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#WEFHamburg: Staff training in multimedia need motivation, direction, goals

Rachel McAthy — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 15:01:46 +0000

There has been plenty of discussion about moving digital journalism forward at the World Editors Forum this week, and the first panel debate today looked at the state of new media training and how editors can improve the teaching of their staff to enable full exploitation of the new media environment.

Announcing the results of a survey mainly of North American journalists by the Poynter Institute’s News University, Howard Finberg told the conference that while reporters felt more proficient in multimedia than five years ago they need to be motivated to learn.

The number one motivator for success is “I need to learn”. You need to tell staff there is a reason why you’re getting the training, it’s because we need to move the organisation from here to here. Give them the reasons to learn, give them the background.

He added that “training cannot stop”.

We do not have the luxury of declaring victory and moving on, this is not mission accomplished. What your staff are telling us is that they need direction, they need goals.

Up next was Joyce Barnathan, president of the International Center for Journalists. In her speech she gave four recommendations to editors in summary below:

Train your staff to engage your readers. In her example of Malaysiakini.com, the site found that whenever citizen journalists posted their videos on the site “the web traffic would just shoot up”. Now the site relies on its citizens to surface stories and editors are able to cover under-represented communities.
Train your staff to use new tools – “let me tell you that the benefit of a free web is that there are free resources that you can take full advantage of to make your website more interactive. Don’t have to have a huge budget to gain access to the technology” e.g. Factual, Dataviz.org, Google fusion tables, Wordle.
Train your staff to be experts in areas of intense interest to your readers – Expert reporters are able to find great stories in their field that others may not.
Use the web to train, such as the ICFJ is doing with ICFJ Anywhere which enables the training of journalists in places where it would be difficult to send trainers.

She echoed Finberg in saying that media training is “a moving target”.

You can feel that you’ve learned the tools to get by today, but there are new tools coming out tomorrow. Journalism can be enhanced in this technological area and we can be better journalists if we embrace the new tools and new partnerships.

Finally the conference heard from Tarek Atia, media training manager for the Media Development Programme in Egypt which organises donor programs which have helped to train more than 4000 journalists in four years.

His lessons to trainers were:

It helps to be a journalist.
Certificates matter.
Be patient – “if we had thought after the first 10-20 workshops on the idea of local media, this isn’t working, then we wouldn’t be where we are today, which is that all of a sudden after two or three years of these courses, in late 2008, suddenly there was a breakthrough and several newspapers started producing local editions.”
Breakthroughs happen (see above).

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Poynter: ‘Dear Potential Employer: 10 reasons you should employ a journalist’

Judith Townend — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 11:23:46 +0000

Journalism.co.uk succumbs to linking another ‘top 10′ type list… This is from the Jill Geisler, group leader, Leadership and Management Programs, at the Poynter Institute.

“Dear Potential Employer:

Please accept this letter of recommendation for the journalist applying for your job opening…”

Followed by 10 reasons it’s a good idea to employ a journalist. Number one: “Journalists will improve the writing, photography, or design in your organisation.”

Full post at this link…Similar Posts:

Editor&Publisher: Obama book to fund new journalism scholarship programme

Judith Townend — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 09:44:10 +0000

From the Editor&Publisher: “The Poynter Institute has announced a new tuition scholarship program that is funded through proceeds from a new book of front pages about Barack Obama’s election and inauguration.

“The program will make available a limited number of tuition subsidies worth up to $500 for participants of select 2009 on-site seminars, a release stated.”

Full story at this link…Similar Posts:

Social Media Journalist: “Our future isn’t traditional online but in mobile media platforms,” Steve Smith, Spokesman-Review

cathy_relf — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 13:20:48 +0000

Journalism.co.uk talks to reporters across the globe working at the collision of journalism and social media about how they see it changing their industry. This week, Steve Smith from The Spokesman-Review, USA.

1. Who are you and what do you do?
I am the editor of The Spokesman-Review, a 90,000 circulation daily serving several counties in eastern Washington state and north Idaho.

As editor, I supervise all news and editorial operations, including our website, our other digital platforms and our radio operations.

I have a staff of 124 full-time employees in the newsroom and an annual budget of about $9 million. I have been here since July 2002.

Before coming here, I worked in a variety of roles at seven other newspapers in six different cities.

2. Which web or mobile-based social media tools do you use on a daily basis and why?
I use YouTube daily because we post all of our multimedia on the site and also are capable of embedding YouTube videos on our blogs, including my blog, “News is a Conversation”.

I use MySpace and Facebook when hiring. We check the profiles/pages of prospective employees and actually have rejected applicants because of questionable behavior observed on their pages.

I also go into MySpace frequently to check on the pages devoted to our entertainment magazine, “7″.

In addition, I check several industry blogs daily. Several times a day, I check Romenesko, the must-read industry blog on the Poynter Institute for Media Studies site.

I do very little of this on my mobile, though I do use it for blog work, reading and posting.

I’m still somewhat of a troglodyte (no MySpace page of my own) so I don’t use the mobile to access video or social networking sites.

The Spokesman-Review is the pioneer newspaper (in the United States at least) for transparency. Our transparent newsroom initiative is built around interaction with people in our communities. Blogging and the various blogging tools are critical to us.

We also webcast news meetings and provide as much two-way interaction as possible via chats and other real-time opportunities. Increasingly, we’re developing transparency systems that work on mobile devices.

3. Of the thousands of social media tools available, could you single one out as having the most potential for news either as a publishing or a news gathering tool?
Blogging from the field has the most potential for us at the moment. We’re in the process of developing ideas for 7 that would have real non-media people posting live reports from concerts, nightclubs and other events.

We’re also involved in some beta proposals for training citizen journalists and giving them publishing platforms.

I have no idea where all of this will lead. We’re experimenting with some developing Google applications such as Google Maps and Google Street View to see how they might enhance our blogs.

4. And the most overrated in your opinion?
Tough question. I am willing to try anything with any tool. Until something proves to be useless, I won’t dismiss it.

I do believe our future isn’t in traditional online but in mobile media platforms, the potential of which is yet to be understood. That may drive us to networking tools that enhance the mobile experience.

To reference one single overrated tool, as it were, I’d have to mention Wikipedia. There is an enormous amount of information there. I go to the site often for informal searches. But journalists beware. It is a bottomless quicksand pool that will easily send reporters and editors off in the wrong direction, at best wasting time and, at worst, producing factually inaccurate, even humiliating journalism.Similar Posts:

Poynter to launch online groups network

Laura Oliver — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 13:33:20 +0000

Poynter Online – the digital offering of journalism training centre the Poynter Institute – has announced that plans are underaway to launch its own network of online groups over the next few months.

According to the Poynter Evolution blog the groups will be ‘not exactly social networking, not exactly professional networking’, but tailored to Poynter Online’s audience. Content will come from users of the site as well as resources produced by Poynter staff.

The idea is to associate the groups with Poynter’s columns, blogs and seminars so that regular readers and contributors have a space for discussion. Other groups dedicated to broader issues in journalism, as well as those connecting journalists by geography, ‘beat’ and reporting interests will follow.

However, the blog post suggests that nothing about the groups has been finalised as yet, and Poynter’s existing group on Facebook – which has 5,848 members and counting – will be used to sound out ideas.Similar Posts: