Enfócate en personas y los beneficios siguen

Reflexiones luego de décadas gestionando medios de noticias

Un estudiante en un curso de gestión de medios tuvo que entrevistar a un profesional de los medios para su último proyecto de investigación. Acepté ser su entrevistado, y ​​en el transcurso de una hora me hizo hablar sobre mi filosofía de gestión en la era digital.

Al leer la transcripción de esa entrevista me di cuenta de cómo mi forma de pensar había cambiado con los años. Lo más importante que aprendí fue a poner a las personas primero. El hecho de haber crecido con el viejo modelo de periódico de la fábrica de noticias me hizo desarrollar habilidades en los procesos de producción, cumpliendo con los plazos y sacando el producto a la calle. Esa era la prioridad: producir una cantidad suficiente de contenido a un nivel de calidad profesional consistente con las limitaciones de tiempo, dinero y espacio (las páginas de noticias) disponibles.

La paradoja
Con el tiempo descubrí una interesante paradoja: poner primero a la gente genera más ganancias. Si piensas primero en desarrollar a tu gente y ayudarlos a alcanzar sus metas personales y profesionales, las ganancias llegarán. Cuando creas una organización en la cual sus miembros sienten que están creciendo, aprendiendo y participando en una misión más grande que ellos mismos, éstos se vuelven extremadamente creativos y productivos.

Liderazgo en la redacción 4: dales tiempo a empleados y establece altas expectativas

English version here.


NewsU y su fundador, Howard Finberg, han celebrado su centésimo webinar con ideas de los profesores del Instituto Poynter sobre cómo mejorarse en el periodismo. Esta es la cuarta entrada sobre el tema. Enlaces a tres más se ubican líneas abajo.

 

Paul Pohlman: cómo hacer el mentor o coach para los colegas

•   Dedica unos minutos cada día a preguntarles a tus empleados cómo va su trabajo. Da retroalimentación. Es muy apreciada.
•   Sé un oyente activo. Repite lo que escuchaste.
•   Para profundizar el impacto con cada persona, dedica un tiempo cada semana para ver cómo van los proyectos. Hay que agendar el tiempo o las reuniones no van a suceder.
•   Ayuda a las personas a hacer planes, revisa el trabajo pasado, y da una crítica honesta.

How to make your newsroom multimedia

For editors who are trying to get their newsrooms up to speed on digital media, Mark Briggs has produced an invaluable 132-page book that is available free online in English, Spanish and Portuguese. You can download it in PDF format.
"Journalism 2.0" is a good place to start with multimedia storytelling. Each chapter has simple, direct instructions on how to harness readily available technology in new ways. Editors and news directors who have been baffled by their lack of training in certain types of technology will find help in overcoming the barriers.

Briggs gives you just enough technical language so that you can understand both the potential and the limits of the technology so as to avoid frustration.
If you are, say, a veteran radio news director, the advice on how to make the most of photos will be invaluable; to a veteran photographer, the advice will represent the basics of the craft. At the same time a photographer who is trying to add sound to a slide show on the web will pick up some tips on how to edit for the ear that every radio journalist already knows.
It's the kind of book that beginners and veterans alike can use right now and begin getting their hands dirty.

Managing conflict of print vs. web
The information in this book could help manage some of the newsroom conflicts that occur when, for example, the print people and web people tend to isolate themselves from each other, a problem they have struggled with at the Washington Post. An editor could create an ongoing series of courses based on the chapters of this book that bring specialists from both parts of the newsroom together. The courses could remove some of the fear factor that veterans may be facing, and it may show the younger tech-savvy folks how the basics of good journalism translate into a better web product.

Useful in Latin America
For any of us who are doing training of journalists in Latin America, it is tremendously valuable to have this available in Spanish and Portuguese. And for those of us who are trying to remove the barriers to a multimedia newsroom, it is a helpful tool.

"Journalism 2.0" is an initiative of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism,
a center of the University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism, and of the Knight Citizen News Network,
which is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Launch of Crain's Manchester Business

On Dec. 17, 2007, Crain Communications launched the first business weekly in Western Europe. This is part of the editorial team that produced the 32-page edition of Crain's Manchester Business that quickly sold out on newsstands. The website was launched at the same time.

My job was to interview, hire and train the editorial staff for this weekly business newspaper, produce a 24-page prototype and launch the first edition, all in about 15 weeks.

Crain's already has four similar publications in the States -- Chicago, New York, Cleveland and Detroit. It also has other specialized business publications in the UK and Germany for insurance, plastics, urethane and automobiles.

A weekly business journal focused on one city is a new concept in the UK, indeed in Western Europe, although it is in every major city in the US.

This consulting job involved blending the best practices and skills of the British journalists with the elements of the US business journal model that could be replicated successfully. We hired people with a mix of experience , including one with very little business reporting experience,

More than 15,000 copies are being mailed each week to a rotating list of C-level executives, professionals and business owners.

The effort has attracted a lot of attention, since news media are consolidating in Great Britain, just as in the US, and few are launching new print vehicles. The Financial Times weighed in with a piece on regional business media. It has been quite well received so far by local communications professionals.

The UK version of Editor and Publisher published an extensive piece as well.

We were posting a good dozen web stories a day to keep the pressure on the Manchester Evening News, the principal daily in the region.

A skeptical journalist tries coaching

In 2003 I was publisher of the Baltimore Business Journal and agreed to chair a major charity campaign. Our company, American City Business Journals, measures all kinds of performance indicators, and our paper was below average compared to the other 40 in the chain. I decided that I couldn't do justice to my day job or the charity campaign without doing things differently.

