Behind the Book

Launched in April 2005 with a $2.8 million Knight grant, News U pioneered on-line training for the news industry. NewsU’s highly interactive modules attracted more than 30,000 journalists, students and educators in 157 countries in less than two years.

By 2007, News U (www.newsu.org) was offering more than 30 e-learning courses that appeal to journalists at all levels of experience and in all types of media. Most are free or low-cost. They include such titles as Cleaning Your Copy, Get Me Rewrite: The Craft of Revision, Color in News Design, Handling Race and Ethnicity, Math for Journalists, Freedom of Information, On-Line Project Development and Beat Basics and Beyond. A complete course list is available at www.newsu.org/courselist.

User evaluations since 2005 show NewsU effectively meeting the training needs of journalists:

• 73% said their course was useful to extremely useful.
• 87% said they were likely to participate in another course.
• 75% said they would recommend NewsU to a colleague.
• 63% said they are likely to use the course as a reference in the future.

Howard Finberg, Director of Interactive Learning and News University at Poynter, offered his follow-up research as well as significant wisdom and encouragement in developing News, Improved.

These newsroom workshops focus on helping journalists become more reflective in their work and to develop their capacity for critical thinking. They raise newsroom standards and improve communication.

The program grew out of years of discussion with more than a thousand journalists concerned about the future of the profession and what they saw as a rise in "infotainment" and opinion in the news. The project in 2003 received a grant of $2 million from the Knight Foundation to take the workshops on the road and conduct follow-up assessments.

Workshops engage participants in a discussion about broader goals and purposes and an examination of whether their newsroom's practices live up to those higher purposes. It helps an organization clarify its goals and develop strategies to achieve them. More than a dozen modules cover topics including Accuracy and Verification, Bias, Rethinking the News in an On-line Age, and the Meaning of Journalistic Independence.

By 2006, the project had offered 1 1/2-day sessions to more than 7,300 journalists in more than 120 print, broadcast and on-line newsrooms.

According to CCJ, follow-up interviews, surveys and content analysis in newsrooms showed:

• An extremely high level of positive feeling regarding participation in the workshops.
• A strong and positive impact on participants’ sense of purpose and morale regarding their journalism .
• Marked effects on the willingness and ability of participants to use critical thinking skills.
• Improvements in quality of news product.
• Learning tools of good journalism, including verification, accuracy, investigative reporting, engaging and proportional story telling, and balance.
• Improved communication within the newsroom .
• Newsroom innovation dedicated to fostering better journalism practices .

For more information on the follow-up studies, go to http://www.concernedjournalists.org/node/547

Stanford University Professor William Damon and his research associate, Brett Mueller, shared data and other reporting from their follow-up assessments for News, Improved. The project has moved to the University of Missouri with an additional $2 million grant from Knight. For more information, go to http://www.concernedjournalists.org/newsroom_development/traveling_curriculum.

This $2 million project conducted assessments in 17 print newsrooms.

Tomorrow’s Workforce conducted exhaustive assessments of newsroom training needs as well as identifying practices and systems that might inhibit learning and the application of new skills. It followed up by helping newsrooms develop training that reflected newsroom goals and promised to improve communication and culture.

(Partnerships also were offered to numerous broadcast outlets but none was willing to invest in training and publicly share any training successes.)

Of newsrooms where TW had conducted measurements and follow-up by the end of 2006:

• Five of seven showed overall progress in improving culture. Two others showed progress in the ranks of top and middle managers, who had received intensive training and coaching.
• 11 newsrooms reported content improvements tied to training; those who decided to shift more focus on-line during the course of the project also linked progress to training.

The 17 newsrooms, with more than 3,000 journalists, are:

• The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Daily circulation: 350,157)
• Ledger-Enquirer, Columbus, Ga. (42,272)
• Dothan (Ala.) Eagle (31,639)
• The Enterprise (Ala.) Ledger (10,200)
• The Gaston (N.C.) Gazette (29,330)
• La Crosse (Wis.) Tribune (31,941)
• The Modesto Bee (79,638)
• The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C. (165,483)
• The Oregonian (310,803)
• Philadelphia Daily News (112,540)
• The Philadelphia Inquirer (330,622)
• St. Petersburg Times (312,695)
• South Florida Sun-Sentinel (222,183)
• Star Tribune, Minneapolis, Minn. (358,887)
• Tri-City Herald, Kennewick, Wash. (40,927)
• Waco Tribune-Herald (38,056)
• Winona (Minn.) Daily News (11,192)

* Circulation figures from Audit Bureau of Circulation or individual newspapers.

Director Michele McLellan and Associate Director Tim Porter are co-authors of News, Improved. In addition, management consultant Judy Pace Christie worked extensively with TW partner newsrooms.

