of Mitchell, Galliano returned to her newsroom of 12 people and posted these questions on every reporter’s cubicle: “What’s the point? Why does it matter? Why is this story being told? What does it say about life, about the world and about the times we live in?” She was planning a staff meeting right after we spoke to discuss how those questions could be incorporated into the reporting and writing process.

Galliano also soaked up enough management training at NewsTrain to drop Stephen Covey-esque comments about Quadrant 1 and Quadrant 2 into the conversation, but for her the impact was as much personal as professional.

“I came back fully re-inspired, you might say, and ready to go and try some different things,” she says. “… It hit me at the right point in time when I was ready to do things a little differently or find a new and fresh approach. I’ve been here 18 years, so you can easily get in a rut of ‘well, this is how we do it’ and it doesn’t leave a lot of room for change and we need change.”

In an industry that under-invests in staff development, as the news business does, exposure to training and interaction with other editors can be highly motivating.

Mid-level editors perform critical but thankless roles at most newspapers, says Banaszynski.

(Author’s note: In the dual interests of decency and preservation of Banaszynski’s meaning, I am substituting the word “cheese” for a common four-letter cuss word in the following quote.)

“How many times does anybody stop and say to a front-line assigning editor ‘thank you.’?” she says. “They don’t get bylines. They don’t get any credit. Their jobs are – pardon my French – sometimes what can be referred to as quadraphonic “cheese”. They take “cheese” from above, below and on the sides. They don’t get the kind of attaboys that reporters get. They don’t get the ability to stand there and do the big vision things that the top bosses do. They’re literally sort of lost in the middle.”

As a result, says Banaszynski, they need “to be reminded about how important their jobs are and how much fun they can be (so) they can get reconnected with why those jobs matter.”

For Meier, of San Bernardino, the highlight of NewsTrain – not discounting the IRE session that “paid off in spades with a lot of stories we wouldn’t have had otherwise” or the credibility session that led directly to formation of a credibility committee at the Sun – was “the interaction with our peers who we wouldn’t meet on any other occasion. We don’t often go to meetings like that. That interaction was great because we got to hear about their problems and explain ours.”

The informal networking with other editors was an unexpected bonus, says Galliano, who is redoing her newspaper’s story planning process after talking casually with the managing editor of a larger paper about how its story calendar is organized.

“She talked about how they plan out on a 30-day calendar what’s coming up for their Page 1 centerpiece,” says Galliano, and “I looked at that as a way of finding ways to get different stories in our paper.”

Galliano came back with an idea that “at first sounds like an amazing investment of time because you don’t have a lot of time in this business, but I’ve got five news reporters and each day of the week I’ll meet with one of those reporters” for 30 to 45 minutes just to discuss enterprise for the next month.

These hidden benefits of NewsTrain are part of Nunnelly and Swanson’s not-so-secret agenda – to move newsroom training from afterthought to priority.

“The way I’m looking at it is that newspapers are becoming much more like businesses, run like businesses in many ways, and this is a training wave,” says Nunnelly. “… I think that you’re going to see that this is going to help change the culture of newsrooms, that this will help move training into the core values. Again, it’s part of being a business. This is another one those big waves. I do think it’s here to stay.”

Rabinowitz, the M.E. in San Bernardino, would welcome a greater priority on – as well as a bigger budget for – training, which in tight times is traditionally one of the first newsroom budget line items to be trimmed. He hopes to use the Sun’s success with NewsTrain “to make a case for the value of training.”

In each of his four years as managing editor, says Rabinowitz, he’s sought enough of a training budget “to get some people to things like Poynter and API and things like that.”

“Generally what happens every year,” he says, “is I’ll put in a request for three or four or five thousand dollars worth of training and then the budget will have maybe $1,000.”

Rabinowitz is forced then to rely on regional, less costly training opportunities such and the National Writers Workshop. He says NewsTrain was “the only real training that’s come to this area that’s geared specifically toward line editors.”

“Because there’s limited money,” he says, “I have to cherry pick what I’m going to get the most bang for the buck for and the NewsTrain both because it was inexpensive and geared toward what I see as the biggest need in the newsroom, which is training for the mid-level editors, it was just ideal.” Rabinowitz estimates he spent $400 to $500 to send three editors to NewsTrain.

The future of NewsTrain is uncertain, says Nunnelly. APME’s commitment, she says, “is to first introduce it into the national training menu and then try to find ways to support it other than a Knight Foundation grant going into the future.”

Nunnelly and Swanson are optimistic, though, both about continuing NewsTrain and about the project’s ability to make a constructive dent in the defensive culture of newsrooms.

“All I can say is that you start out at trying to do a piece that can be done and the effort can make a difference,” says Nunnelly. “The one thing I think we have on our side is the knowledge that journalists want this even more than more pay.”

Swanson provides the coda: “We’re relentless, she says. “… You’ve met a couple of tough women here. We are stubborn.”
 back to top ^

July - August 2004
Growing Your Own: Training from Within

 By Tim Porter

The Oregonian and the Gaston Gazette couldn’t be more dissimilar. The Gazette sells 32,000 papers a day, the Oregonian 342,000. The Gazette has a newsroom staff of 36; the Oregonian lists more numbers than that just on its newsroom phone directory. The Gazette is a red state on the electoral map; the Oregonian is blue.

What the Gazette and Oregonian do share, though, is a deep institutional belief that journalists need ongoing training and that often the best people to provide it are their fellow editors, reporters, photographers and artists.

Both newspapers, and others I’ll talk about, offer lessons about training from within and about peer-to-peer learning that other newsrooms can – and should – emulate.

“Philosophically,” says George Rede, director of recruiting and training for the Oregonian, “we think that an effective training program makes maximum use of the resources your newsroom already has. It’s a lot more efficient and you have a lot more control of the schedule, of the content and, in some cases, the quality than when you ask an outside person.”

John Pea, editor of the Gazette in Gastonia, N.C., devised a lengthy training program for his newsroom managers after he took over the paper. He found “that it had a lot of editors who were good at editing – you know the story – they were good at editing, but dealing with people, doing performance issues, the basics, they really hadn’t had any instruction on at all.”

At Rede’s disposal are all the resources of the Oregonian – enough to form a sophisticated training program entitled Oregonian University – as well as the services and counsel of writing coach Jack Hart.

Oregonian University, of which Rede is the de facto dean of students, emerged three years ago as an entity that pulled together all the ad hoc training happening at the Oregonian. In its first two years, Oregonian U sponsored more than 150 training activities – classes, brown bags, workshops, field trips. Significantly, more than a third of those events featured speakers from the Oregonian staff, ranging from managing editors to graphic artists.

