The
Reed Sarratt Lecture
School
of Journalism
University
of North Carolina
November
11, 2002
It is always a rewarding experience for me to be in Chapel
Hill in the company of this excellent School of Journalism that Dean Richard
Cole and his associates have created and nurtured.
I am especially pleased to have your invitation to
participate this evening in a lectureship that honors a man who so deeply
believed in the education and the professional development of journalists.
Reed Sarratt was very much on my mind as I thought about
this opportunity to discuss a puzzling lack of commitment by newspaper and
broadcast companies to the education and professional development of their
working journalists.
I remember meeting Reed at Harvard in the fall of 1965,
where he had come to talk to the Nieman Fellows about his work in developing
seminars and workshops in journalism for the Southern Region Education Board.
There weren’t many opportunities in those days for
mid-career learning in the world of journalism.
The field was pretty much limited to the American Press
Institute, then located in the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism building,
the Nieman Fellowships and the programs Reed Sarratt was creating for
journalists in the South.
The Poynter Institute would not come into existence until
1975. Other mid-career fellowship programs based on the Nieman idea wouldn’t
take root until the 1970s and 1980s.
The newspaper foundations that have pumped valuable
millions of dollars into journalism training and education weren’t very active
until the 1970s and beyond.
Reed Sarratt was a true pioneer in recognizing and
nurturing the relationship between education and good journalism.
His early interest was formed through the Southern Region
Education Board, which had received a Ford Foundation grant to begin a program
of seminars that focused on the substance of journalism, rather than the
techniques of our craft.
Ford’s idea was that society would benefit if the scholarly
innovations and ideas being generated at our great universities could be
transmitted to the pubic by an enlightened press.
Reed developed and ran the program for five years and, when
the Ford Foundation suggested that the Southern Region Education Board find a
partner to help share the cost of the seminars, he made a connection with the
Southern Newspaper Publishers Association.
SNPA agreed to establish a foundation to fund and
administer the seminars. Reed became executive director of the foundation and
later was chosen to run SNPA.
Under his leadership, the organization developed a wide
range of programs designed to lift the sights, sharpen the vision, raise the
level of ambition and expand the professionalism of newspaper journalists.
Reed was known as a big-picture man but also a first-rate
nitpicker of the details, a tendency he said he developed during his years at
the University of North Carolina.
He was fearless and never intimidated by the southern
publishers on his board, although he was willing to make a strategic compromise
from time to time.
As a southerner with a passion for progressive thinking
about civil rights, he wrote a book, “The Ordeal of School Desegregation,” and
was determined to hold an SNPA seminar at an historically black college.
He found it expedient, however, to defer that idea until
the day a certain Deep South publisher completed his time on the SNPA board of
directors.
When Reed was nearing his 65th birthday, one of
the SNPA officers said to him, “Well, I guess we ought to create a search
committee to find your successor.” Reed
quietly assented and the search committee went to work, finally assembling a
group of finalists.
After the last candidate had been interviewed, the
committee turned to the chore of picking a successor.
The room was quiet for a while. Finally, the publisher who
initiated the search process looked at Reed and asked, “Why do you want to
retire?” “I don’t,” said Reed. “Well,
what are we doing here?” “I don’t
know,” said Reed.
The meeting was adjourned and Reed continued as executive
director for three more years, until he died at age 68, as he was packing his
bags at the conclusion of a SNPA board meeting.
Today, Reed Sarratt might look with satisfaction on the
growth of the educational ideas he fostered.
A recent study by the Council of Presidents of National
Journalism Organizations identified 191 organizations that now provide training
and education for journalists.
To a considerable extent, this broad landscape is
misleading. The training and education programs many of these organizations
offer are modest, and collectively, they fall far short of the meeting the
need.
Most of the money for their programs comes from foundations,
or from their own fund-raising efforts, rather than from the news organizations
their educational programs ultimately serve.
Can you imagine another industry that so depends on charity
to pay for the education of its workforce?
