What digital tools and skills does a newsroom leader need?

Tools that have retained their usefulness somewhat longer than Google Wave. (Photo by Minnesota Historical Society via Wikimedia Commons)

As I mentioned yesterday, Steve Buttry sent out a call for journalists to tell him why they should be hired as Digital First editors. I’m not raising my hand, but the questions he asked were interesting.

What digital skills and tools do you excel with? Which ones are you learning? (If the answers to both questions are “none,” don’t waste your time or mine making your pitch.)

Yesterday’s post should make clear that I agree with the spirit of that parenthetical remark. For the first question — which digital tools and skills I excel with — the most truthful answer is “none of them.”

Which can I use? I can post quickly, aggregate efficiently, organize effectively. I can spot and fix errors in HTML and CSS. I’ve done podcasts and video. Used Storify and various forms of Google maps, a few timeline tools, and Twitter’s embed code. In the category of useless skills, I can program in COBOL and Fortran. In the category of soon to be useless skills, I’m a generation behind in Flash, but I once made “quite possibly the worst Flash game ever.” (Which was also the most-viewed thing, by far, for that year on cleveland.com. Proving that even when it comes to fail, the saying’s still true: go big or go home.) I’ve done audio slideshows in Soundslides. I’m reasonably skilled at Photoshop. I’ve played around with a lot of software, including MorphAge (my favorite features Cleveland’s own Dennis Kucinich.) I’ve tweeted and Facebooked and Tweetdecked and Hootsuited.

But, excel? The way I’d define that, it takes a lot more single-minded devotion to a tool than I’ve chosen to pursue. Here’s where I defend myself from the charge of dilletantism by comparing myself to someone famous: A.J. Liebling wrote, “I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.” I came across that quote early in my career, and it stuck with me as the kind of journalist I wanted to be.

Not coincidentally, it’s also how I think the best leaders should be. Editors whose only pre-management newsroom experience was as reporters, especially those who worked in a limited range of beats, should not be put in charge of newsrooms. (This is a sweeping generalization meant to stir comment — see, that’s another digital skill I have. You may wish to point to notable exceptions. But I will hang with Damon Runyon, who said “The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet.” Having a narrow background is not an unfailing recipe for failure, but that’s the way to bet.) I want leaders who have some visceral understanding of as much of the newsroom’s operations as possible.

I am encouraged in this belief by the best teacher: bad experiences. There was the editor who had never worked a copy desk, and had no qualms about using it as a dumping ground for those he disliked. I was a foot soldier in the newspaper design wars of the ’80s, when one editor wondered why our news photos couldn’t have more colorful backgrounds to take advantage of our new presses, and another editor said the Business section “doesn’t really lend itself to infographics.” Then came the online journalism wars of the ’00s that continue to this day, and editors who thought our online department should only provide service to the “real” journalists on the print side.

But, wait, on reflection there is something I’m excellent at: training. Not an online skill, you say? Yes, probably the most important one.

Excelling at some online tool is great. But it’s also a fleeting accomplishment. Partly, that’s because the tools keep changing. As I mentioned, I’m a generation behind on Flash. I gave up on trying to keep up when the scripting language changed; I used it too infrequently to go through that again. Partly, too, it’s because the tools may disappear. Not so long ago, you weren’t a real nerd unless you used AltaVista as your search engine. And remember Google Wave? Yeah, I waved bye-bye to that after a brief look; it took the arbiters of social media a little longer, and Google even longer than that.

How about web design? I’ve done it in every program from GoLive to Dreamweaver. Had I taken the time to excel in any one of those, I’d probably still be sitting here today with a blog whose underlying design I picked up for free, running a blogging platform I installed with one click. My knowledge of HTML and CSS comes in handy, but my knowledge of GoLive and Dreamweaver? Nada.

This is one of the ways the internet has changed everything: Everything changes, and changes faster than ever. Even if a newsroom leader isn’t teaching classes in new tools, she or he has to be training the newsroom continuously. And being a trainer is an excellent way to disabuse oneself of the idea that if you can figure out how to use a new tool, everyone else can figure it out on their own too. Or the idea that if you know about some changes coming and understand them fully, everyone else in the newsroom must know the same things by some sort of osmosis.

Trainers know that people learn at different rates, in different ways. They know that hoarding knowledge, while it may help you feel superior, doesn’t contribute to success. And they know that learning is a lifelong task.

Which kind of leads into the other question from Steve Buttry: Which tools and skills am I learning? I want to neatly bookend this by saying “all of them,” but Sarah Palin has ruined that line for all of us. So I’ll be more specific and confine myself to right now: I’m learning to blog.  Whether I ever excel at that or not, you, gentle reader, can decide.

This series started with an explanation of what makes for a “digital person.”

And it continues with a post about leadership.