Fresh off a rousing success in the Chicago suburbs, MPI and Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc. will again offer their one-day Watchdog Journalism workshop May 31 at the Indianapolis Star.
More than 80 reporters and editors attended the April 26 Watchdog Journalism seminar at the Daily Herald in Arlington Heights, Ill. MPI and IRE are hoping for another big turnout in Indianapolis.
Mark Horvit, executive director of IRE, will lead sessions on “Web for Watchdogs,” “Key Documents You Can’t Live Without,” “Open Records,” and “Quick-hit Watchdog Investigations.”
Horvit, who also teaches investigative journalism as an associate professor at the University of Missouri, was a longtime IRE member before becoming the executive director. He formerly served as projects editor at the Fort Worth Star-Telgram. He also has worked on projects teams at newspapers in Texas, North Carolina, Missouri and Florida.
The workshop will begin at 10 a.m. and will finish by 3 p.m. Registration for the workshop is $25 and includes lunch. Those interested in attending can register with John Ryan, executive director of MPI, via email at jmryan@eiu.edu, or phone, 217.581.7939.
Mark Horvit, executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, tells two ways journalism organizations can improve their watchdog journalism efforts.
What is ‘watchdog’ journalism
Mark Horvit, executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, discussed the importance of watchdog journalism for a news organization and a community.
Mid-America Press Institute and Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc. will put on a one-day workshop on “Watchdog 
Journalism” April 26 at the Daily Herald, Arlington Heights, Ill., thanks to a grant from the McCormick Foundation.
Mark Horvit, executive director of IRE, will lead sessions on “Web for Watchdogs,” “Key Documents You Can’t Live Without,” “Open Records,” and “Quick-hit Watchdog Investigations.”
The workshop will begin at 10 a.m. and will finish by 3 p.m. Registration for the workshop is $20 and includes lunch. Those interested in attending can register with John Ryan, executive director of MPI, via email at jmryan@eiu.edu, or phone, 217.581.7939.
The McCormick Foundation awarded MPI and IRE a grant to cover IRE’s expenses to put on a one-day workshop in the Chicago metropolitan area.
Horvit, who also teaches investigative journalism as an associate professor at the University of Missouri, was a longtime IRE member before becoming the executive director. He formerly served as projects editor at the Fort Worth Star-Telgram. He also has worked on projects teams at newspapers in Texas, North Carolina, Missouri and Florida.
Editors conquer hardship through optimism
By Rachel Rodgers
Eastern Illinois University
When facing reduced staff, slashed budgets and quashed moral, journalists have the opportunity to reach more readers in more diverse ways than before, a news editor said on Feb. 11.
Penny Weaver, the news editor of the Charleston/Mattoon Journal Gazette & Times Courier, joined Jason Piscia, the online editor of the State Journal-Register in Springfield, and Karen Workman, the community engagement editor of the Oakland Press in Pontiac, to address how to overcome hardship in the news industry.
Weaver said she experienced a 50-percent cut in staff about six months ago after the merger between the Charleston and Mattoon newspapers and realized that one could look at the situation in two different ways.
“One way is to say that we don’t have enough people to do everything we used to do, and in the newspaper business, it is like we all have a disease where it is all a matter of who drops first,” Weaver said.
The other view consists of thinking of ways to reach audiences by using tools, like in-depth online coverage, to recruit and retain more readers, she said.
Piscia explained how the State Journal-Register had to shut down its press about a year ago and they print the newspaper in Peoria, which is about an hour away. They also face losing their copy desk in June, he said.
He spoke about how he saw two important areas of change, one being logistical with having reporters shooting videos and posting blogs, and the other being psychological with staff members grieving over what the past used to be.
“Now there is the psychological effect of showing up to work to empty desks of people who have worked with us for years that aren’t there anymore,” Piscia said. “After staff cutbacks, we know not to expect much out of people the next day because they are broken.”
Another aspect of the emotional side of the situation was that they felt the perception change in the community where people did not think they were the Springfield newspaper anymore, he said.
“The staff is smaller than what it was, but things really haven’t changed around here in terms of what we do and what the job descriptions are,” Piscia said. “Some of the cards have been taken out of the deck, but it is time to reshuffle and redistribute job titles and job duties now.”
Workman described how most of the Oakland Press’ staff cuts occurred in 2005 so she and her team had time to adjust.
