A radical idea to get your staff up to speed

Paul Grabowicz, instructor-guru of the University of California-Berkeley’s famed Multimedia Reporting training series, trotted out a radical idea for getting a newspaper staff trained on multimedia skills and story planning today at Poynter.

He suggested giving all reporters and editors two weeks off their beats. At the same time.

In the first week, they would spend five days in the communities they cover – not in the office – talking to people they have never met before. In the second week, they would go through a multimedia crash course similar to the one that he leads in Berkeley a few times a year.

During those two weeks, he recommends filling the paper with wire and press releases. Sacrilege, for sure. But in the big picture of one year, would your readers permanently revolt if you were up front about why you were doing this? It’s no secret that newspapers need to change, even to Joe Reader who doesn’t read Romenesko every day.

Obviously, it’s probably too radical an idea to ever happen. But it gets you thinking differently about how to replace the transmission on this car while it continues traveling down the highway. Can we slow down for a bit? Visit a rest area, maybe?

How about giving a two-week sabbatical to one team at a time?

Feeding the (print) beast is what’s keeping most newspapers from reinventing themselves for the digital age. We have to be more aggressive in our thinking about how we can make this happen, like the folks in Fort Meyers and Atlanta have done. I’ll discuss that with my next post.