The Idea Factory

Report on the 3rd Learning Newsroom Symposium

Contents

Lessons in Leadership
Outcome Highlights
Training Results
The Fragile Future

"The steering committees are very fragile."

Vickey Williams made that comment at one point during the final Learning Newsroom Symposium,(November 14/15 at the American Press Institute in Reston, VA) a comment I recall her making six months earlier during the last symposium.The repetition was rooted, not in a lack of originality, but rooted rather in the simple truth.

Listening to the reps from the ten different newsapers who've been part of this Learning Newsroom experiment it became clear that the $1 million dollar, three year pilot has demonstrated it's worth as a driver of change, an engine of innovation. But at the same time the fragile state of the project in most of the newsrooms suggests quite strongly that as an engine, it's more of Wankle rotary than a slant six — innovative, revolutionary but definitely tempermental and high maintenance.

Later on in this report I describe the symposium as being simultaneously energizing and depressing and I can think of no better way to summarize the experience.

LN3 - Lessons in Leadership

Might as well start at the top.

The evening session of the third and final symposium of the Learning Newsroom experiment began with senior editors from 8 of the ten papers offering their thoughts on the lessons in leadership they've taken away from their involvement. (Dana and Mike Jenner from the Bakersfield Californian — whose papers were billed as the Learning Newsroom "rock stars" — were asked to hold their sessions over to the next day so that the programs funders and other interested industry types could hear them.)

Senior editors were given a chance to brag a little, asked to share the lessons they'd learned during their involvement with the Learning Newsroom experiment, and to point out some of the bumps in the road they encountered. If a common theme emerged from the eight different presentations it could probably best be summed up in the words of Susan Goldberg of the San Jose Mercury:

  "Act, Communicate, Listen, Act"

... with the emphasis firmly on the listening part. Nick Pappas of The Telegraph in Nashau, New Hampshire was blunter - "Shut up and Listen" he said; collaboration is a two way street.

LN3 - Outcome Highlights

The outcomes (consultant speak for "results") from the Learning Newsroom experiment were presented in a couple of ways — Vickey Williams offered an overview of the key results, Learning Newsroom programme-wide and Pete Myers walked us through the Culture Inventory results for 6 of the ten papers.

Bottom line for both is that the project produced measurable change in the values and actions of all of participating newsrooms. Vickey could point to large increases in training and future training commitments that occurred at each newsroom, and Peter's culture inventory results some real movement from our oppositional culture towards a collaborative one. Being a good "pseudo-scientist" (as he jokingly referred to his psychologist self), Myer also pointed out some anomalies in the data, pockets of staff who were digging in their heels and warned again that culture change is a three to five year process.

LN3 - Training Reports

I guess nobody should be surprised that the single biggest impact the Learning Newsroom experiment has had has been in the area of training. Below I have links to .pdf copies of each of the training reports the member paper's submitted. First an overview (courtesy Vickey's presentation:

• All of the papers established training committees
• 6/10 papers gave staff at least an advisory role in spending the training budget
• 2 papers adopted training minimums (12 hours per year) and are looking at increasing that number next year
• 3 other papers plan to launch minimum annual training requirements in the coming year.
• The overall average training hours delivered per newsroom in 2006 was 858
• The per person training hours varied greatly: from a low of 4.5 (that's us, albeit with an incomplete number*) to a high of 25 hours per employee (at Bloomington)

A couple of points I noted from my chats with the other papers:

LN3 - The Fragile Future

Folks, we are clearly at a crossroads.

The Symposium was simultaneously energizing and depressing; for while there were inarguable improvements and accomplishments visible at each and every Learning Newsroom paper, it is also true that each and every steering committee was moribund or struggling.

All of us had vacancies — many vacancies in some cases — on their steering committees. Several steering committees hadn't met in months. Almost none had very clear plans or goals to take them through the next year or three that the research says is needed before we can expect to see genuine, rooted, culture change.

Only two papers had clear plans to move forward:

The Sarasota Herald Times, which is creating HT+5, a company-wide successor to the Learning Newsroom that aims to gather together the most passionate people in the building to generate ideas and solutions to take them forward for the next five years

The Hamilton Spectator, which is planning to launch the Innovation Time Bank.

Neither is up and running yet.