As part of our recent renewal with our stock music provider, Universal Production Music (UPM –formerly known to us as Killer Tracks), we now have access to additional music tracks. UPM also owns a company called FirstCom music and we now have access to thousands more tracks in that library as well. This library has been added to all existing Gannett logins.
There’s some information attached just to get you familiar with what UPM offers. They have music directors who can help with your music search.
As a reminder, we should rely only on UPM for stock music and not the various free sources you may find online. We do have an enterprise license to use UPM with unlimited seats and unlimited downloads. Our usage rights for content that we use UPM tracks in are pretty broad and include all our normal needs such as on platform and social networks. Anyone who needs a login can email support@gannett.com to get instructions on how to set one up.
If you run into problems getting it created or have other questions about where we can use UPM, you are welcome to reach out to Cathy Kononetz, executive director of video content, anytime.
We will cover Charity Watch, SEC filings, Form 990s on Guidestar, etc. Google Dataset Search, Google Scholar, including ways to analyze case-law. We will learn to scrape Google Finance to isolate stock data and historical stock data. And will finish by learning how to scrape data from business sites and visualize it using Flourish.
A master-class that also will hold some value for beginners. Taught through examples by Michael Chow, award-winning videographer and photographer at The Arizona Republic.
Practical advice for new managers (and potential new managers) on overcoming obstacles, working effectively in a hybrid newsroom, pacing yourself and, always, moving forward, even when you hit that wall at Mile 20. Greg Borowski is deputy editor for news, projects and investigations at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and a late-in-life runner who has completed six marathons and is looking for number seven. Moderated by Tia’Lavon Hill from our Rising Leaders cohort.
The Columbus Dispatch’s Erica Thompson will explore a few big stories (Stand Your Ground Law being passed in Ohio, the Rittenhouse verdict, the deaths of Ma’Khia Bryant in Columbus and Gabby Petito – and how paying attention to the reactions of diverse audiences can lead to localized stories. She also will offer tips on advocating for diverse coverage and better support of reporters of color.
On the eve of the inauguration of the first female vice president, we partnered with a local organization to give young women in Jacksonville an opportunity to talk to local women leaders.
We cover Charity Watch, SEC filings, Form 990s on Guidestar, etc. Google Dataset Search, Google Scholar, including ways to analyze case-law. We will learn to scrape Google Finance to isolate stock data and historical stock data. And will finish by learning how to scrape data from business sites and visualize it using Flourish.
We have stories throughout the Network on issues that have directly affected marginalized communities, but what else is occurring there? Is this story a boiling point? Where else across the country has this same issue happened? How did it affect them? This will use Census data and two new network tools: Diversity Dashboard and Pass the Mic, to see where stories land and how to cultivate follow ups with sources.
Featuring: Krystal Nurse, reporter in Lansing, Mich., CJ Benjamin, director of audience engagement and trust and Rachel Kilroy, project manager in our content innovations group
Bucks County Courier Times/The Intelligencer sports reporter Nur B. Adam started creating content on her TikTok account at the start of the spring season and has used it to connect with the student athletes she covers. She’s gotten them to participate in videos, including some where they tap into the latest viral trend on the popular app. Some have gone viral, including one that has over 182,000 views and 18,700 likes. Her video rating her photos got 78,000 views, and now she’s created a series of videos. Network social media expert Jaime Cárdenas will interview Nur in an informal conversation and demo open to any of our journalists.
Featuring: Nur B. Adam, sports reporter in Bucks County, Pa., and network social media expert Jaime Cárdenas
We will talk about the importance of video in everyday journalism, how to work with the VPC, how and what to shoot, different platforms esp. IG reels and TikTok. Featuring Jane Mo, producer of video franchises.
You likely know the racial and ethnic makeup of your newsroom, but what about your sources? Let’s talk about why diverse sourcing is important, how to find out how well your sources represent your community and ideas on creating and retaining those sources.
Featuring: Alfonzo Galvan, reporter in Sioux Falls, S.D., and Jana Hays, reporter in Oklahoma City
Use this tool to track and visualize search trends on Google. You can compare terms or sub-topics, and use the tool to compare keywords you can use in SEO tags and headlines. The comparison graphics, maps and list are easy to embed and share.
We tackle the fundamentals of what makes a story newsworthy, the essential practices of journalists and the shared values that differentiate journalism from other forms of content and storytelling.
Our reporting time has never been more valuable — every story we write needs to reach an audience, prompting illumination and change. Understanding who our audiences are, the reasons they seek us out and how we can earn and keep their support is essential to building a sustainable plan for journalism’s future. This is a primer on the the audience funnel. First, we will do an audience health checkup and what we can do to help move readers through the loyalty funnel. Then we explore what a reader NEEDS from our content – and making sure we deliver.
Learn how to probe through millions of documents, including audio, video, PDFs and more, to find patterns or that proverbial needle in a haystack. You’ll see case studies of how Gannett journalists have used this software to break big investigative stories.
Download the collection of links discussed during the training below.