Asked for examples of staff participation in Oregonian U., Rede rattles off a list rich with sophistication, innovation and commitment:

• Two reporters – a suburban reporter and a business reporter – do an hour-long workshop on what they learned at the IRE convention. Yes, this is typical post-convention info-dumping, but with a twist: The suburban reporter also visits all five suburban bureaus with a modified version of the program, ensuring that bureau staffs don’t get left out (a common complaint at many papers).

• Several copy editors present a video made “to show people in a very fun way how copy flows from reporter to line editor and then where it goes from there before it finally lands in the paper.” The video was a take-off on Oregonian reporter Richard Read’s Pulitzer Prize-winning French Fry Connection, which traced the route of a potato around the world. “We followed a potato here,” says Rede, “which represented a story as it went through the production process, the Copy Desk Connection.”

• Steve Engelberg, M.E. for enterprise, offers sessions not, as you might suspect, on investigative techniques, but on how to write a nut graph and how to write a bright. “How to write a nut graph filled the room,” says Rede.

In contrast to the resource affluence of the Oregonian, the Gaston Gazette’s Pea has, well, himself and “a mish-mash of all sorts of things, things I have been through before, books that other people have pointed me to in the past.” If there were a Gazette University, Pea would be the dean, the faculty, the curriculum developer – and one of the students.

“Lacking any other available resources,” Pea relied on his experiences, the advice of others and, occasionally, the local public library, to build a syllabus that contains seven sections – for example, Leadership vs. Management and Getting the Job Done – and subdivides into 40 one-hour classes on topics that range from coaching to hiring to personal accountability.

Pea works with three of his managers at a time through the course, which borrows from Pea’s own background, an extensive reading list of popular management books like “Fatal Errors Managers Make” and “The One Minute Manager,” as well as numerous other role-playing and hands-on exercises.

“What I had hoped to do,” says Pea, referring to the readings he assigns his editors, “was to get the ideas flowing, to get them thinking. … We used (the sessions) as the time to discuss it and try to point out what I wanted to make sure they got out of it.”

In the five years since Pea first gave the course to his “guinea pigs” – the managing editor, city editor and regional editors of the Gazette – he has remixed the ingredients, emphasizing hiring and performance evaluation more and adding modules on mentoring and coaching.

The Rewards of Peer Learning

Pea receives three layers of benefits from his approach to training – one strategic, another financial and the third personal.

“It helped me mold my editors the way I wanted them,” says Pea, “and, second, it was a lot cheaper to do. … I also became a better editor because I was scouring everywhere to come up with the best resources, the best reads, the best activities to do in conjunction with this. So, I improved myself in the process.”

Involving staff members in training produces ancillary results beyond the imparting of knowledge from one journalist to another.

First, an invitation to a reporter or an editor to teach what they know conveys an inherent message of self-worth.

“It’s another way of telling them that they are a valued employee,” says Rede. “They have something worthwhile, expertise, a perspective, or something, that we value enough to ask them to share it with others.”

Also, says Michael Roberts, the deputy managing editor for staff development at the Arizona Republic, “there’s an automatic sense of purpose and importance that you’re actually helping the paper, the newsroom and individuals in the newsroom achieve something.”

Staff members who lead training sessions receive the bonus of new-found communications skills and diminishing anxieties about having all eyes in the room on them.

“How many journalists get into this profession with good public speaking?” says Rede. “Not too many. Understandably, a lot of people are kind of nervous the first time, but when they have a role in speaking up, I think that almost always they are surprised and pleased by the positive reinforcement that comes from presenting their particular piece.”

Those Who Can, Teach

Dick Hughes, the editorial page editor and newsroom trainer at the 56,000-circulation Statesman Journal in Salem, Ore., says almost all of the paper’s training regimen “is done by people in-house.” Hughes says involvement by newsroom leadership in training sends a dual message: No one’s time is too valuable and training is part of the newspaper’s value system.

A visible training role by editors like the Statesmen Journal’s David Risser, the executive editor, and Victor Panichkul, the managing editor, who have lead classes in ethics, beat development and design, also helps corral the typical newsroom’s most truant subjects, those mid-level editors who beg off training with excuses of overwork.

“The most difficult people to send to training sessions are line editors,” says Hughes. “Everybody thinks they’re too busy. They’ve got stories to edit. … It doesn’t do diddly if you train your copy editors and photographers and reporters and don’t get their editors there. So, having the top editor saying we’re going to do this, we want you to lead these sessions and we’re leading sessions shows their support.”

At the Oregonian, training “involvement really goes across the top of the newsroom,” says Rede.

Editor Sandy Rowe has helped moderate or opened classes with remarks emphasizing their importance. Executive Editor Peter Bhatia has spoken at diversity and accuracy workshops. Writing coach Hart holds a managing editor title. And Therese Bottomly, managing editor/news, has set up sessions on libel law.

Beyond such direct participation in training, Rede says, the most important role top management can play is “creating the newsroom environment in which all this takes place.”

“When we talk to potential hires here,” he says, “one of the things we’re always stressing is the attention paid to continuous learning. It doesn’t matter if you’re an entry-level person, mid-career or a high-end veteran, there’s something that is always going on which is presumably of some interest or application to you.”

Focus, Focus, Focus

Hughes of the Statesman Journal likes to say with a laugh that “none of my ideas are original – I steal from everybody.” He readily offers credit for this observation: “One thing I’ve learned from Michael Roberts is that you have to have an objective for what you want to accomplish.”

The belief that training must be goal-oriented to be effective might be a truism were it not so widely ignored by much of the newspaper industry. How, then, can newsroom trainers apply the principle to the practice of peer-to-peer learning?

First, says, Rede, you’ve got to have those goals, which can be defined by various methods:

• They can be formally crafted and stated like those at the Oregonian where Editor Rowe outlined “seven primary newsroom goals for 2004 and said that Oregonian U’s curriculum is designed to support those goals” or like those at the Arizona Republic where Roberts says a “pretty formal goal-setting program” for this year includes an intention to incorporate more “non-traditional story forms or non-linear stories” into the news report.

• They can arise in response to a series of problems, such as errors or poor graphics.

• They can conform to newsroom initiatives. As Hughes says: “We’ve got a redesign. How do we make the redesign work?

• They can be paper-wide, specific to a section or individualized. “We have the goals from the top editor,” says Roberts, “but we also work on department by department goals that support the larger goals of the editor, but also goals within that department that may be particular to that department.”

• They can be basic. Says Roberts: “We tend to overestimate how much people already know about some of the basic practices and approaches, especially when it comes to interdepartmental contact like reporters working with graphics or photo.”