At that time, a respected colleague told me that she had been using an executive coach and strongly recommended that I try it. I had been highly skeptical of the idea for a number of reasons. As a journalist, I had often been unimpressed with the work produced by consultants hired by government agencies. And how could an outside consultant with no journalism experience understand what my job was, and more specifically, our particular journalism niche?

But my colleague's strong recommendation led me to interview three potential coaches. In a 45-minute trial run with the coach I eventually chose, Alan Dobzinski, he asked me compelling questions that made me think. What part of the business, if it improved, had the most potential for immediate positive change in business results? he asked. He drilled down with questions, and by the end of the session, I was saying out loud the changes I needed to make in some critical support areas.

Over the next three years, I met three hours a month with Alan and worked on my leadership skills, on getting accountability, and on developing people, among other things. The results were both immediate and long-lasting. My direct reports became much more open and honest with me. We identified problems and worked on them together. The business results were significant double-digit increases in revenues and earnings. Our paper had significant growth in paid circulation two years in a row at a time when daily newspapers were losing subscribers. We began to work together more as a team. Our events became better attended, better executed and more profitable.

For me, work became much more rewarding and less stressful. The paper's successes made it easier for me to retire on a high note in July 2006 to accept a Knight International Press Fellowship.


Here's a photo of my coach, Alan Dobzinski. He and his former business partner, Margaret Wilson, have written a book on coaching called The Accountability Factor, which I've been using in my own coaching.

Developing newsroom leaders in Bolivia

Here in Bolivia, I'm working for nine months on helping professional journalists and students develop their skills. (In the photo I'm working at El Nuevo Dia newspaper.) Many of the seminars I have been giving have been aimed at developing newsroom leaders. As in many other businesses, the top performers in journalism eventually are asked to teach and manage others. Usually they don't have much training in managing people. This has been a focus of my training here: how to set goals, gain accountability, develop people, communicate, conduct effective meetings and other leadership skills.

A course I conducted at the Evangelical University here in Santa Cruz was called How To Start and Run Your Own News Media Outlet, and a portion of the course focused on leadership and people skills. At some of the largest news organizations in the country, I've been working with editors on handling the tough problems they face in working with motivated, creative people in a high-stress environment.

As it happens, another Knight Fellow, Jesse Hardman, who is working in Peru, and I have been coaching each other with weekly phone calls (free on Skype). We hold each other accountable for performing certain tasks, ask about each other's challenges and make suggestions.

I'm also giving career coaching to my son, a 23-year-old jazz musician living in New York. He has several different music-related sources of income and is working hard to establish himself. We talk about once a week. I ask him how things are going, what kinds of challenges he's facing, what he's doing about it and occasionally offer suggestions. He actually gives me very good advice since he and I are doing similar things at the moment -- offering our skills to others in a variety of different ways and trying to find venues to perform what we do.
(Photo of Patrick, me and a New York friend, Michael John McGann)



Training editors at La Razon



This is my favorite souvenir of my six months here in Bolivia. I spent a week with these folks, the editors at La Razon newspaper in La Paz, giving seminars on leadership and coaching. What does that mean? Leadership means giving people extremely clear expectations, standards and direction. Coaching means helping them reach these goals and their own professional goals as well. Most of it is learning how to communicate frankly and effectively.

This group was really into the training, so there was lots of interchange and plenty of skeptical questions. On my last day there, they surprised me by running this photo on Page 2 of their paper. The photo caption says basically what I just said: that I was doing leadership training. If you click on the picture you can see it better.

We did one day on how to handle real-life cases that editors face -- the arrogant reporter, the personal phone calls, the failure to meet deadlines, etc.. Most journalists get very little training in people stuff before they´re put in charge of other journalists, so this group welcomed the help.



Critiquing Bolivia´s main wire service



Father Jose Gramunt, to the right, is a Jesuit priest and highly respected newspaper columnist here in Bolivia. He appears in the major dailies and is a model of fearless political and social commentary. Because of his longevity and his independence of any political party over many decades, he has a unique standing. His opinions carry a lot of weight. He doesn't pull any punches, and he is as likely to question the tactics of the left as the right.

He is also the founder and director of a national news service called Fides that is known for its independence and credibility, which really counts in a country where no one trusts any authority. Most of the papers in the country subscribe to it. It offers general news as well as sports, business, politics, crime, etc. Fides also has a radio news network of some 30 stations around the country.

A recent report from the Interamerican Press Association mentioned that Gramunt's news agency has received threats from President Morales's party, which accuses the journalists of "promoting sedition with the goal of overthrowing the government of Evo Morales."

Father Gramunt asked me to do a critique of a week´s production of the wire service for his 10 journalists. His goal: How could they make their news report more enterprising, with more initiative, and be less reactive? Over two mornings, and two batches of salteñas (tasty filled pastries), we went into that, and the journalists participated with lots of energy and enthusiasm.

Journalists want to work for Father Gramunt. He has trained many of the best in the country. Born in Tarragona in Spain, he came to Bolivia in 1952 as a student and eventually persuaded his Jesuit bosses that he should be a journalist. The news service grew out of a Jesuit radio network whose original focus was on religious programming. Gramunt wanted to do more journalistic programming but the church couldn´t finance it. The only way he could make it work financially was to start a subscriber news service, which is what he did in 1963. It´s managed to pay its own way for more than 40 years. Gramunt, 84, has a real sense of mission. He knows how important a credible news source is in an emerging democracy.