She said after the staff reductions and bankruptcy issues, she noticed that the staff began to realize that everyone, no matter the skill level, had something to bring to the table.
“Veterans can teach young people like me so much about being a good journalist with the basics of good writing and good reporting, and they provide great examples in that way,” Workman said. “The other people in my team can bring some of those technical skills to the table like learning how to edit video and figuring out how to use Facebook and tweet.”
Workman said the key to overcoming hardship in the newsroom is to strive to become a cohesive team united with the goal of involving the community and creating conversation through news coverage.
“It feels like we have a purpose. We have a future, and we have a direction again,” she said.
Steffens: Four big obstacles confront print journalism
Photo by Kelly Moffitt
By Tara Kulash
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Brian Steffens said the biggest obstacles for print journalism have become smart phones, electronic tablets, social media, bundling and pricing.
As the communications director at Reynolds Journalism Institute, Steffens spoke at the Mid-America Press Institute gathering in St. Louis Feb. 11 about the state of the news industry, where it might be going and how it might get there.
He said media is progressively moving toward blogs and mobile applications, which has in turn increased online advertisement sales.
Smart phones have become the number one source people use to get their news, Steffens said, because they’re on-hand virtually at all times.
The second largest source for news is the electronic tablet. Steffens said while brands like the Nook and Kindle are used more for games and video, the iPad is more popularly used for reading and news. While the morning newspaper used to be read before work, he said, many don’t have the time anymore to sit down with it until the evening.
“Now the newspaper at best is the news from 9:30 last night,” Steffens said.
Yet you can’t get local news from CNN and the New York Times on a tablet, he said.
Tablets are also beating print newspapers because advertisements are moving online, Steffens said. The iPad has 80 percent advertisement clicks and eBay started as an auction site but started a “buy it now” option.
“If we could empower the ‘buy it now,’ we would be better,” he said.
Print newspapers also used to have the majority of coupons, Steffen said, as certain people would pick up the paper on days for advertisements. Online has taken over the coupons, too, though, he said.
“We owned coupons, but there is nothing Groupon does that we couldn’t have done,” Steffens said.
The number one reason newspapers don’t take the opportunity to use online resources is because of development and maintenance cost, he said. Following reasons included staffing resources, fear of lack of reader interest, lack of advertisement interest and having too many platforms to support.
“We are fearful of failure,” Steffens said. “We have limited resources and we don’t want to use up those resources and get burned.” He said it’s important to take that risk, though, or papers won’t move forward with the times.
Another obstacle for print journalism is social media, Steffens said, such as Pinterest, Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. Pinterest includes news and sports photos, as it is an image centric site. Facebook is good for conversation, events, polls, surveys and sharing links. Twitter includes broadcast alerts, police scanners and hashtags to group popular topics.
Steffens said journalists should embrace the social media sites and use Twitter to get their stories out. Professional blogs are also useful and gather a sizeable readership.
Bundling and pricing is the fourth obstacle for print journalism, he said. Sometimes online content can come with a charge for consumers, and it’s important for a newspaper to try to be the best source for its community. If it is the only source, however, it should be on all platforms, Steffens said. He said 46 percent of all newspapers under a circulation of 25,000 have changed to online content.
“Don’t not try something just because you are not positive it will work,” he said.
Above all, it’s important to keep up with the changing times and what readers want in order to be successful, Steffens said.
“I wake up every morning thinking about the user experience,” he said.
Holt: Integration and innovation are key
Photo by Kati Maseman, University of Illinois-Springfield
Sarah Schneider
Southern Illinois University-Carbondale
In a changing industry, Margaret Holt reminded a group of commercial and student newspaper editors that everyday at a newspaper has to be a process of reinvention.
Holt, the standards editor of the Chicago Tribune, said that after working in newsrooms for 40 years, she has learned it takes a strong willed person to start over new every day, but with a team full of those kind of people it is possible.
She said teamwork and morale are key to changing an industry that has to be changed.
“We have to make peace with change,” Holt said.
She said amidst filling for bankruptcy in 2008 the new management at the Tribune was dedicated to changing the culture of the newspaper. She said this meant ensuring people’s ideas were being heard and having regular meetings with the departments.
Setting expectations for people and then checking up to make sure it actually happened is another example Holt used to make people know you care about their work. She said one of her previous editors always said to “expect and inspect.”
“I have gone a long way in my career by remembering that,” she said.
Holt said being a bridge between different departments such as advertising and marketing could make a considerable change for newspapers.
Holt distributed handouts during her presentation, one of which was titled, “Unfreezing the middle, seeing a different innovating prospective.” The document suggests there is a difference between radically changing the paper and taking progressive steps towards change.
“Have the courage to listen to other ideas,” she said. “You don’t have to be the smartest person in the room.”
During the session Holt also acknowledged the college students in attendance that she said might be asking “Is there a future in this business for me?”
“And the answer is yes there is. Journalism matters,” she said.
Even when the future of the newspaper industry does not look bright she said not to listen to those with “toxic” mentalities of the business.
Holt said it is ironic that while things are looking bad for newspapers, it is a time for great creativity.
Oklahoman’s social media strategy evolves to encourage experimentation
By Elizabeth Edwards
Eastern Illinois University
An Oklahoman editor said during a presentation Sunday, that experimenting with social media is encouraged within the newsroom.
Alan Herzberger, digital managing editor of The Oklahoman, described the newspaper’s approach towards social media over the last five years, during a presentation titled “Managing Social Media.”
“I do not claim to be an expert really on anything,” Herzberger said. “I am an expert at what we do at The Oklahoman.”
In the beginning, Herzberger compared The Oklahoman’s strategies to his son’s make-shifted Halloween costume, which consisted of a ninja costume with a Spiderman bag randomly thrown in.
He said The Oklahoman “ninja-like” strategy was that they had no strategy at all.
Though, he said he encouraged reporters not to be afraid to get involved in social media and he helped create an atmosphere of encouragement.
He said he appealed to the ego of some reporters to get them to use social media.
Appealing to the ego, he said gets the first reporters in the door and they become the superstars on the medium.
As for the other reporters without a big personality, Herzberger said they do not have to be superstars in social media, but they should be themselves.
The greatest obstacle Herzberger said what prevents reporters from using social media is they are afraid to be themselves.
He said the way a journalist acts at a cocktail party or goes out with friends should be the same way they act on social media.
“A lot of journalists need to expose themselves to our audience,” he said.
While Herzberger said the first documented strategies for The Oklahoman did not come until 2009 with Twitter guidelines and a company-wide policy in 2010. The Twitter guidelines were mostly about the logistics of Twitter and how to use the medium. The guidelines mainly consisted of the “don’t be stupid” policy, he said.
Right now, more the half of their newsroom is active in social media and about a week ago they implemented an official strategy.
Like the previous strategy, The Oklahoman still encourages their reporters to experiment with social media, but now they are analyzing their productivity.
Herzberger said the champions in social media are actually producing more print product them other reporters.
Also, The Oklahoman is rewarding reporters with a best of the best awards. Winners will receive a small cash reward.
Measuring the social media footprint is also another important strategy, he said. Though he said his publisher gets discouraged when The Oklahoman has less of apresence on social media then the local television station.
Though Herzberger said he believes the reason for the low social media numbers is that The Oklahoman has multiple accounts and it is hard to measure.
Now, he said they also expect all new hires to understand and know how to use social media.
“We want someone who has already done it,” he said.
Herzberger said they do not force current reporters to use social media.
“We want them to come to the altar of social media on their own,” Herzberger said.
By Becca Clemons
University of Kentucky (Kentucky Kernel)
While many newspapers may be instructing their reporters to take on more tasks as the industry takes on the Web, one editor is rejecting a common adage heard around newsrooms.
Bob Rose first engaged guests at the Mid-America Press Institute’s “Managing Change” workshop with an exercise inspired by legendary designer Tim Harrower, who had used it at another conference.
“Do more with less,” he instructed the journalists on his left to repeat.
“That’s just BS,” he told the ones on the right to chant.
Dealing with digital changes doesn’t necessarily mean doing more, but rather having reporters focus on things that interest them.
Rose, the deputy managing editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, centered his talk on “digital challenges” around three objectives: making money, building an audience and making the community better.
“All three of those are legit goals for newsrooms to have,” he said. If they do the first two — especially using the sports and features desks — newspapers could have the money to do the third thing through meaningful journalism, he said.
“When you realize that, then you have a lot easier time doing the things that make money and build audience,” he said. That in turn makes the community better, which he said is most important.