The key to successfully involving staff members in training, says Roberts, is to connect what they are teaching to explicit newsroom goals.

“The program has to be pretty sharply focused on one or two specific tasks,” he says. “If you try to address something like good writing or something pretty broad it’s going to be very tough to be effective and then people are not satisfied. If you can get it down to something pretty concrete like how to file a graphics request or what are the four qualities that make a good photo and how do you develop a checklist for reporters who are making photo assignments, the more practical and focused and skill-based you can make it, the more successful they are.”

Linking the training to its practical application also can help persuade reluctant staff members to lead a class, says Roberts, because it enables them to see the usefulness of what they’re teaching.

“If it’s just the kind of a topic that’s kind of an evergreen, not altogether very well focused, then it’s a tough thing,” he says. “I do think if it’s practical, it’s tied to goals and people can immediately use the skill, the person who is sharing it automatically gets a sense of the value. At the same time … I really talk it up with them, I explain the value of it, I explain how much people need it, how much it’s going to help people.”

Converting Journalists into Teachers

Even “tougher to address” than setting goals and defining practical training that will move the newsroom toward accomplishment of those goals, says Roberts, is teaching staff members how to share effectively what they know.

“You have to help the person who’s the expert for that program to prepare a program that has some good basic training principles involved,” he says. “It obviously has to be focused, it also has to have skills, it also should probably have an exercise or two to help people practice. In the training world what they call the subject matter experts are not people adept at training.”

Many journalists need what Roberts calls a “safe” environment to leap comfortably, even if temporarily, from the role of solo practitioner to that of player coach. A narrow subject matter and a standardized classroom format can alleviate staffers’ anxieties about appearing to be know more than their colleagues – a common concern in some smaller newsrooms, says Roberts (“Who am I to be an expert? Who am I to talk to my colleagues?) – and make them feel a “little less exposed to celebrity-hood that they don’t feel comfortable with.”

“They don’t feel like they have to deliver a college-level course on good writing,” he says. “If it’s simply about how to use commas properly, I think they can be the expert for that hour on how to use commas. If it’s something like 29 tips for good writing, that can be very overwhelming and daunting.”

Roberts adds that a “standard way of presenting a program” makes people feel more equal and “then somebody who is funny and entertaining doesn’t appear to be popular and somebody who is maybe knowledgeable but less entertaining doesn’t feel like they failed or something. The focus really has to be on the content and anything you can do to help people effectively plan and deliver an hour of some kind of development would make it more of a group activity and less a performance where they feel the possibility of getting judged or rejected.”

For smaller papers, peer-to-peer learning is an end-run around paltry training budgets, says Hughes of the Statesman Journal. “You don’t have to spend a lot of money,” he says. “It would be nice to have money to spend, but most newspapers don’t.”

Hughes schedules training months in advance, slotting staff members into time periods and matching them with topics. He advises editors on similar sized papers to “start small. Don’t bite off more than you can chew.”

Think of training as a continuum, an ongoing activity that is core to the ideals of journalism and the business of the newspaper. “The idea,” says Pea of the Gaston Gazette. “is that things are building upon one another in the organization we have so that we can tie it all together at the end.”

When a newspaper embraces training as a strategic necessity, it is a natural ensuing step to use its own reporters and editors and photographers and artists as primary sources of journalistic how-to because they know the paper best, they hold the trust of their colleagues, and, of course, they’re already paid for.

Befitting an editor who couldn’t think of a reason why he shouldn’t train his staff himself, Pea aptly summarizes the thinking of those journalists who can do – and still teach: “First, just decide you’ve got to do it and that you can’t use the excuse of no time or no expertise. I just pulled together various resources to get me the expertise. It’s more commitment of time than anything else.”
 back to top ^

June 2004
Follow the Money – If You Can Find It

By Tim Porter

Here’s a familiar scenario: Your newspaper’s top executives say they are committed to training. But the money put aside for it disappears, perhaps spent on something else when a hard financial choice had to be made. At year’s end, the money is gone and the training never happened.

Reid Ashe, president and COO of Media General, thinks he has found a way to break budget-but-don’t-spend cycles: He has told the publishers and editors of Media General’s 25 daily newspapers that budgeted training dollars cannot be used for anything else. If they don’t spend the money it will be charged against their bottom lines nonetheless.

In other words, Media General newspaper execs who don’t train will still feel the financial pain.

Ashe, a onetime editor in Jackson , Tenn. , and a publisher in Wichita and Tampa , explains his thinking. “We all got tired of the fact that when things get tight, training is too often the first item that gets cut from the budget,” he says. “So this year we just told everybody you can’t save any money by cutting training because if you don’t do the training we’re going to charge you for it anyway. So if you want to save money you’ve got to find something else to cut.”

There is a simple message emanating from Media General’s headquarters in Richmond , Va. , to the company’s newspapers, which range from mid-sized metros like the Richmond Times-Dispatch and the Tampa Tribune to community papers like the Dothan ( Ala. ) Eagle and the Hickory (N.C.) Daily Record: “Training is an important investment in the staff,” says Ashe. “It enhances people’s skills. It’s a retention tool. It’s part of what you need to do to keep the organization healthy.”

Put Ashe’s words to music and Joe Grimm would be dancing. Grimm, the recruiting and development editor for the Detroit Free Press, a Knight-Ridder newspaper, is known for his frank admonitions to industry leaders and advice to fellow trainers.

“The existence of a training budget reflects some seriousness of purpose on the part of the editors to developing people,” says Grimm. “If the newspaper … wants to get some return on its dollar and pay attention to what it’s doing with its money for training and believes that its staff needs training to stay current and to stay competitive, then probably a budget that you can manage makes a lot more sense than pulling money out of thin air.”

Donna Reed, vice president of news for Media General, says the hard shell imposed on newspapers’ training budgets conveys the seriousness of the company’s intent.

“It’s been very effective in putting a spotlight on training as being foundational,” she says. “I call it a use-it-or-lose-it theory.”

The smaller papers in Media General’s newspaper group may be the greatest beneficiaries, says Reed, because they have the greatest temptation to eschew training in favor of the more pressing day-to-day needs of getting out the newspaper.

“The smaller the paper, the harder it is to carve out the time,” she says. “There are fewer people. In a metro, you can cover for one another pretty easily. You can afford to send people into a two-day training session off-site. The smaller the paper, the math and the percentages get the best of you.”

Linking Training to Broader Editorial Goals

While declining to discuss specific amounts, Reed said the training budget for Media General newspapers is linked to each paper’s editorial goals and the broader objectives of the company’s publishing division. Definition of these goals is essential, says Reed.

