Happy newsrooms, sad newsrooms
In yet another inspiring post, Colin Mulvany of The Spokesman-Review encourages those who work in today’s newsrooms:
One of my longtime mantras has been that there can be no more “just photographers” or “just reporters.” Everyone now needs to be multimedia producers. That’s my story and I’ve been sticking to it. My goal is not to change the newsroom in mass, but to empower one person at a time with the multimedia tools and training that will allow them to be successful in producing content for online.
Recently I received an e-mail from the online editor at a small newspaper, who wrote:
… we are meeting some pretty strong resistance from some reporters and photographers, mostly the photo staff. Do you have any advice on how to build enthusiasm for the new media? … I understand we’re adding to their workload (one of the chief complaints). We’re trying to find a balance between maintaining the print newspaper and boosting our storytelling online.
I haven’t replied yet, but I think there’s an answer in Colin’s post. He says his newsroom has been “incredibly receptive.”
Maybe that’s because he and a young, savvy multimedia producer (hired straight out of college) “spend a lot of time making people in the newsroom feel comfortable with new technology like digital recorders and small video cameras.”
I was reminded of a series of e-mails from a friend of mine who works for a newspaper in the Midwest. Many of his early efforts to learn multimedia storytelling were thwarted by his own editor, who apparently saw the online as competition against the print product. My friend’s editor actually went up the chain of command to get a top editor to tell my friend to spend LESS time on multimedia and more time writing those good old pure print stories.
(Sorry for using unnamed sources, but you know I can’t expose these folks.)
So which of these newsrooms is going to improve the online and therefore increase the staff’s skills and produce better content? Seems to me like The Spokesman-Review has the right idea.
Which techniques for helping people adopt a positive attitude — and maybe even build enthusiasm — are working in your newsroom?
One of the best ways to inspire cooperation is to instill a sense of urgency. Folks have to understand that our industry –and their jobs as a result– are in serious trouble.
March 21, 2008 at 7:44 amNot writing things like “in mass” might help inspire confidence, too.
Some journalists – sorry, head-in-sand nitpickers – fear sloppy errors like that will descend en mass if we all try to become MTV.
March 21, 2008 at 10:39 amThanks for the heads-up Dave. My dictionary actually spells it “en masse.” So we both got it wrong. Funny, I don’t think I have ever written that word before.
I’d also point out as a blogger, I don’t have the luxury of a having an editor like you. An excuse? Maybe. But are you telling me you have never sent a grammar error in a story to your editor? Did my spelling en masse incorrectly really change what I was trying to say?
No,our industry is not going to descend into the MTV abyss. Dave, I hope you don’t think just writing stories for your newspaper is going to be enough to preserve your job in the near future. I am only trying to help my coworkers survive the coming fifth round of layoffs in the last six years. At the Spokesman-Review, we’ve been cut to the bone. Being a web-centric organization, who do you think management is going to cut next? The person who understands and produces for the web or the “head-in-sand nitpicker.”
March 22, 2008 at 2:05 pm