Companies like General Motors and General Electric believe
it is in the best interests of their companies, and their shareholders, to
invest in the knowledge base of their employees.
They understand that brainpower is an imperative in
creating new products and sustaining market share in their industries.
These companies are fully committed to investing in
training and education across the breadth of the workforce. Lifelong learning
is part of the culture.
In 1993, at the start of an extraordinary period of
economic prosperity, the Freedom Forum published a seminal study called No
Train, No Gain.
It documented the universal need for training among
journalists that existed10 years ago. No Train, No Gain reported then
that one journalist in 10 got regular training.
Today the number is three in 10. Such a comparison enables
news industry leaders to claim that their journalists are the best educated and
trained in history.
But the facts are somewhat different. No Train, No Gain documented three problems that can be linked to a
shortage of professional training: newspaper quality, morale and employee
retention.
Nearly half of the 650 journalists in the survey
acknowledged they are sometimes ill-equipped to develop stories fully.
Many said they felt that limited training opportunities
were unfairly awarded. And some, who valued training and weren’t getting it,
were so frustrated they said they may leave the business.
To establish a fresh benchmark on training and to see what
had been achieved since the publication of No Train, No Gain, the
Council of Presidents of National Journalism Organizations initiated a study,
just completed, with funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
The study, entitled Newsroom Training: Where’s the
Investment?, drew these conclusions:
·
The
nation’s journalists say a lack of training is their major source of job
dissatisfaction.
·
More
than two-thirds of working journalists say they receive no regular skills
training.
·
News
companies have not increased their training budgets in the past decade, and
during the recent economic slump, money for training was among the first items
to be slashed from newsroom budgets.
·
News
executives acknowledge they should provide more training for their journalists,
but say time and insufficient budgets are the main reasons they don’t.
I encountered this budgetary obstacle just recently, in a
way that gave me a snapshot of what the Knight Foundation study is telling us.
Last year, the Nieman Foundation established a program in
Narrative Journalism, putting the Nieman brand behind the belief that narrative
is an under-used and not well-understood asset in the hard job of keeping the
news engaging and down-to-earth.
In addition to providing instruction in narrative for the
Nieman Fellows, we hold an annual conference on narrative in Cambridge that
sells out to an audience of 900-plus.
The conference offers journalists an intensive and
high-quality weekend of learning from and talking with the best narrative
journalists we can assemble.
The conference was held this past weekend. During one of
the sessions, I did a little hip-pocket survey, asking how many had been sent
by the editors and how many had come on their own nickel.
In a show of hands, about 70 indicated they paid their own
way to Cambridge.
Many of the editors who attend the conference tell us they
are working on narrative stories, but are flying by instinct over ground they
wished were more familiar.
In an effort to expand the circle of editors who are
conversant with narrative theory and techniques and who can become useful
teachers at their own papers, the Nieman Narrative Program is organizing for
next spring a small seminar on editing narrative.
I wanted to test the market for such a seminar. I phoned a
several editors around the country, inquiring whether they would support the
attendance of an editor from their staff.
I explained the purpose of the workshop, the selective
nature of the group in which their paper would participate and that the Nieman
Foundation would pay most of the cost.
The response was cautious interest that quickly dissipated
when I said their newspaper would be expected to share in the cost: travel and
two nights in a hotel.
“Sounds like a good program. But budgets are going be lean
in 2003 and there is little money for travel and training.” That was the
response to each phone inquiry.
These conversations echoed the experience during the past
two years at the Poynter Institute and the American Press Institute, two
leading journalism training centers.
Each has felt the impact of tight newsroom spending.
Poynter has attempted to counter declining attendance by cutting tuition and
offering free hotel rooms. API was forced to cancel classes last year.
The evidence reinforces a troubling paradox about the news
business:
Newspapers and local television news organizations are rich
and profitable. They are well able to afford substantial investments in
training and education.
