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Training 2.0: Top tips from newsroom trainers

I’m in Florida for a few days at the Poynter Institute as part of a session on newsroom training. Some 50 journalists who lead training and staff development at their news organizations, plus several J-school academic types, are here to participate.

We kicked off last evening with a session called Idea Exchange. About half the participant group took turns explaining a training tip in about three minutes (the other half of the group goes on Saturday). I was very impressed with the quality and diversity of training tips presented. Here are a few of the highlights:

- At the Miami Herald: Online University, a weekly training class to showcase latest technology and trends. Topics have included an introduction to MiamiHerald.com, how the site works, Audio 101 and 201, Video editing 101 and 201, and Advanced Blogging.

- Teresa Starr of the Post-Standard in Syracuse, N.Y. explained the five steps she uses to help journalists at her paper with the changing culture: Listen, acknowledge, teach, support and cheer.

- Robert Miller of the News & Observer in Raleigh highly recommended the book Art of Possibility for helping changing newsrooms recognize opportunities.

- Dana Eagles of the Orlando Sentinel highlighted a new feature his paper recently began including in the weekly newsroom newsletter called Web Speak. The idea is to define a technology buzzword each week while building a comprehensive glossary of terms. Their first two entries were mashup and sock puppetry.

- Marissa Nelson of the Toronto Star described a week-long training course offered to all reporters, photographers and editors at her newspaper called StarNext. Three staffers at a time get a week off from their regular job and for a one-week web immersion program to get training and hands-on experience developing story ideas into multimedia stories and packages for the paper’s web site.

After the second round of ideas are presented on Saturday, we’ll be asked to vote for the best idea. Following the first round, I must admit to being partial to a couple of ideas that are similar to things we’ve been doing at The News Tribune for a while: Miami’s Online University and Toronto’s StarNext. Our Technology and Training sessions are monthly (instead of weekly) but have tackled similar topics (and inspired the Journalism 2.0 project). And our Web Internship is a less formal version of StarNext as one volunteer staffer at a time gets the opportunity work with web producers for a week, ultimately churning out a multimedia project.

Posted by MarkBriggs on Friday, September 07, 2007
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