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Growing Your Own: Training from Within July - August 2004 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:
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. 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.” 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.” 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:
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.”
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.” |
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