“You don’t want training for the sake of training,” she says. “You want training that’s going to move the needle on whatever your goals are or whatever some of your needs are.”

At the Tampa Tribune, for example, Media General’s largest daily (238,000 daily; 315,000 Sunday) and where Reed was managing editor until a few months ago, the newsroom’s senior editors meet annually to develop a set of goals for the coming year. Here is their list for 2004:

• Create a rewarding work environment
• Live the brand.
• Give readers better storytelling.
• Improve multimedia journalism.
• Own the big story.
• Diversify staff.
• Successfully install a new front-end system.

Beverly Dominick, news recruiting and training manager for the Tribune, says Media General’s new training budget policy is giving her more flexibility in creating training opportunities to help meet those goals as well as more reach into the newsroom than in the past.

Dominick doesn’t want to say how much the Tribune will spend on training in 2004 because, she says, in addition to her budget there are “other pockets of training throughout the newsroom” so an exact figure is hard to come by.

“With the allotment we have this year,” Dominick says, “we’re making really good use of the money. It’s certainly spread out not just among reporting, but photo and copy desk and our designers, so we’re not targeting just one group. We’re really trying to spread it around.”

In response to the “better storytelling” goal, for example, as well as to an assessment of the staff’s training needs, Dominick arranged for trainers from API to hold a two-day writing workshop at the paper that involved 96 reporters from throughout the 300-person newsroom.

This is precisely the three-pronged method – establish newsroom imperatives; define needs of the management and staff; develop training to meet those needs – that Grimm of Detroit thinks works best when developing a budget for training.

By contrast, says Grimm, “the popular way to do this is … survey the staff members about what they want to be learning. I don’t think that’s a good way to go. I don’t think people have good ideas about what they want to learn. They’re sort of making a guess. … They’re swimming in the middle of the ocean, saying what they would like and they’re saying, anything. And then the newspaper goes out and it rolls out anything.”

“A better place to start from,” says Grimm, “is for the top editors of the newspaper to sit down and say, ‘What are our key initiatives, our top priorities, things that keep us awake at night? How can training help us get those things done?’ Then you’re training for important things that help you accomplish your key goals. If your training isn’t tied into your key goals then how important can your training really be?”

Tomorrow’s Workforce takes essentially the same approach in its free consulting for news organizations that invest in training and staff development. We provide our partner news organizations with a learning assessment that examines their newsrooms’ culture, training needs and learning capacity and helps define priorities and develop training around them.

How Much Training Money is Enough?

The news industry traditionally has been indifferent to training, and relatively few newsrooms carefully track investment of time and money. So the industry as a whole lacks information about what the right amounts might be.

On average, though, the U.S. newspaper industry spends significantly less on training than other U.S. industries – 0.7 percent of payroll, only a one-third of the national average of 2 percent found in an annual study by the American Society of Training and Development. Companies that place high on such lists as Fortune magazine’s annual compendium of the “100 Best Companies to Work For” often devote 3 to 6 percent of payroll to staff development.

With some simple math, it is easy to calculate a training budget target for your newspaper. For example, at a newspaper with 300 newsroom employees who earned the $44,000 a year (the median salary for American newspaper journalists) direct annual payroll costs (not counting benefits) are $13.2 million. Two percent of that is $264,000.

A quarter-million-dollar training budget? A newsroom’s dream, a publisher’s nightmare and a completely unrealistic figure if not understood in the context of a “fully loaded” budget, one that accounts for indirect as well as direct costs. In other words, that $264,000 figure needs to include the cost of the training as well as the salary of, say, a training director and the portion of employee time devoted to training.

The accompanying table looks at the $264,000 another way. After deducting the salary for a training director and the direct costs of the training itself (fees, travel, materials, etc.), what remains is an amount that is measured in the cost of the hours devoted to training by the newsroom staff. In this scenario, a newsroom of 300 people who are paid the median U.S. journalist salary should be devoting the equivalent of about four FTEs to training just to meet the national training average of all industries.

The Bottom Line

Of course, other metrics can be used to establish a benchmark for a training budget such as a percentage of operating budget or a fixed dollar amount per staff member. Or a key determinant may be the average number of hours per employee per year.

What is important, though, is to have a dedicated amount of money devoted to training and to have the training similarly devoted to the organizational goals of the newspaper and the newsroom.

Reid Ashe knows that the dots cannot always be connected between training and quality – or even between training and the bottom line, but he also knows that progress, innovation and change cannot happen without training.

“It’s hard in every case to trace the direct payoff,” he says, “but clearly we want to be more skilled at the functional aspects of our business, we want our frontline supervisors to be more skilled as supervisors, they should make for a more effective organization.”

The nut graph is that “training and development are linked to everything,” says Ashe.

That’s why the training line-item in Media General newspaper budgets is receiving the same scrutiny this year that is usually reserved for operating margins or net profits.

“Because of what we’re doing this year,” says Ashe, “we’re watching carefully what they are spending vs. their budget because I don’t want to let anybody get to the end of the year and discover that they’ve got all this money they’ve budgeted and they haven’t spent it. … We don’t want that to happen, so we’re watching carefully.”
back to top ^

May 2004
Training for managers: forget the beast. let's deal with those ducks
By Tim Porter

The old San Francisco Examiner had a newsroom culture that was equal parts Sun Tzu, Homer Simpson and Hunter Thompson. When I became metro editor, my management training consisted of this advice from a predecessor: “This job is like being nibbled to death by ducks. Don’t let them get to you.”

That was many years ago, and the old Examiner is gone. But the ducks are thriving in newsrooms across the country, biting the ankles and nipping at the shins of front-line editors, quacking up a storm about budget lines, weekend shifts, seating arrangements, the company car and so much more, distracting those editors from what they were hired to do: Good journalism.

It’s not a fun place to be, in the middle. Bosses want long-term vision converted to daily reality. Reporters have needs and idiosyncrasies. The news beast is ravenous around the clock.

These editors – the department heads, the assigning editors, the copy desk chiefs – have the hardest jobs in the newsroom. In most cases, they receive the least preparation to do them well.

Mike Phillips, editorial development director for E.W. Scripps Newspapers, worked those newsroom trenches – and empathizes with those who still do it.

“I spent a lot of years in mid-level jobs,” said Phillips. “You really do feel trapped between the suits and the working stiffs in some ways. And in today’s newsroom, which is far more complex than it was when I was city editor or an assistant city editor, you’re trapped in a lot of complex processes and very demanding serial deadlines. You’ve got to post to the Web site and on and on.

