Training on a Shoestring
An Open Conspiracy to Improve the Quality of our Journalism, May 3, 2002

When tough economic times slash or burn your training budget, that doesn't mean you stop training. It means you work harder to keep training. Put your staff to work training each other.

Learn from your best work.
When a staff member produces some work you're proud of, schedule a "how I did it" brown-bagger so she can share her secrets and her lessons with the staff. Ask detailed questions: When did you start writing the story? How did you find that fact? Did you outline the story first? Be sure to include artists, photographers and editors in these sessions. If you're talking about breaking news, the photographer's war story may be more interesting than the reporter's. If you're talking about a project, the teamwork is an important part of the success, so you want to recognize and learn from the full team.

Take inventory.
Lex Alexander of the Greensboro News & Record advises: "Inventory your in-house assets. Who are your best sourcers? Interviewers? Documents reporters? Who writes your best ledes? Best narratives? Anyone ever worked with databases or spreadsheets, perhaps in another line of work? (One member of my CAR team is a woman whose introduction to spreadsheets came in retail.) Keep a written record of these folks and their skills. Inventory every new hire as soon after he/she starts as possible." Sue Burzynski of the Detroit News adds: "We're looking at everyone from the publisher on down and examining what our best people are good at."

Share your strengths.
Schedule staff members to lead workshops in their areas of expertise. Staff-led workshops help on at least three levels: The participants learn from a colleague's strength; the workshop leaders will have to analyze what they do and why, and may get even better in an area of strength; the workshop leader feels valued and recognized. Staff members at the Bucks County Courier Times have led sessions on conversational writing and boosting readership. An editor who's a published history author will speak about the dynamics of writing a book while holding a full-time news job. The St. Cloud Times created the Times Institute of Excellence (TIE), a program run by human resources and involving all newsroom departments. "Basically, we created our own in-house university," explains Rene Kaluza. "We created a catalog of courses that were offered. Among those offered by the newsroom were a grammar and style course (done totally by e-mail and Intranet), a community perspectives class, a newspaper ethics course. Other departments offered courses such as Excel and Access training, customer service training, Outlook training, sales training." Participants earned credits for which they could receive trinkets or with enough credits, a day off. The institute even had a graduation, with little diplomas and a barbecue to celebrate. Other than the ribs for graduation, the cost was mostly the time of the faculty. "It actually required more dedication than dollars," Kaluza says.

Learn together.
You can learn from each other even if you don't have an acknowledged leader. Maybe you're all stumbling around the Internet finding helpful Web sites and learning search techniques on your own. Schedule a workshop where you share experiences. Those who are more adept can share their favorite sites and techniques and those who are struggling can ask questions.

Critique each other.
Schedule periodic workshops at which writers will critique drafts of stories staff members are working on. Announce a brown-bag workshop and invite reporters to bring several copies of a draft that they are working on. (For insurance, bring a draft of your own if you write, or ask a senior writer to be sure to bring a story.) Each writer reads his draft aloud, a valuable exercise that your writers probably don't do often enough. Then the writer listens while others at the workshop discuss the story, telling what they liked, what they didn't and what they would suggest. Eventually, the writer will join the discussion, but it's best to listen at first, stifling the urge to explain and defend on every point.

Establish a mentoring program.
Appoint formal mentors from your experienced staff to spend time with new and inexperienced staff members. Ask them to talk at least weekly, answering questions about your community, your paper and professional challenges they are facing.

Tour your community.
Take several newer staff members in someone's minivan on a tour of your city, or a part of town. Have a longtime staff member or a community leader serve as tour guide, pointing out important sites and telling about the city's history and culture. Get out and look around at some important sites. Don't go just to the tourist traps. In fact, you might avoid them altogether. But make sure you show the flood plain, the older or poorer neighborhoods, the most expensive homes, the former landmarks in decline.

Use community experts.
"I am absolutely shameless about asking outside speakers to speak at Courier Times University - for free, of course," says Rose McIver of the Bucks County Courier Times. "We just got a stress management CTU session that way and I'm working on others." Joe Hight of the Daily Oklahoman advises cutting costs by agreeing to trade appearances with the community experts. Some experts might charge if you ask them to develop a formal seminar with PowerPoint presentation and lots of prep time, but they might come at no charge if you invite them to an informal brown-bag brainstorming session. You might call on a fund-raiser who knows how to find information about people's wealth, an environmental activist who digs up records using the Freedom of Information Act, a private detective, a creative writing professor, a studio photographer, a commercial artist. The Oklahoman has invited the state's historian to speak about the paper's effect on the state, a psychology professor who writes articles on media skepticism (or the lack of it) and victims to talk about their perceptions of the paper's coverage. The Detroit News invited a pollster to talk about the perils of reporting on polls.

Learn by doing.
Identify skills reporters need to work on and pair them on a story or several stories with a reporter who's strong on that skill. Make clear to both reporters that the learning reporter should do more of that type of work as they progress. The ideal match would have each reporter learning a skill from the other.

Create a "Training Table."
The Boulder Daily Camera established "a place where staff can pick up handouts, books, and browse at a bulletin board where highlights of good work - from our paper and others - is posted," Curtis Hubbard reports. "Two challenges to this task: getting staff (as opposed to the lone staffer dedicated to the project) to submit items. We've had moderate success in that regard. The other was finding a place of prominence in our newsroom; a place that tells people "writing and learning are valued here."

Impose on colleagues.
Watch for journalists coming to your city and ask if they'll do a session for you, Hight advises. "Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts came to Oklahoma City to speak at a church on a recent Sunday. I persuaded Pitts to come to The Oklahoman on Monday morning to talk about good writing. Pitts was terrific, and we had an enjoyable discussion."