Corporate executives surely must understand that a
well-trained, well-educated newsroom workforce is essential in sustaining their
economic viability.
Most would agree with the late Katherine Graham’s
observation that “journalistic excellence and profitability go hand in hand.”
A culture that values training and education does more than
improve the quality of news coverage. It contributes to higher levels of
satisfaction on the job and to lower turnover---not to mention the prospect of
increased trust among readers and viewers.
So here’s the paradox: a rich industry that has not made
the sustained, long-term investment in developing its best and brightest and
keeping them on the payroll, in the interest of good journalism and good
profits.
This industry is not likely to do so, unless, perhaps, it
can be persuaded that there is a direct link between training and education and
higher profits.
Many of the editors whose training budgets are being
squeezed work for publicly traded newspaper companies with annual returns that
range from 17 to 25 percent. And many local television broadcast outlets enjoy
earnings in the 30-40 percent range.
Even during the current downturn in the U.S. economy, which
has caused a slippage in classified and retail advertising, newspapers have
remained a robust business.
The operating margin of daily newspapers during 2001 was
about 17 percent. That was down from 22.5 percent for the year 2000, but a
healthy return by any standard. This year, media companies are reporting strong
gains, year-over-year.
By almost any measures of profitability, these numbers are
impressive, clearly at the high end.
Compared to other industry sectors, however, the share of
operating budgets news organizations commit to training, education and
professional development is at the low end of the scale.
Investment in formal training, as opposed to informal
on-the-job training or noon-hour brown bag discussions, can be tracked as a
percentage of payroll.
According to the Readership Institute at the Media
Management Center at Northwestern University, the average newspaper industry
expenditure on formal training is 0.7 per cent of payroll.
The national average for companies that have been tracked
on this scale is 2 percent, or nearly three times what newspapers spend on
training.
The National Association of Manufacturers recommends that
companies spend 3 percent of payroll on training.
Workforce magazine has a general guideline of 3 to 6 percent for
“true learning organizations,” in whose company news organizations would be
included.
The American Society for Training and Development, in a
study of 367 non-journalism firms, found that, on average, these companies
managed to increase training by 10 percent between 2000 and 2001, in spite of
the economic recession.
The Society also provides evidence to support the idea that
training helps the bottom line.
In a second study, it identified 575 publicly traded
companies in the United States that ranked high in training and had
significantly higher shareholder return than companies ranking lower on the
training scale.
Firms in the top half of the listing had a shareholder
return that was 86 percent higher than those in the bottom half, and 45 percent
higher than the market average.
Fortune magazine’s list of 10 best companies to work for
average 67 hours of training per employee per year.
The report by the Council of Presidents of National
Journalism Organizations was based on telephone interviews with 1,964 news
executives and news staffers in March 2002.
Eight of 10 news executives interviewed said that training
in their newsrooms was limited by a lack of money.
Many of these executives said that $500 was the most they
could afford to spend per year on training per journalist on their staff.
These numbers and these comparisons deepen the
contradiction of a $100 billion business--- which ranks high in profits and
which enjoys a Constitutional protection as a public trust---but does not make
training, education, professional development part of its journalistic culture
in a more meaningful way.
Much has been said and much has been written in the past 18
months about the nature of newspaper company profits and the need to strike a
better balance between the bottom line and good journalism.
The point
about newspaper profits is not that margins of 20 percent and higher are
exorbitant—although some would argue that they are---but that the long-term
health of newspaper companies requires them to invest greater amounts in such
newsgathering resources as newshole, staff and training.
Investments
in training should be part of a strategy that will help determine whether the
local newspaper franchise will remain the dominant provider of news in the
community and whether the profits newspaper companies have enjoyed will
continue into the coming decades.
During the
present downturn, many---perhaps most---newspaper companies reacted by
shrinking their newsgathering resources: cutting newshole, reducing the number
of working journalists through layoffs, buy outs, hiring freezes, and reducing
their investment in training, professional development and education.
