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Follow the Money – If You Can Find It
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:
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. 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.
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.” |
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