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#ASNEchat: Ex-editors on What They Would Do Differently Now
Guest panel: John Robinson (Greensboro News & Record); Melanie Sill (Sacramento Bee and Raleigh News and Observer); Howard Weaver (Anchorage Daily News and McClatchy); Glenn Proctor (Richmond Times-Dispatch); Mike Fancher (Seattle Times). Host: Carole Tarrant, editor, Roanoke Times.
in list: Innovation and industries
Advice, pointers and tips for changing a newsroom's culture
Despite the title, this isn't a rant about nepotism - it's an excellent read about what it means to be a journalist, with some great anecdotes and observations on a long career.
Having said that, it's difficult to disagree with the point that "Clinton is not the first unqualified silver spoon from the professional political class to be handed a plum news job...The current crop of media silver spoons includes Meghan McCain, daughter of Sen. John McCain, who is a contributor to MSNBC; Chris Cuomo, son of former New York State Gov. Mario Cuomo and a correspondent at ABC; and Jenna Bush Hager (left), daughter of President George W. Bush and a correspondent for NBC's "Today" show.
Hager's professional qujennaalifications? Your guess is as good as mine.
Either she was hired on the strength of her status as a teacher's aide and reading coordinator, or she was hired because her daddy is the former head of the Republican political machine. Curiously, her first big accomplishment was landing an interview with Bill Clinton, the former head of the Democratic political machine. How much do you want to bet that one of Chelsea's first big "gets" will be a similar interview with George W. Bush?"...
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It was Sept. 6, 2005, and Ray Couture and I had just about finished the gruesome body count inside St. Rita's Nursing Home in hard-hit Chalmette, La. We'd found the corpses of 15 elderly Americans in various states of decay.
It was a horrendous experience. The worst bodies looked like they'd been carved from butter after floating in the floodwaters for eight summer days. Some still had catheters hanging out of them.
It took us an hour to perform the
room-to-room search in the dark and flooded facility. The wooden doors had expanded in their jambs and we had to shoulder them open without slipping and falling into the stew of decomposing tissue, feces and swamp mud that covered the floor. Yellow streams emanated from the bodies - a characteristic I would later learn is typical of decomposing fat.
Ray and I were in the lobby, where a few beams of sunlight illuminated the brown high water mark all around the big room. An indignant voice broke the silence.
"This ain't right," the voice said, dripping venom. "These guys never had a fucking chance and that ain't right."
Ray was staring back at me in slack-jawed amazement when I suddenly realized the outraged voice was my own. The "me" I keep penned up inside. The "me" that isn't a detached, professional observer of the human condition. The real "me" who has opinions and knows each corpse inside St. Rita's was someone's grandmother or grandfather.
It was also the me that knows that leadership is done by example and that elites are expected to get down in the muck with the rest of us when there's hard work to be done. Chelsea Clinton and her fellow silver spoons haven't done that.
Really interesting piece from Neiman (2007) on the importance of newsroom training. Training can be the first budget to get cut... but these examples show why it's an investment for the future: "As the news industry strives to become a dynamic competitor in a fierce information economy, good newsroom leadership requires finding an edge to distinguish their news products from the glut of other media offerings. Improving reporters’ and editors’ skills, while raising their energy level and spurring motivation, can mean the difference between a news organization successfully reinventing itself and one that doesn’t."
Three signs your newsroom isn’t ready to cross the digital divide, and three suggested solutions
..."Newsroom culture change efforts tend to focus either on the front line of folks who are eager to try new things or on the often-vocal resisters. But the sweet spot of lasting culture change is actually at the center of the spectrum - folks who will ad
..."experimentation is the path to salvation. But good experimentation requires a lot of research and forethought. Guessing is just following the latest buzzwords and trends"...
Is newsroom integration working? (no, maybe, and yes according to the three different editors discussing it here)
..."hat’s the point of a newsroom in today’s era of limited resources? What would you rather fire: content producers (and by extension money makers) or a physical building?"...
Steve Outing's thoughts on what the newsroom might look like, and what tools it will need
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