Dean
Singleton, publisher of the Denver Post and CEO of MediaNews Group, told an
appreciative audience of editors at the Associated Press Managing Editors
conference recently that “newsroom cutbacks have gone far enough, maybe too
far."
This
critical connection between investment and success may be further confirmed in
a series of research projects now underway.
Phil Meyer
of your faculty is engaged in one such study—funded by the Knight
Foundation---seeking to demonstrate that good journalism is good business and
that investment in the newsroom has a meaningful benefit on the bottom line.
Another
study, by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Poynter Institute,
is attempting to identify and define measurements of newsroom abilities that
are useful in building a culture that drives successful newspaper companies.
Training
comes in many forms, of course. Journalists identify four distinct areas of
training they want and need: training in journalistic skills, education in
ethics, values and legal issues, education about the content of the news, and
professional development.
The type of
training most often available in news rooms is in journalistic
skills---reporting, writing, editing, photography, graphics, computer assisted
reporting---as well as discussions about ethics, values and legal issues.
Such
training sessions typically occur in-house, even though the journalists
responding to the Council of Presidents’ survey voiced a strong preference for
training opportunities that would take them away from the newsroom for extended
periods.
The other
two forms of training---education in news content and professional
development---are less often available, with clear consequences for the
credibility of news organizations and for management and leadership in the
newsroom.
Dr. Gary
Becker, a 1992 Nobel laureate in economics from the University of Chicago,
observes that “any modern economy is marked by the amount of money it spends on
human capital, rather than physical capital. Today, it’s brainpower that
counts.”
Carroll D.
Stevens, director of the Knight Foundation Fellowships for Journalist in Law at
the Yale Law School, says that “almost more than any other profession,
journalism depends on intellectually versatile practitioners---people skilled in
the immediate tasks of the craft, to be sure, but also fluent in the purposes
and function of civil society.
“Such
nimbleness of mind and technique can only be achieved---with quality journalism
as its result---through a process of continuous learning.”
Dr. Becker
and Carroll Stevens remind us that we live in complicated times.
As
journalists, we face daily demands to explain, clarify and interpret for our
readers and viewers issues that are complex and, more often than not, contain
elements of science, technology, medicine, economics and engineering, as well
as human emotion and political or ideological conflict.
As early as 1919, Walter Lippmann, the most influential
newspaper columnist of the first half of the last century, recognized that as
stories become more and more complex and more specialized, there was a greater
and greater need for reporters and editors to develop special areas of
expertise in which they could do their work in a highly informed and
authoritative way.
The solution
Lippmann suggested was for journalists to acquire more of a “scientific
spirit…” and aspire to a “common intellectual method and common area of valid
fact. The field should make as its cornerstone the study of evidence and
verification.”
Years later,
Lippmann impressed these ideas on the president of Harvard University, and they
took root in the Nieman idea of mid-career education for journalists when the
fellowships were established in 1938.
More than
two generations of journalists have come to Harvard to study as Nieman Fellows.
A few thousand others have enjoyed similar privileged experiences in mid-career
programs at Stanford, Michigan, Columbia, Maryland and MIT.
It is
interesting to note that none of these programs draw much support from the news
organizations that so benefit from the knowledge their journalists acquire
during a year away from the newsroom.
Rather they
exist because visionaries at the Knight Foundation, the Ford Foundation and
other institutions of charitable giving have created and sustained these
educational opportunities of lasting value to the news industry.
In my own proposal to the Nieman
selection committee in 1965, I envisioned a year of study focusing on urban
problems.
When I began my year at Harvard, I
was an editorial writer at the Akron Beacon Journal. When I returned the
following spring, I was thrust unprepared into the role of city editor.
It was a struggle for me to come to
terms with the responsibility for organizing local coverage and directing the
work of others. But my Harvard experience had enriched my ability to think
about the stories I was assigning.
From my Harvard professors, I had
made the important discovery that the question is always open, that there is
always the possibility of new information tomorrow or a fresh idea next week or
next year.