“We all had to feed the beast forever, but the beast has gotten to be more demanding.”

Phillips is one of a growing number of news industry leaders who believe the best place to start changing newsroom culture is in the middle.

The Readership Institute emphasized the same organizational location when it introduced its “Ready to Innovate” index to the joint convention in April of the Newspaper Association of America and the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

The index measures the institutional capacity of newspapers to innovate – to reconfigure processes, to challenge assumptions about what is possible, to imagine and develop new editorial products. It stresses the need for management communication, staff training and involvement by all employees in goal-setting and execution.

The characteristics of Ready to Innovate newspapers include:

• Managers “create and communicate reader-oriented strategy.”
• The entire staff focuses on readers.
• Training and development is a resource allocation priority.
• Employees are fully engaged in the direction of the newspaper.
• Staff are involved in “creating solutions.”

Let’s look at three new efforts that target development of mid-level newspaper editors: Innovative, chain-wide programs at Scripps Newspapers and Lee Newspapers, and a home-grown series of seminars by a Newhouse newspaper in Syracuse, the Post-Standard.

Learning How to Learn at Scripps

The Scripps Newspapers program launched in May and involved 36 front-line editors from the company’s two newspapers in Tennessee, the Knoxville News-Sentinel and the Memphis Commercial Appeal.

Phillips, Scripps editorial development director and the architect of the program, said the training is “built around the Learning Newsroom concept. It’s broken down into teaching a number of skills that will make it possible for the line editors to change their newsroom cultures.” These skills include coaching, systems analysis – “two of the key ones,” said Phillips – understanding learning styles and advanced planning.

Here is how the program works:

• The editors convene in Nashville for a day-and-a-half of training.

• They return to their newsrooms with a hefty to-do list – form a newsroom-wide training grid, analyze skill levels and identify training needs for their staff, assess the learning styles of all their people and decipher how each best learns, run an analysis of newsroom decision-making and work-flow systems and, said Phillips, “solve at least one problem in each area.”

• In six weeks, they regroup for another long training session, focusing on “more advanced organizational psychology” and similar subjects.

• Finally, said Phillips, the editors “go back and put together a plan, including a timeline, of developing a Learning Newsroom and present it to senior management.”

Where do these editors – often the first in any newsroom to identify themselves as having too much to do and too few hours to do it in – find the time to make this happen?

“Where are they going to get the time not to do it?” said Phillips. “They’re all trapped feeding the beast. They all say, ‘I wish I had more time to work with reporters, but I don’t.’ They’re trapped in a vicious cycle. They have got to break the cycle in order to be more creative leaders and to be the kind of leaders they want to be.”

Phillips is optimistic. “I’ve gone through this with newsrooms that didn’t plan and that was the question: ‘Where would I find the time to do all this planning?’” he said. “Once you get them over the hump and get them planning all their enterprise work, four, five, six weeks out, they’d shoot you if you tried to take it away from them because it frees up so much time to do better journalism. I think the same things going to happen.”

He interviewed each of the 36 editors chosen for the program, as well as a number of the reporters who work for them. “What I found,” he said, “was a lot of hunger for change and at the same time a lot of skepticism that it would be possible. They want it to happen, but they’ll believe it when they see it.”

Phillips drew on a number of resources to design the program, including the Learning Newsroom handbook put together by ASNE (“as a basic text”) and “10 Steps to a Learning Organization,” by Peter Kline and Bernard Saunders, from which he used a cultural assessment survey to mark a the starting point for each newsroom.

“We’re doing by the seat of our pants to some extent,” said Phillips. “Nobody’s ever really done anything like this that I know if, at least not in the newspaper business.”

Lee Newspapers Adds the Four Y’s to the Five W’s

By this summer, nearly 100 assigning editors from Lee Newspaper’s 44 dailies will have completed a rigorous, four-day program developed by David Stoeffler, vice president of news for Lee Newspapers:

Stoeffler describes the Four Y’s of the program:

• Your Readers: Trainers present Readership Institute findings and talk about how Lee Newspapers have responded to it. “We introduce people to the markets where they work and live every day and make sure they know a lot about the reader in their own markets.”

• Your Teams: An entire day is devoted to this concept. “This is where the heart of the culture comes in. … It’s all about trying to get people to focus on being a coach, not a fixer … getting people to focus on front end of the reporter relationship as opposed to always trying to fix things on the back end.”

• You: This segment explores each editor’s own leadership style “and what some issues are with that because we’re different and some of us are naturally empathic and some of us aren’t.”

• Your Boss: The editors examine their relationships with their own managers and how the hierarchy “influences the day-to-day activities of the newsroom.”

The program, which began in fall 2003 and is held in regional locations with about 20 editors at a time, grew out of discussions about potential training between Stoeffler and the company’s top editors. “They agreed that assigning editors were the key,” said Stoeffler.

“We feel like over the years – before the Readership Institute reported – and especially since, that we’ve hammered away at the top leaders that they really need to be focused on customers and really need to be focused on readers,” he said. “Now, we feel like it’s important to focus on those mid-level people and give them the tools to do that.”

Stoeffler said he developed the training program with a group of about 10 editors from Lee newspapers – “people who I knew or recognized as strong leaders in our own newsrooms.” He said the planners also drew from programs developed by other companies such as Knight Ridder.

At the end of the training, the editors “fill out a contract with themselves,” a commitment to carry the lessons of the workshop from classroom to newsroom in each area of the Four Y’s – “something that they’re going to do themselves, something that they’re going to do for their readers, something that they’re going to do for their team and something that they’re going to do for their boss,” said Stoeffler.

When an editor signs the contract, another editor witnesses it. “What we’re trying to do,” said Stoeffler, “is set up a peer relationship between two people to talk about their problems because everybody knows what happens: About 10 days after the seminar is over, the glow is gone, you’re back at your desk, the phone is ringing off the hook, reporters are lined up waiting to talk to you and you start to forget. So, we’ve tried to set up a mechanism for people to check in on each other and give themselves some support.”

Creating New Standards at the Post-Standard

Michael Connor, executive editor of the Post-Standard in Syracuse, N.Y., felt something needed to be done about the “inconsistent standards” that sometimes resulted in stories “that are just embarrassing to see on the front page.”

“We wanted to try to identify our standards and communicate them to all the editors so that we know what a Page 1 quality story is,” said Connor. “What are our expectations for centerpieces? What are our expectations for a good enterprise story?”

Connor hopes to find the answers to these and other questions in a series of monthly workshops the paper created for its 18 assignment editors from metro, sports, features and business. The workshops focus on four areas: Planning, organizing, editing and managing, with a particular emphasis on the latter.

