Training For Managers: Forget the Beast.  Let’s Deal With Those Ducks.

May 2004
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.

Tomorrow’s Managers Tomorrow’s Workforce also has identified training for managers as a priority in newsrooms where it has conducted learning assessments. At the Columbus (Ga.) Ledger-Enquirer, Publisher John Greenman has begun conducting sessions of a “Supervisors Academy” aimed at managers in all departments of the newspaper. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution conducted intensive training for managers last year, and the corporate Cox Academy offers management training for other Cox newspapers.

“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 ^

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