As a way of thinking about the
news, I found this to be an unfailing caution against the structure of daily
journalism, where the tendency is to sum up today’s news with a neat conclusion
for tonight’s viewers and tomorrow morning’s readers.
The limitation of the Nieman
Fellowships and other elite programs, of course, is that they are available to
a relatively few journalists each year.
For continuing education to have a
broader reach, a more substantial impact on journalism, news organizations
themselves must take the lead.
Few news organizations are making
this investment, even though private companies in the United States are a major
source of investment in knowledge.
Each year, $45 billion is invested
in professional education in the United States.
Jack Fuller,
president of the Chicago Tribune Co., in his widely acclaimed book, News
Values, argues that even the generalists among reporters “must be capable
for dealing with experts from a position of strength.”
This, he
suggests, “requires journalists to become more comfortable with technology, to
have a rigorous education in a specialized discipline and to understand that
they are expected to produce work in complex fields that holds up against the
examination of practitioners in these fields.
“We cannot
accept the kind of ignorance of basic statistical methods that so often leads
to preposterous reporting of scientific claims,” he wrote.
William Damon of Stanford
University conducted lengthy interviews with journalists for a book called Good
Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet, which examines the culture of
journalism.
Damon found that the typical
strategies journalists used for verifying information were learned by trial and
error rather than in more formal ways from teachers or editors.
These
journalistic behaviors, as often as not, lead to what Neil Rudenstine, former
president of Harvard, once characterized as “uninformed” reporting.
Recently, Michael Getler, in his ombudsman column for The Washington Post, recalled a story
published on the morning of September 11, 2001 on the front page of the Los Angeles Times---a story that was
being read by early risers on the West Coast as the highjacked jetliners were
being crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Under a headline, Key
Foe of Taliban Is Dead, U.S. Says, the Times
reported the killing of Ahmed Shah Massoud, a warrior intellectual who had
become a legendary figure in the region for his battle against Soviet
occupation in the 1980s and then against the Taliban regime that followed.
The LA Times
story stayed in Getler’s head for two reasons, he said.
“First, it struck me as an immediate, though
circumstantial, clue to the likelihood that Osama bin Laden was behind the
attacks that were taking place in New York and at the Pentagon. If the United
States was to come after him, as bin Laden and the Taliban must have reasoned,
best to have Massoud out of the way.
“Second, I was impressed by whatever it was that caused the
LA Times to put the story on the
front page when it did. It reminded me of the service that newspapers can
provide by a dedication to being alert at all times.
“Maybe it was just luck,” Getler mused, “or a slow news day
that propelled the Massoud story onto the LA
Times’ front page that fateful day. But I doubt that. Not many readers knew
or cared about Massoud. It would have been easy to keep him off the front
page.”
Getler asked Leo Wolinsky, the Times’ front-page editor, about that news decision.
Wolinsky explained that the paper had devoted a lot of
coverage to Afghanistan and the Taliban. “We had been sensitized by the earlier
reporting,” he told Getler.
“And this was a fascinating tale with quite of bit of
background and detail. The foreign staff was very alert and my judgment was
swayed by their arguments. We never would have done it without the commitment
to foreign reporting.”
Getler’s
point was that being alert is critical to understanding the meaning of news and
deciding the placement of stories, thus signaling their importance to readers.
Such
alertness is surely a consequence of experience, journalistic instinct and
education.
My final
thought about the value of growing brainpower in the newsroom is the
significance of professional development. This is an important dimension in any
journalist’s life, for it conveys to the journalist the interest of the news
organization in his or her professional growth and advancement.
Failure to
provide opportunities for professional development often is a consequence of
the way journalists become editors. They do well as reporters and are thrust
into positions of authority and command without adequate training and
education.
On-the-job
training for newsroom supervisors does not always lead to managerial
competence.
Lack of
effective supervisory skills can contribute to difficulties of the kind
newspapers have experienced in building multicultural news staffs.