Execute deeper, more precise, more sophisticated web searches by harnessing specialized search engines. Diversity your stories, angles, sources and readers.
On or potentially before Aug. 16, the 2020 Census results will go public. How can you turn these data points into stories? Within hours of release, the Digital Optimization Team will share spreadsheets and searchable maps that will help the entire USA TODAY Network understand changes in their communities.
Tips and traps: Tools such as Signal app, Freedome and VPNs to keep you, your data and your sources safe. We’ll look at a few Google tools (including how to unplug from Maps tracking) as well as resources from the Digital Security section of Journalist’s Toolbox.
We also look at data scraping: How to scrape data from web pages with Google Sheets, browser-based plug-ins and scraping .PDFs with Tabula.technology. Students should download the Tabula software at http://tabula.technology
Many newsrooms have historically focused on white, Christian, cisgender, heterosexual men when selecting story angles and choosing who to interview for stories on sports, politics, education, culture, courts and law enforcement and many other beats. But when reporters overlook women, LGBTQ people, Asian Americans, Black people, Latinos, disabled people, immigrants, Muslims, atheists and other often overlooked communities, they are missing the stories of this increasingly diverse nation and missing out on the chance to win over readers from those communities. At the same time, surface-level outreach to these communities is not appropriate. Reporters must build trust with sources in diverse communities, especially those outside their own, by staying educated on issues important to these communities and talking to well-known and everyday people in these communities. Every story must have diversity of sources. It is not acceptable to publish a story that does not include people from underserved communities. Writing a story about how billionaires are getting rich from the COVID pandemic? Talk to a Latino economist and/or a Black billionaire. Writing about how parents are tired of hanging out with their kids after quarantine? Talk to an Asian mom, a parent who is non-binary and a Jewish family therapist. Doing a story on the best TV shows to binge watch this August? If all the TV shows only feature white, cisgender people, then that story is not ready for publication.
During this session, enterprise reporters Romi Ruiz, Marc Ramirez and Jessica Guynn will talk about how they work to build trust with diverse audiences and find story ideas about communities that represent different experiences in the United States.
CSV Match is an open-source fuzzy-matching library that uses some of the same algorithms as Google’s Open Refine, only it finds matches between two files rather than within one.
Do you have a dataset you want to feature in your article as a table or a searchable database? There are a few easy tools to help you show your work: Google Flourish, Airtable and Tableizer.
Fact-checking images, video and verifying facts: Google Image Search, Tineye, FotoForensics, Watch-frame-by-Frame, YouTube Dataviewer, Google Fact-Check Explorer and other fact-checking tools. We also play the Clemson University Spot the Troll game with Twitter to sharpen our social media fact-checking.
Google Colab runs notebooks on a virtual machine that can execute your code, connect to data in the Google cloud, and share with a collaborators. NOTE: Must have Google Drive account.
What education data sets out there, and what stories can they help us tell? Conversation led by Claudette Riley, Springfield, Mo., education reporter and Chris Quintana, USA TODAY higher education reporter. We covered enrollment, teacher turnover, equity, Critical Race Theory, financial aid and other items.
Google Advanced Search, search operators, deep searching a government website with a lousy search tool, Google Dataset Search, Google Scholar. Data sources — Google Public Data explorer and other data portals that collect information so we don’t have to go fetch it.
Search within a site for a topic: site:cdc .gov SARS
Search for a file format/topic: filetype: .csv us mass shootings
Search a range: Put .. between two numbers.
Example: camera $500..$1000
Sites similar to one you’re searching: Put “related:” in front of a web address you already know.
Example, related:time.com
Look at a website’s cache: Put “cache:” in front of the site address to see an earlier version of the story/site.
Example: cache:journaliststoolbox.org
Search for an exact image size: Right after the word you’re looking for, add the text imagesize:widthxheight. Make sure to add the dimensions in pixels.
Example: Eiffel Tower imagesize:500×500
Search a Twitter list: site:twitter.com inurl:lists <michelin starred>
As a reporter, if you remember nothing else from college stats, it should be how to tell if a number is both newsworthy and trustworthy. This session also might be called: advanced math for journalists!
What are the best datasets out there and what stories can they tell? Conversation led by Hadley Barndollar, New England regional, health and welfare reporter; Nikie Mayo, investigative reporter in Greenville, S.C., and Jayme Fraser of the USA TODAY data and investigations team
Do you have a dataset you want to feature in your article as a table or a searchable database? There are a few easy tools to help you show your work: Google Flourish, Airtable and Tableizer.
In part I of our two-part series, “Data visualization for everyone,” we explore DataWrapper — an easy but powerful tool available to journalists across Gannett.
How can you find diverse sources for your stories? It’s not always easy, especially for young reporters still building a contacts list. This session will show you how to use expert databases to find vetted sources, what to look for with “faux experts” and how to follow experts when they publish.
Use this tool to track and visualize search trends on Google. You can compare terms or sub-topics, and use the tool to compare keywords you can use in SEO tags and headlines. The comparison graphics, maps and list are easy to embed and share.