The broader objective, said Connor, is to rearrange the cultural mindset of these mid-level editors.

“They have the power to transform the paper,” he said. “They can bring this change about. One of our major goals in this whole training … is to move as far away as we can form the we-they dichotomy where middle managers think upper management is ‘they.’ … We’re trying to get them to believe that they are the newspaper and they can change the newspaper. The excitement and creativity that got them into those jobs in the first place can drive the paper places we didn’t think we could go.”

Connor said the editors have responded energetically. “The first session we had with them was really electrifying,” he said. “There is a lot of energy among that group. They had never met as a team before. There is a lot of commonality in their interests.”

The Post-Standard’s program began in March and runs through July. Connor considers it a first phase of an ongoing learning program and expects the assigning editors to play a larger role in the design of future training. “We want them to help to come up with some kind of device to measure the success of this thing,” he said.

All-Levels Leadership as a Differentiator

The emphasis on growing good middle managers reflects the deepening newsroom realization that fundamental, cultural change can only come from within. Sophisticated readership research is useless unless it is understood and embraced by an engaged, enthusiastic corps of front-line editors, the people who make the hundreds of daily decisions large and small that result, ultimately, in the newspaper that readers hold in their hands.

“I was struck by that as a priority,” said Connor, referring the Readership Institute’s presentation at the NAA-ASNE convention.

Too often, leadership is interpreted solely as an executive duty, something top editors are obliged to provide to the rank and file. Yes, the masthead gang owns the strategy, but, as David Stoeffler pointed out, leadership at all levels is necessary to convert that “vision thing” into ink on newsprint.

“The difference between the average newspapers and the best newspapers is all about the leadership,” said Stoeffler. “It certainly starts at the top and by that I mean both the editor and the publisher, but it’s really critical to have strong leadership at the mid-level management of the newspaper and that’s where we have put most of our energy.”      back to top ^

April 2004
Growing audience: The importance of training and development

The news industry, traditionally untroubled about staff development, is taking a new look.

In today’s multimedia world, industry leaders feel heightened competition for the best and brightest employees. Economists predict an acute shortage of “knowledge workers.” Starting salaries for journalists, stagnant for decades, have begun to creep upward. Industry attrition also is climbing, and an increasingly professional journalism workforce wants – and is starting to get – more training and mid-career education.

The same information revolution that draws away journalistic talent also siphons off the attention of audiences. But a growing body of research, as well as the experience of many news leaders, shows that improving staff development and training can help news organizations improve the quality of their journalism to keep and even expand audiences.

Benefits include:

1. Journalists with learning and development opportunities stay with organizations longer. Higher employee retention both saves money and strengthens readership.
2. News organizations with strong training and education programs enjoy a greater chance of success in creating newsroom diversity and reaching wider audiences.
3. A learning newsroom is more likely to have a constructive culture, increasing performance.
4. Skill, topic and value training all help journalists provide greater editorial quality.

The following pages explore the case for staff development.

1. Journalists with learning and development opportunities stay with organizations longer. Higher employee retention both saves money and strengthens readership.

Average turnover across America ’s newsrooms, historically low compared to other non-manufacturing industries, climbed in the 1990s as Internet and other opportunities lured many journalists away from traditional media. By 2000, newsroom turnover in the newspaper industry averaged 15 percent, about the same average found across industry nationally.

“Newspapers feel they are dealing with a mounting crisis in getting and keeping good people,” the Media Management Center’s Readership Institute reported in 2000. “In countless conversations with newspaper executives, two themes recur: ‘We’ve got candidates for jobs, but we don’t seem to be getting the cream of the crop any more,’ and ‘We keep losing the people we can’t afford to lose.’”

Recruiting and retention challenges are likely to increase. The middle-aged baby boomers who make up the largest portion of the news industry will retire in the first quarter of the 21st century. The worker group that follows is smaller and less likely to be loyal to any organization that does not provide challenges and development opportunities.

“We are about to face a demographically driven shortfall in labor that will make the late 1990s seem like a minor irritation,” Anthony Carnevale, former chairman of the National Commission for Employment Policy, told Business 2.0 magazine in September 2003.

This will worsen what the Readership Institute calls the ”hidden” business cost of turnover, the relationship between high-turnover staffs and high-turnover readership.

“Difficulties in recruiting and keeping talented workers come at a time when levels of readership and share of advertising continue to slowly but steadily erode. New research shows these issues are linked – that high turnover can depress reader satisfaction, readership and how people perceive the newspaper’s brand,” the Readership Institute said after its Impact Study of 100 newspapers.

“That alone is a compelling opportunity for newspapers to focus on getting and keeping the best.”

The Readership Institute identifies development and learning activities as critical to retaining staff and building a dynamic workforce.

Newsrooms do not typically track or report their turnover rates or link them to staff development activities. In those that do, however, there appear clear relationships between staff development and turnover.

In Georgia , for example, The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer newsroom had below average turnover in 1999 and 2000. A 50,000 circulation newspaper feeding the Atlanta market would have been expected to have higher than average turnover.

Former Ledger-Enquirer Executive Editor Mike Burbach says the paper’s commitment to training – an average of approximately 30 hours per employee per year – helps them recruit better employees, “keep them longer and keep them in the game longer.”

The 2002 study “Newsroom Training: Where’s the Investment?” underscored that improved opportunities for training and development will be critical to the retention of journalists in all media as the economy opens up. Though three in 10 journalists told researchers they received regular training, an even greater number – a full third of those surveyed – expressed dissatisfaction with training opportunities. The lack of training outranked even compensation and lack of opportunities for promotion among the journalists surveyed.

The survey, co-sponsored by the Council of National Journalism Organizations and the Knight Foundation, estimated that the news industry spends .07 percent of payroll annually on training and staff development, when industries generally spend three times that amount and some high-performing corporations spend 10 to 20 times that amount.

2. News organizations with strong training and education programs enjoy a greater chance of success in creating newsroom diversity and reaching wider audiences.

The news industry hopes to keep and expand its audience in an increasingly diverse nation, yet it struggles to keep and expand the number of women and journalists of color in its newsrooms.

The American Society of Newspaper Editors 2002 survey of diversity in the newsrooms of American daily newspapers found that journalists of color made up 12.5 percent of the newsroom staff, lagging well behind the U.S. population, 31 percent people of color.

“The American Journalist,” a survey done every decade by David Weaver at the University of Indiana, showed the journalistic workforce in the year 2002 was about a third women, unchanged from 10 years earlier, even though women now make up more than 60 percent of the nation’s journalism school students.

