If today's news organizations are to survive, they need to learn to act more like start-up companies.
That's the message of a new
John S. and James L. Knight Foundation-funded book. It argues that journalists need to be reconditioned. Instead of fearing new ideas, risk and change, journalists must learn to embrace them.
"Journalists don't know how to innovate," says
Tim Porter, co-author with Michele McLellan of
"News, Improved: How America's Newsrooms Are Learning to Change."The book, which was released this morning in Washington, D.C., suggests one way to teach them how. Strategic training. Training that educates the entire staff, drives the newsroom toward specific goals and carefully measures success and failure.
It is this kind of training, the book says, that breeds innovation. This assertion is based on the findings of Knight's four-year, $10 million
Newsroom Training Initiative. The initiative funded six specific training programs:
Tomorrow's Workforce,
NewsTrain,
The Learning Newsroom,
Traveling Curriculum,
Traveling Campus and
News University, an online distance learning project based at
The Poynter Institute.
McLellan, who directed Tomorrow's Workforce, sees strategic training not as a matter of choice, but one of survival.
"We've been a static industry," she says. "Training has largely been an afterthought. ... You could have somebody at Starbucks getting more training than a mid-career journalist."
That, McLellan says, is unacceptable.
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For at least five years, research has shown that journalists want more training. In 2002, a Knight survey of nearly 2,000 journalists found that
eight in 10 newsroom staffers wanted more training than they were getting. An update to that study,
"Investing in the Future of News," [PDF] which was released today in the "News, Improved" book, reports that the number has increased to nine in 10.
Yet, in the five years that passed between the two surveys, only three in 10 news organizations increased their training budgets.
This, McLellan says, is a serious problem. But she points out that simply increasing training won't cut it. She says that's partly because much of the training being provided today isn't all that effective.
Porter explains that, in many newsrooms, training is poorly planned, sporadic and limited by a focus on improving the skills of only a few select journalists.
The news industry trains people as badly as a fast-food diet nourishes them. Training is episodic rather than continuous. Random, rather than strategic.
--"News, Improved"The new Knight survey reflects this. It reports that most journalists prefer instruction in practical skills -- such as, how to use multimedia storytelling tools -- to more general training. And that off-site training is preferable to that which is provided in the newsroom.
Furthermore, the popularity of online distance learning, or e-learning, which is designed to teach highly specific skills to individual journalists, has doubled. The survey says two in 10 journalists use it today. Since it was established two years ago, NewsU has seen enrollment grow to nearly 40,000.
These things are good, McLellan says. But not good enough. Teaching an entire newsroom to get comfortable with taking risks, she says, is vastly more effective than sending a few staffers to a place like Poynter for the week.
"The news industry trains people as badly as a fast-food diet nourishes them," the authors write. "Training is episodic rather than continuous. Random, rather than strategic. Long on talk. Short on measurable impact."
The point of organization-based training, both authors say, is to get everyone on the same page, working side-by-side, struggling as a team to make the news product better.
This sort of top-down leadership approach we see in newsrooms does not encourage innovation of creative risk-taking.
--Michele McLellan"We have a model of leadership that's set up for a static industry, and right now we're in a very dynamic and changing one," says McLellan, who worked for nearly 20 years as an editor at
The Oregonian. "This sort of top-down leadership approach we see in newsrooms does not encourage innovation or creative risk-taking."
In 2004,
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution partnered with Tomorrow's Workforce. Over the course of several months, McLellan worked with executive editor
Julia Wallace and other newsroom leaders to build a training strategy. Articulating the newsroom's goals clearly and specifically was critical.
"They had the right idea," McLellan says. "They knew they wanted the paper to be more engaging. But they hadn't, as a group, really defined [that] in a very specific way."
Wallace and her team settled on three goals. First, improve watchdog reporting. Second, decrease use of the traditional, inverted-pyramid story form. And third, enhance the culture in the newsroom.
To realize the second objective, the newsroom staff was taught how to apply a variety of alternative story forms. Teachers visited the newsroom -- a move that has become more common in recent years as organizations like Poynter have sought ways to supplement the training they offer at their locations. But much of the instruction was conducted by experienced newsroom staffers.
After a year of training, the proportion of nontraditional stories on the front page of the newspaper had grown from 33 to 57 percent.
Undergoing training as a group, McLellan says, unified the staff.
This, the authors write, is what organizational learning expert
Peter Senge calls "alignment."
The book points to Senge's characterization of what happens when a group of people works together as a whole: "A resonance or synergy develops, like the coherent light of a laser rather than the incoherent and scattered light of a light bulb. There is commonality of purpose, a shared vision, and understanding of how to complement one another's efforts."
You have to be ready for anything. You have to be out there playing and trying [new things].
--Tim PorterAs Porter sees it, learning to embrace change -- to work as a team, to take risks, to innovate -- should be every journalist's top priority.
"You have to be ready for anything," he says. "You have to be out there playing and trying [new things]. ... You set some goals. You work on them. Some of them are going to work, and some aren't."
Like Porter, McLellan concedes uncertainty about what the future will bring.
"Underlying this is that the industry needs a new business model," McLellan says. "[The industry needs] to figure out how to make enough money to support all the reporting that's being done. We don't have a solution to that problem."
That problem, though, can only be solved by a certain kind of news organization.
In his introduction to "News, Improved," Knight vice president of journalism programs Eric Newton describes what he considers to be the defining characteristic of such an organization.
"Media evolution doesn't favor the big or strong," he writes. "It favors the nimble.
"Be nimble."