Start writers' groups.
The Boulder Daily Camera followed a suggestion in "Coaching Writers" by Clark and Fry, who list 50 topics for such groups (page 134). "Thus far, we have one group that's going well, although it's too editor-driven," Hubbard reports. "We plan to expand to three or four shortly. The idea here is to create groups of writers from different desks that talk about their own writing and that of others."

Start designer/editor groups.
Hubbard recommends starting points of Mario Garcia's Guide to Better Newspaper design, SND books and various editing and headline writing tips available on Web sites, notably Poynter, Copy Editor and Notrain-nogain.

Debrief contest winners.
If you have monthly contests honoring your best work, make the winners tell the staff how they did it, either over lunch or in brief essays posted electronically in your newsroom. If you don't already have such a contest, you might start one. Of course, cash for the winners would be nice, but you could reward them in other ways: a day off, a prime parking place, merchandise with your newspaper logo.

Spread the learning.
"Leverage the bejeebers out of whatever outside training your folks can get," Alexander advises. "That means they do in-house seminars, brown-bag lunches or dinners, or whatever, to share what they've learned with as many other staffers as possible for whom it could be relevant. If they brought back handouts, have 'em make copies and distribute them. You might get more bang for your buck if you send an assigning editor or copy desk supervisor, rather than a reporter or copy editor, to outside training. Those folks can then turn around and teach their direct reports and peers." The Detroit News has similar sessions after staffers return from such training events as IRE conventions or Poynter seminars. Burzynski takes notes at the post-workshop sessions and posts the highlights on the newsroom intranet site so staff members who miss the session still have a chance to learn.

Share the load.
Create a newsroom training committee to help plan and present workshops for the newsroom. "Our committee planned a short workshop on peer coaching that was well-attended," Hight says.

Share the wealth.
Invite smaller nearby papers to your training sessions, especially if they are affiliated. "We're the largest of the four Gannett papers in Michigan," Burzynski says. "So we've started inviting editors/reporters from the smaller papers to Detroit for some of our in-house workshops. They seemed to really like it. It's not a super long drive so the only cost is mileage and the time they give someone to attend. Other small papers, who belong to larger groups, may want to think about sharing expertise that way." At the World-Herald, we've invited editors from affiliated papers in Council Bluffs, Bellevue and Papillion to our training program for editors. Our editor sent me to our sister paper in Ames, Iowa, for a day of workshops.

Training messages.
The Boulder Daily Camera is planning a daily e-mail that would include a writing tip, a notable story or report, web site or some other learning tool. So far, Hubbard reports, this is a proposal not a success story: "Thus far we haven't found a willing volunteer, and I'm overextended." In a follow-up session as part of our training program for editors, I started a weekly leadership tip. Participants in the program complained of overload of tips and suggestions as they came out of the workshops into the real world. So most of the weekly tips are just reminding them of points from the workshops, though I'm soliciting suggestions and success stories to share in the notes.

Apply for free training.
Journalism training organizations are offering fellowships that often include travel. Watch for those opportunities and apply for them.

Enlist the help of "long-distance coaches."
Ask friends and colleagues to critique an issue or two of your paper. You can trade critiques with a colleague from another paper. Ask for a constructive critique that identifies what you are doing well and suggests how you can do better, in addition to pointing out weaknesses. Share the critique with your staff. It won't help as much as a personal visit from a writing or editing coach, but the staff will welcome the outside view. When I was editor at the Minot Daily News, I did this because I didn't have the money to bring a writing coach all the way to North Dakota. I always heard enthusiastic comments from the staff when I posted a long-distance coach's critique. If the critique was simply saying the same thing I had been saying for weeks, it somehow carried more weight.

Host a National Writers' Workshop.
This is a lot of work and will cost some money up front, but it brings two huge benefits for your training program:

1. For a year or two, the workshop is right in town and your whole staff gets to go.
   
2. If you manage and promote the workshop well, you make a little money, which can pay for training your budget can't cover. The World-Herald hosted workshops in 1999 and 2000 and put the money in a separate account for newsroom training. When our newsroom budget was cut last year and this year, the fund allowed us to continue with some training plans.

Expect that editors teach.
Even if you have a writing coach and a huge training budget, the most valuable training in your newsroom should happen every day between assigning editors and reporters, between copy editors and slots, between photo chief and photographers. Tell your supervisors clearly that training is one of the most important things they do. Insist that editors not just fix copy, but identify problems in copy to reporters and discuss with them how to improve. Demand that editors give stories back to reporters for rewriting when time permits, rather than rewriting themselves. Tell all supervisors that they should set goals for staff members and give them daily feedback on their daily progress toward those goals. Seminars, workshops and conferences are terrific. You should fight to develop a strong training budget. When you get one, don't forget that the best and most effective training is daily guidance and feedback from supervisors and colleagues.

Use the Web.
Scour the Web for training materials to use in your own workshops. Good places to start are notrain-nogain.com and poynter.org. These also might help:

1. Bill Dedman's powerreporting.com
   
2. Teresa Schmedding's presentation on training ideas at ACES last month: http://www.copydesk.org/2002conference/doit.htm
   
3. presentersuniversity.com
   
4. Big Dog's Human Resource Development Page has a Trainer's Toolbox of Templates, Outlines and Briefings (http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd.html) Mary Lynn (Martin) Billitteri of American Press Institute says the site also has some great training quotes to sprinkle into your presentation slides.
   
5. Training Basics section of the American Society for Training and Development Website, (www.astd.org)
   
6. The Training Supersite (trainingsupersite.com)