Management Archive
30 Jun 2015
Why The Plain Dealer will miss having Thom Fladung around
The set of all great managers and the set of all newsroom managers have a fairly small area of intersection, in my experience. One of the great ones is leaving, so that intersection is getting even smaller. Thom Fladung returned home to Northeast Ohio as managing editor of The Plain Dealer in 2011. I worked
30 Jan 2014
5 tips for print newsrooms shifting to online focus
If the announcements from Digital First Media and the San Francisco Chronicle are any indication, the rest of America’s newspapers are waking up to the reality that Advance Digital figured out a few years ago: Future success in news depends on adapting to online, and that means cutting loose from the print mindset. Steve Buttry,
11 Dec 2013
Journalism ethics: Why we are responsible for the mud-slinging in our comments
If journalists have an ethical duty to protect those who provide content, what does that mean in practical terms? I’ve seen much discussion of a duty of care regarding journalists who, as part of their job, take physical risks or cover events that leave psychological trauma. At the higher levels of journalism, where foreign correspondents
07 Dec 2013
Journalism ethics: How a hierarchical code would apply to a real-life decision
Jimmy Olsen rushes into the newsroom waving a CD-ROM. “Got it,” he says, almost out of breath. Lois Lane snatches the disk and slides it into the side of her MacBook, firing up its Audacity sound-editing program. She opens the first file on the CD. After a second or two of quiet static, a woman’s
04 Dec 2013
Journalism ethics: Duties to our audience, our subjects, and ourselves
When one of my reporters was leaving to become a manager at another paper, I gave him this advice: Make the readers your first priority, your staff second, and everything else a distant third. Putting aside the clues that may offer to why I’m no longer a working journalist, the key thing is that I
03 Dec 2013
Journalism ethics: 5 levels that bring broad principles down to real-life decisions
Over my years in newspapers, I went to many mandatory in-house seminars on copyright and libel issues. Had to attend annual sessions on how to evacuate our building in case of fire, and participate in fire drills. Number of in-house formal discussions of ethics: Two. Not mandatory. And those were discussions I chaired. I know
19 Nov 2013
Could photojournalists have avoided the newsroom purges?
Let’s start with a basic fact, now confirmed: Visual journalists, particularly photographers, are suffering disproportionately as the industry retrenches. Move on to a conclusion that a lot of us have reached: This is not a good thing. I said that myself back in October; someone far more qualified to judge, Mario Garcia, said so today.
12 Nov 2013
Training your staff: What science says about how to do it properly
Annie Murphy Paul has done an excellent job of summing up (The surprising science of workplace training) a report from 2012 in the Association for Psychological Science that was itself an amalgamation of decades of research (The science of training and development in organizations). The original report’s authors — Eduardo Salas, Scott I. Tannenbaum, Kurt
11 Nov 2013
What’s so bad about reporting good news?
The last, but arguably most important, of Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules for writers is “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” In a blog post this weekend, former newspaper editor John L. Robinson suggested the same kind of principle for newsrooms. Try this exercise: Ask readers — it won’t work if
07 Nov 2013
9 things managers do that sabotage staff training
Newsrooms facing rapid change need training more than ever. But editors — or managers and executives in any kind of organizations — can sabotage training, often without realizing what they’re doing wrong. If you’re a manager in a newsroom preparing for or going through training, watch out for these mistakes: Impatience: Training takes time. It