The Frontline Editors Project

As long ago as 1995, the news industry identified a crisis in the ranks of frontline assigning editors — the over-worked and often under-trained professionals who work most closely with the news. Pressures on those editors have snowballed with the expansion of the Internet and the shrinking of newsrooms.  Despite the importance of those roles, leaders across the industry agree that assigning editors are among the most misunderstood and least supported of all newsroom groups.

This project takes steps to close that gap, and hopes to encourage more. A loose coalition of journalists, educators and news corporate representatives came together to find ways to boost understanding of the demands of the job in a changing media landscape, to identify and provide training opportunities to the editors in those jobs, and to help future editors step into those roles armed to succeed.
The project was funded with $100,000 from the Knight Foundation, Tomorrow’s Workforce and Poynter’s News University . Project partners worked with more than 100 educators and journalists, including 60 frontline editors to create an inventory of non-craft skills required to be effective in the job. Job profile expert Les Krieger, of Assessment Technologies Group, assisted the project.

The effort identified 23 key management, leadership and relationship skills for editors. 

Working with Michele McLellan, director of Tomorrow’s Workforce, and Jacqui Banaszynski, Knight Chair in Editing at the University of Missouri , Poynter’s NewsU now is using those findings to develop a wide array of on-line training for frontline editors. The first courses will be available in 2007, and include:

• A job fit assessment that will allow individual editors or prospective editors to compare their management style preferences with those of effective frontline editors.
• A module of newsroom situations, with optional responses, that will help those editors better understand their own management style on the job, and will provide feedback and refer them to training resources to help strengthen their skills.
• A day-in-the-life simulation course that will put prospective assigning editors into the job, helping them understand the challenges they might face, and the skills they will need to be effective.

In addition to McLellan and Banaszynski, significant contributors to the project include Howard Finberg, director of News University; John Greenman, a former newspaper editor and publisher who now is a journalism professor at the University of Georgia; Marty Claus, a former executive with Knight Ridder; Carl Sessions Stepp, professor of journalism at the University of Maryland; Mary Nesbitt, managing director of the Readership Institute and associate dean at Medill, and Michael Roberts, deputy managing editor for staff development at the Arizona Republic.

The Learning Newsroom, sponsored by the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the American Press Institute, received a grant of $1 million in 2003 to work with 10 print newsrooms.

Through an intensive one-year program of training and facilitation of committee work, the project sought to demonstrate how training could improve the culture of the newsroom, a key driver of innovation greater audience appeal.

The Learning Newsroom developed a five-part culture-change curriculum:

• Communication: Efforts to make communication more honest, direct and meaningful for individual and team performance.
• Business literacy: A better understanding of the strategies of the newspaper and how the work of all departments – newsroom, advertising, marketing, and circulation – contributes to the enterprise.
• Innovation: An overview of ways in which organizations are identifying opportunities and responding with new products.
• Systems analysis: Looking at current practices, suggesting more effective ones.
• Time management: Exercises to help the staff discover time-consuming practices that may no longer be efficient or necessary and stop or modify them.

More than 900 journalists received training from Learning Newsroom representatives while logging hundreds of hours with other trainers. Of seven newsrooms surveyed by the end of 2006, six had shown improvements in culture. Each participating newsroom also listed dozens of innovations and improvements in news content as a result of the project.

Partner newsrooms:

• Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times (51,704)
• The Bakersfield Californian (60,975)
• Corpus Christi (Tex.) Caller-Times (51,743)
• The Hamilton (Ont.) Spectator (103,072)
• The Herald-Times, Bloomington, Ind. (28,886)
• Lincoln (Neb.) Journal Star (76,504)
• The News Tribune, Tacoma, Wash. (116,150)
• San Jose Mercury News (228,880)
• Sarasota Herald-Tribune (96,260)
• The Telegraph, Nashua, N.H. (25,468)

* Circulation figures from ABC or individual newspapers.

Director Vickey Williams and consultants Pierre Meyer and Toni Antonellis contributed their research and advice for News, Improved. For more information on the project, visit www.learningnewsroom.org.

With $1 million from the Knight Foundation and support from the Associated Press Managing Editors, NewsTrain took craft and management training to more than 3,000 journalists at 40 regional locations in 2004-06.

NewsTrain offers practical advice and proven techniques designed to help frontline editors polish their editing and management skills and become more effective editors. The program features two workshop leaders -- a management teacher and an editing coach -- as well as trainers on freedom of information, credibility and ethics, and online news.

In follow-up interviews and surveys of participants, John Greenman of the University of Georgia found:

• 95 percent found the sessions useful.
• Strong interest in training related to on-line news content, particularly editing and presentation for the Web (80 percent).
• Greater willingness to advocate for training. More than half had participated in some form of training since returning from NewsTrain. Nearly two-thirds were stronger advocates for training in their newsrooms.

Elaine Kramer is project coordinator for NewsTrain, which was founded by Lil Swanson, NewsTrain’s first director, and Carol Nunnelley, APME projects director. For more information, go to www.newstrain.org.