The bottom line: diversity in America is growing at a far greater rate than diversity in American newsrooms, raising the odds that newsrooms will become disconnected from the communities they serve. The problem is especially acute in America ’s smaller newsrooms.

Journalists of color who leave the profession generally cite a lack of professional challenge and a lack of opportunities for advancement.

Improved training and professional development has been an important factor at the relatively few dailies that have achieved racial parity with their communities.

Past surveys show journalists of color joined by both women and young journalists as being statistically more likely to want to leave a job if it does not offer a chance to learn and grow. News industry efforts to reach younger news consumers as well as female consumers also can be hampered by a lack of training and staff development.

3. A learning newsroom is more likely to have a constructive culture, increasing performance.

Staff development – investments that enhance an individual’s skills, knowledge and behavior – strengthens companies by doing more than reducing turnover.

Organizations with constructive, learning workplace cultures tend to do better in the marketplace. In the news industry, Readership Institute research has stressed that the “defensive” cultures of most newsrooms are a primary obstacle to growing audience.

The Southern Newspaper Publishers Association recently faced both of these factors – a constructive need to add training and defensive budget cuts during the recent recession – and fashioned a creative solution to increase staff development opportunities for its member newspapers, many of which are the small newsrooms most in need of training.

Inspired by the “ Cox Academy ,” which provides newsroom training for regional clusters of Cox newspapers, SNPA developed a “traveling campus” program to offer weekend training at 20 sites per year, reachable by car by any member.

In 2002, more than 7,600 newspaper employees attended the traveling seminars, nearly as many people in one year as the SNPA foundation had trained in the previous 32 years. By the end of 2003, the organization’s members had pledged $8 million of a $10 million endowment needed to permanently fund the training.

4. Skill, topic and value training all help journalists provide greater editorial quality .

News industry leaders say they can compete only with relevant, credible content. These key elements of editorial quality – and of any quality news brand – rely increasingly on the skill, knowledge and ethics of the staff.

The Readership Institute points to newspaper craft skills such as writing, photography, graphics and page design as keys to increasing reader satisfaction. Recommending improved technique is one thing, putting it into place is another. That’s where increased and improved training and development comes in.

Similarly, news organizations struggle to provide content that is relevant across a wider audience that includes young people and people of color. Updating knowledge and expertise – whether it is community knowledge or specialized knowledge in business, science, health, and law – is essential to this process. Newsrooms with a high commitment to training already know and practice this. The challenge is to find practical ways to increase the capacity of newsrooms of all sizes to know and practice it.

Recent events have shown that credibility is a vital yet fragile force in any news organization. Ongoing training and staff development around values and ethics is needed as market forces increase pressure on standards. Indeed, when journalists say they want training, they refer to all three types – skills, knowledge and ethics.

In newsrooms, journalists consistently say they need more training to do their jobs. The national training survey found surprising harmony -- eight in 10 journalists believe they need more training to keep up with changing demands, and nine in 10 news executives agreed.

Summary

For a century now, journalism associations, societies, school and professional groups have argued that editorial quality matters.

In recent years, expensive studies have shown it statistically.

“The importance of editorial content in building long-term readership comes as no surprise,” the Readership Institute reported. “What is interesting is how sensitive readers are to improvements in editorial content … any improvement … leads to more time spent with the paper, more frequent and complete reading.”

In television, the Project for Excellence in Journalism has since 1999 unveiled a series of studies showing that local broadcasters that meet generally agreed upon standards of editorial quality are more likely to rise in the ratings and become number one stations in their markets.

“60 Minutes” demonstrated this on a national scale by topping the ratings for years with the most aggressive, journalistic news report on television. Program anchor Mike Wallace has donated millions of his own money to endow a mid-career fellowship at the University of Michigan to bring continuing education in specialized topics to hundreds of his colleagues.

Leading journalists agree that increasing levels of quality require increasing and improved investment in staff development.

“Thinking about training and development in business terms there is no question, no question in my mind at all, that it’s essential to our success,” says Jay Smith, president of Cox Newspapers. “I think it’s every bit as important as what we spend on newsprint, what we spend on travel, what we spend on all those line items in a budget. Because if we don’t make the commitment to do it, what we’re saying is that we don’t care, that we are prepared to lose ground as the world grows more complex with each passing day, and to lose ground effectively is ultimately to lose.”

Strategic staff development efforts that focus on journalistic quality and a constructive workforce culture will be critical to news organizations as they face the increased competition for audience and talent in the 21 st Century.      back to top ^

Lessons from industry: Training for change

By Tim Porter

“In order to grow, you have to train – or you get trapped in the present.” ­– John Bachman, managing partner, Edward Jones, No. 1 on Fortune’s list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For, Fortune, Jan. 20, 2003

Given a choice between the past, the present and the future, most newspaper companies would opt for the past, when newspapers were a daily read in most households and profits flowed like ink.

But that era is gone. The future threatens to become even more challenging financially and journalistically than it is now.

Other companies in other industries face similar challenges. Those that adapt and thrive are prepared for change. They train their managers. They train their staffs. They learn as institutions.

Newspapers invest poorly in employee development

The newspaper industry spends only 0.7 percent of payroll on employee training – about one third a national standard of 2.2 percent, or about 28 hours of training annually per employee.

Only one newspaper company – the New York Times – made Fortune’s 2003 list of 100 Best Places to Work, and it was No. 93, 46 places behind Starbucks. The coffee company pays its baristas as much (or as little) as some smaller newspapers pay their newest reporters, but also offers them 40 hours of annual training (not to mention a free pound of coffee a week).

What lessons do Starbucks and other companies that invest heavily in their employees have for newspaper companies?

Dr. Laurie Bassi, CEO and Managing Partner of McBassi & Company, whose Maryland research and investment company tracks financial performance of companies that do significant amounts of training, says the answer is intrinsically linked to a company’s willingness to change with the times.

“It is impossible to change without learning something new,” Bassi said. “An organization cannot change without learning something new, nor can the individuals within it change without learning something new.

“Investment in employee development is the prerequisite for change, which is essential for firms being able to adapt and survive in this highly volatile set of circumstances in which they find themselves. I think it’s a perfect application for the newspaper industry because it obviously is going through enormous change (and) must change rapidly if it’s going to survive.”

Training spending boosts the bottom line

A study by consultants Roberts, Nathanson & Wolfson of 5,200 organizations found that “world-class development practices targeted at ‘rank and file’ individuals throughout the organization make a significant impact on business results,” among them retention (up 57 percent) and productivity (up 19 percent).

The study showed how staff development activities paid off for the top 16 percent of organizations doing the most training. (See table.)

The pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, which devotes the equivalent of 14 percent of its payroll to training, provides a concrete example of Roberts, Nathanson & Wolfson’s findings.

In 2002, Pfizer noticed turnover increasing among its sales force, a huge negative in an industry in which revenue is driven by the strength of the relationship between the sales representative and the medical professional.

In response, the company taught managers to identify at-risk sales people and develop with them a working relationship focused on active, ongoing listening, coaching and counseling.

The result? After one year and $150,000 in costs, turnover decreased by 2 percentage points, saving the company $2.4 million in replacement training costs alone. “When calculations were complete, Pfizer estimated a total return of $3.6 million in cost avoidance and increased productivity,” Training magazine reported.

Strategic training, engaged leadership

Jerry Godbehere, Pfizer vice president for Global Learning and Development, says two key components must be in place for training to pay off:

• Strategy: The training must complement the needs of the business – and of the customer. “Sometimes we do things that seem good, but they aren’t really aligned to the outcome at the end of the day,” Godbehere said in an interview. “To me, it’s that real clear understanding and engagement of the business” that makes training work.
• Leadership: Training must be embraced and modeled by managers. “You can send somebody to a training course, and they’re going to learn stuff and they may use some of it,” said Godbehere, “but where it really sticks is where they come back and their manager is working with them on the very same thing, is helping them apply what they learned in that.”

Having managers responsible and accountable for employee development is critical to sustaining new ideas and new skills, said Godbehere. “A lot of it gets back to the engagement of the manager in what has been learned and the application of it,” he said. “It speaks to a culture of learning, creating that environment of people realizing that they don’t know it all and a willingness to learn new things.”

Indeed, across industries, the high levels of performance found in the Roberts, Nathanson & Wolfson study usually are associated with organizations that have “constructive” cultures, which the Readership Institute has shown are rarely found in newspapers.

“Culture” embodies a set of principles that govern corporate and individual actions, principles that determine how well a company and its employees communicate, collaborate, innovate and adapt in challenging environments. “Constructive” cultures embrace change; “defensive” cultures avoid it.

“What are our core beliefs?” says Godbehere, talking about how Pfizer considers its training needs. “How do want people to behave? Any company, regardless of size, if they focus on their foundational reasons for being and spend some time training on that, I believe there’s value in that.”

Knowing about knowledge

Training specialists use terms like “knowledge business” and “human capital” when talking about investing in employees. This language seems too manufactured, too steeped in corporate-speak to find easy acceptance in most newsrooms, where a plain-spoken news-factory patois is preferred by many journalists who prefer to see themselves as technology-enabled Hildy Johnsons rather than as “assets” whose value to the newspaper is directly related to their skills.

Why is a newspaper in the “knowledge business”? Because it sells information to people who need it in order to make good decisions about their lives and about the society in which they live.

A newspaper’s “human capital” are all the people who make that happen. Increasingly, that human capital is all that separates newspapers from that unruly and growing horde of pundits, shouters, spinners and bloggers who are clamoring for the attention of the public.

Developing that capital – and keeping it from walking out the door – is critical for newspapers and other companies in the knowledge business.

Nearly seven in 10 global business leaders believe “that retaining talent is far more important than acquiring new blood,” the consultant group Accenture found in a study of 200 senior executives. "People have become the key competitive differentiator in today's knowledge-based economy.”

In other words, a newspaper’s success – how well it adapts to the unique needs of its own community and separates its journalism from the glut of media noise – depends on the skills, productivity and attitude of its workforce.

People make the difference

“The reason that human capital is so important now in the knowledge era, as we’ve moved out of the industrial era, is that it is really the only sustainable source of competitive advantage,” said Bassi of McBassi & Company. “Machinery, technology is all very global, as is financial capital, and so it can be easily replicated. Human capital is the only thing that cannot be easily replicated and, hence, a source of long-run competitive advantage.”

Other organizations – law firms, for example – whose success depends on the knowledge and skill of professional practitioners invest heavily in the ongoing education and development of those professionals.

Testa, Hurwitz & Thibeault, a Boston-based law firm with 300 attorneys, teaches its legal staff everything from accounting, communication and management skills to how to take a deposition, how to delegate and how to draft a clearer contract – almost all of it in-house with senior associates and partners leading the instruction.

“Why is the firm successful?” asked Elaine Ohlson, the firm’s director of professional development. “Is it because they practice law like every other firm in the United States or in the world? No, they must have some sort of edge. So, how are you going to pass on that edge if you don’t somehow let the people who’ve developed it, or developed that expertise, share what that uniqueness is with the people you’re trying to bring along in their careers?”

The firm is a prime destination for ambitious first-year associates fresh out of the nation’s best law schools who see it as a launching pad for their careers. Isn’t the firm concerned that investing in those young lawyers is a waste of money? “No,” said Ohlson, “we don’t worry about that. What are we going to do? Keep them stupid so they’ll stay. … It’s part of the way we do business.”

Growing employees – and profits

When knowledge is applied it becomes a skill that can be deployed to build a better product, whether that product is a legal service, a daily newspaper or a construction project.

TD Industries, a Dallas construction and engineering firm that is a perennial selection for the Fortune “Best Places to Work” list, practices a management philosophy called “servant leadership.” Its central tenet is that as employees “grow stronger, wiser, (and) more autonomous … the stronger the performance is going to be,” said Jessie McCain, managing director of human resources for the company.

“What this is all about is answering the question: Do people grow?” said McCain. “The primary responsibility of a leader at TD Industries is to ensure those (people) that person is leading grow. Not only in job responsibilities, but in judgment, in character, just grow.”

At TD Industries, each employee is expected to complete 32 hours of training a year, managers are evaluated by how well their staffs meet learning goals and the company pays 100% of tuition, books and fees for continuing employee education.

“Just about anything that is remotely related to their job or helping them qualify for a job in the future to which they might aspire,” said McCain. “For example, it would not be unheard of for a plumber to decide that he wanted to get a degree in mechanical engineering. We would support that.”

In the end, the question newspapers and other companies face is this: Why invest in your employees? Why spend the money? Our answer must begin with “so that”:

• Why are we teaching our reporters computer skills? So that they can analyze campaign finance records more deeply and more quickly, providing readers with coverage we can crow about in marketing materials
• Why are newsroom managers learning Spanish? So that they can meet with and understand people who make up our nation’s faster-growing demographic.
• Why are we giving our best reporter a year off for a fellowship? So that she doesn’t leave for good and take with her 15 years of community knowledge.

McCain’s answer is even simpler. “It depends on why you’re in business,” she said. “If you can do your job and run your company with monkeys, go ahead. We can’t.”
back to top ^