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Freeing the Prisoners of the Newsroom September - October 2004
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.” |
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