Talk journalism or the staff goes away

”News as business feels calculated, cynical and desperate. News as community service produces passion and energy. And because good journalism is very hard work, passion and energy are everything.”

Here is an interesting lesson of bad leadership and poor internal communication. In the Columbia Journalism Review Chris Ison, a former report at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, catches an important change in the atmosphere inside his newspaper newsroom that has driven talents out of the company:

• Ison on why talented people leave the industry: ”Newspapers aren’t the strong community institutions they used to be. They aren’t the places we came to work at.”
• On today’s American newsroom: ”Dire industry news is everywhere, and we know journalists love to wallow in the negative. Tighter papers mean shorter stories, and a sense that there’s less appetite for ambitious journalism. Design concerns can trump content—sometimes rightfully, but not always. The earlier and heavier planning that goes into every morning’s paper can lead to more management-driven assignments and, thus, a disempowered staff. Downsizing means fewer journalists doing more work with less depth. It produces staff shake-ups, new assignments, labor strife and other disruptions. All of this understandably can keep managers in their offices and away from the staff.”
• On the mistrust inside newspaper organisations: ”The gloomy business talk… has leaked—no, flooded—out of the management meetings and overtaken the newsroom and the industry… [The Pew Research Center] survey shows that fewer than a third of the journalists in the trenches feel that managers share their values…. Many more reporters than managers expressed concerns about the influence that business and advertising has had on news content. I am convinced that newsroom leaders must deal with this if they are to retain the good journalists essential to recovery. And this time, it means the leaders need to change.”
• On what should be done: ”Managers must compensate by keeping the hand-wringing out of the newsroom and stressing quality journalism more than ever—even while the search for a business model continues.”
• On what really motivates the newsroom: ”The challenge for newsrooms is to instill that sense of purpose—and yes, pride—every day, because most days, the best stories are much harder to come by. A motivated reporter sees a story in almost every document and interview. On a bad day, the same reporter can manage to never see a story. He can file the easy 12-incher, and no one needs to know that he avoided the riskier one.”

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