Since 1978,
the American Society of Newspaper Editors and its member newspapers have been
struggling with the challenge of diversifying their newsrooms.
The original
ASNE goal, as you may remember, was to bring the percentage of journalists of
color in U.S. newspaper newsrooms to parity with the population of racial and
ethnic groups in the country by the year 2000.
Newspapers
made progress against the goal. The population of journalists of color rose
from 3 percent in 1978 to more than 11 percent in 2000, but well below the
national figure of 26 percent.
As editors
and their news organizations initiated creative, aggressive recruitment efforts
to hire more journalists of color, they didn’t recognize, until just recently,
the sobering reality that for every five journalist of color they hired, four
were leaving the business.
Last year,
in a study for the American Society of Newspaper Editors, retention was
identified as a greater challenge than hiring in improving the percentage of
journalists of color in newspaper newsrooms.
Lack of
professional challenge and opportunity for advancement were the reasons journalists
of color gave most often for decisions to leave newspaper jobs.
We know that
a factor is how journalists of color are supervised. The newsroom is, after
all, still a place that is dominated by white males who, by and large, have
defined the ethos and traditions of the journalistic workplace.
The message
to newspapers from the research was that professional development training for
mid-level editors is a key to addressing the retention problem.
ASNE is
pursuing model programs the begin with a handbook on retention that would
provide a curriculum outlining the necessary managerial skills for effective
mentoring, nurturing and supervising journalists in a diverse newsroom.
Educational
programs in multicultural management can help white editors, particularly,
develop an awareness of differences represented by journalists of color.
They can
learn how to work smartly with these differences in carrying forward their
responsibilities for coaching and directing newsgathering activities.
Dori
Maynard, president of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, which
over the past 30 years has become the leading organization for training
journalists of color, notes that nearly all of the graduates of the Maynard
Institute are still in the newspaper business because “there is a direct and
undeniable link between training and retention.”
The lessons
of retention are reaffirmed in a recent study conducted for the American Press
Institute by the Pew Center for Civic Journalism that examined female leadership
in U.S. newsrooms.
The study
concluded that there is a great divide between two distinct subsets of women
who register notably different aspirations, concerns and career paths.
Fifty-five
percent of the women in the survey identified themselves as confident about
their career paths. They said they have the benefit of mentors and access to
their bosses, a situation that appears to have helped them set and achieve
career goals.
Forty-five
percent of the women said they were conflicted about their careers. They may
want to move up but they have concerns about advancement, including sexism and
the lack of opportunity.
In the
concluding interpretations to the study, the concerns about career-conflicted
women signaled a need for training and coaching.
News
organizations are struggling to improve their standing with the public. Trust
and credibility are important concerns being discussed at every level of our
newsrooms and our news companies.
Press
performance and public attitudes toward it have been exhaustively studied. From
these examinations, the public has made clear that it needs and wants a
credible, knowledgeable, accurate press.
Yet
journalistic performance too often merits only public distrust, as witnessed by
public reaction to coverage of such stories as Princess Diana’s death to the OJ
trial to the Clinton scandals to Gary Condit.
During my
years at the Freedom Forum’s Media Studies Center, I directed a three-year
study of fairness in the news media.
One of the
important findings in our work was that the public respects the professional
and technical skills journalists bring to their craft, but fears that
journalists don’t know enough.
Specifically,
the public thinks journalists don’t have an authoritative understanding of the
complicated world they try to explain to the public.
If the robust nature of the U.S. economy is powered by the idea that
people and organizations have an almost unlimited power to improve themselves
through education.
If
journalistic excellence and profitability go hand in hand, as the late
Katherine Graham has said. If investment in human capital is the soundest
strategy in a modern economy, as Nobel laureate Gary Becker argues.
If both
excellence and profitability are enhanced by an intelligent, highly educated,
alert, resourceful news staff, as the evidence indicates---it remains a
mystery, then, why news organizations don’t put a higher premium on training
and education.