Rose cited a partnership with CineSport, a national company that syndicates video on the Web, and blogs about personal topics of interest as ways to get reporters used to sharing what they are thinking, rather than just what they know.
One reporter at the Post-Dispatch had an interest in beer and launched an app about it, and St. Louis Cardinals reporter Joe Strauss hosts live chats to engage his readers with what Rose said is usually more compelling content than a straight game story.
“Find two or three things you can own in your market, and dive in on those,” Rose said.
Rose also encouraged reporters to jump in on the comments section of their news website and respond to readers.
Newspapers should focus more on what readers want — the “user experience,” as it was frequently called throughout the conference — Rose said.
“ESPN had it right,” he said. “What’s the ‘E’ stand for? … Entertainment. They recognize what sports is. They still do their meaningful stuff … but they put entertainment first.”
Margaret Holt, the standards editor at the Chicago Tribune, agreed that some traditional priorities for print must be reconsidered.
“Our long stories are too short and our short stories are too long,” she said.
A cookie cutter design template for certain sections can save time and put more energy toward story elements, Rose said.
Digital changes affect editors, especially copy editors, who must take into account tags and keywords when moving a story online.
Where the copy editors’ big jobs used to be to write compelling headlines, Rose said, they now are often responsible for pushing content to the Web, and in a way that readers can easily find what they search for — in addition to writing compelling headlines.
Reporters and editors must also learn how to write differently for individual platforms, Rose said. Writing a text alert or a tweet requires a different language than traditional stories do.
Rose also suggested that reporters and editors focus less on AP Style and catching small errors, and more on getting information out across multiple platforms.
When others in the session asked if spelling errors could compromise credibility, Rose said resulting corrections could be used as conversations between journalists and readers.
However, those like Holt and Jim Robertson, of the Columbia (Mo.) Daily Tribune, were worried about errors slipping through.
“Print lives,” Holt said.
Photographers, too, must do some things differently in order to meet Rose’s first two objectives, such as photographing posed shots of people at events that aren’t typically considered journalism.
Designers at his paper have also created special merchandise to make papers extra money.
“We made a ton of money off the World Series, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” Rose said.
Also, Rose said, everyone in the newsroom must know the outlet’s content management system in order to save time and reduce the need for a support staff.
Making an analogy to poker, Rose said that currently newspapers “have chosen not to dominate the table.”
“Find out the stuff we want to do and get passionate about it,” he suggested, “and eliminate the other stuff.”
Doing so will allow newspapers to work toward Rose’s third objective — improving the community.
“That is the most important thing,” he said. “That’s why we’re not grocery stores. That’s why we’re not phone companies. That’s why we’re in the business that we’re in.”
Newsrooms need to shift focus outward
By Kayla Pickrell
University of Kentucky
The newsroom has lost sight of the readers and focuses purely on itself.
Paul McAuliffe, of the Evansville Courier & Press, and Gary Dotson, of the Belleville News-Democrat, highlighted the challenges and how to combat them through planning, finding priorities and social media.
“We need to plan, plan, plan and then plan some more,” McAuliffe said. “If we are not planning, then we don’t have the manpower for a newsroom.”
McAuliffe pointed out that the most important decision to make is to not dwell on the past.
The newsroom will never be the same as it was years ago.
“We’re sort of feeling sorry for ourselves,” McAuliffe said. “The more time we spend on ourselves, the less time we spend on the readers.”
Newspapers are caught in the fact that there are less than half of the reporters in a newsroom than when newspapers were booming, McAuliffe said.
The step to progressing is focusing the attention away from that fact and the “grieving” to turning it towards the readers.
How to grab the attention of the readers and focus on them relies heavily on new media.
Video, social networking, blogs and live chats are only the beginning of the connection from the writer to the reader.
“I have a love/hate relationship with new media, as most of you do too,” McAuliffe said, addressing the older journalists.
It is the job of the young journalists to take hold of the opportunity and seek out the older journalists to help, McAuliffe said.
“I see a lot of young faces here, and I’m glad to see that. You don’t come with the baggage that those of us that were there from the fat days of the media bring with us,” McAuliffe said. “It’s unfortunate that that shows up in our decision making process.”
One of the major steps to changing the decision-making process is to figure out the priorities and executing those priorities, according to McAuliffe.
