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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:
The following pages explore the case for staff development. 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. 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. 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. . 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. 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 ^ |
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