Google MyMaps helps you build layered maps using nothing more than a spreadsheet and shapefile (.KML, .KMZ). This tool is great for smaller “day-turn” maps for routine stories such as pothole repairs, vaccination centers, etc. The map will handle any spreadsheet up to 1,000 rows in length and is easy to embed and share.
People unknown to you often tweet, email or text you videos from “news events.” But do you know if they are legit? Was the video from today or five years ago? Was the video doctored? How can we see when and where a video was first published? We’ll explore how with Watch Frame-by-Frame and Amnesty International’s YouTube Dataviewer.
WatchFramebyFrame.com http://www.watchframebyframe.com/watch/yt/Xb0P5t5NQWM Great for fact-checking videos. Paste URL into player and hit the arrow keys to look at each shot frame by frame. Watch for shadows out of place, etc. You also can watch frame by frame in YouTube by using the comma and period keys after pausing the video. Comma moves backward and period forward.
Exercise: Test both tools with this famous fake video of a bird trying to fly off with a kid. It was passed off as real and went viral. Watch the shadows of the bird and the kid for clues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CE0Q904gtMI
YouTube Dataviewer https://citizenevidence.amnestyusa.org/ From Amnesty International, plug a YouTube video URL in and see where the video has been published through reverse lookup of video frames.
We’ll give you three photos to fact-check with context shared (for real) on social media about each photo. Your job is to reverse image search each photo to see if the context is accurate or if the photo has been misrepresented. Answers will be at the end of the video. No peeking!
People unknown to you often tweet, email or text you photos from “news events.” But do you know if they are legit? Was the photo from today or five years ago? Was the photo doctored? How can we see when and where a photo was first published? We’ll explore how with Google Image Search, TinEye and FotoForensics.
The first of a four-part series on fact-checking, we introduce you to some basic tools like Google Fact Check Explorer, Google Earth, the Verification Handbook and First Draft News resources. We’ll show you some practical ways these tools and resources can help you in your quest to verify the news.
Need an interactive chart quickly without doing any coding or using a spreadsheet? The Google Public Data Explorer is linked to reliable datasets that can help you build charts in minutes. It gives you a link and embed code to post on your site. It’s particularly helpful for unemployment stories, census stories and some business stories.
Link to tool: Click here More data journalism tools on Journalist’s Toolbox: Click here
We all use Google, but have you used the advanced search settings? Or have you tried search operators to narrow your search and dig deeper into the web? Or do you need a specialized “micro-search” tool to find what you need? We’ll cover all kinds of search tips and tricks in this video. Make sure you have Google.com open as well as the search operators handout linked off this page.
Data scraping — pulling tables of stats and other information from web pages, .PDFs and other documents — is a valuable skill for journalists. In this training video and hands-on exercises, you’ll learn how to scrape data tables out of web pages. We’ll use a formula and a browser plug-in to scrape web pages, then we’ll cover how to scrape native .PDFs with a fantastic tool called Tabula. Before starting the video, install Tabula.technology on your computer, and open the exercises page link. You’ll be a data-scraping ninja in no time!
Do you need to estimate a crowd size at a large outdoor event such as a protest, parade, concert or other ticketless event? Then MapChecking.com is the tool for you. Developer Anthony Catel built this “mashup” tool with Google Maps that lets you designate an area on a map, estimate how many people fit per square meter and get a crowd estimate for that designated space. It’s great for fact-checking crowd estimates from the police or event organizers, who almost always inflate the numbers.
Government databases are public records, yet most agencies treat records requests for data as something exotic and fraught with challenges. Anticipate the objections and defeat them for the win. Conversation led by Steve Suo and Nick Penzenstadler of the USA TODAY investigations team.
Automatically sort text or images with machine-learning.
Got too much text to read, or too many images to dig through? Make the computer do it, by teaching by example.
We’ll sort images into categories like “has a bike or doesn’t have a bike” or “is a hog farm or isn’t a hog farm”.
We’ll sort text into buckets like “is about gun control, environmental policy or immigration”.
The goal isn’t for the computer to make uncheckable conclusions you’ll rely on in a story, but an easily-checkable conclusion to transform a boring week-long slog into a few hours of data labelling, some coding and a little bit of waiting.
You’ll leave with two hands-on examples and working code you can adapt for your own projects, but also intuitions about what the AI’s output means to us as journalists.
Google Earth Engine Timelapse features 37 years (1984-2020) of satellite imagery over a given area on Earth. You can search, zoom in or out and easily link or embed to changing imagery as it plays through a timelapse meter on the bottom of the screen. It plays at three speeds and the tools is great for census (city/physical growth), environmental (development, flooding, wildfires, etcs.) and agriculture stories.
Slice and dice data to to organize your reporting, find patterns and reveal better stories. Led by Erin Mansfield and Nick Penzenstadler of the USA TODAY data/investigations team.
How USA TODAY dominated stimulus check search, NFL Draft and March Madness planning, how the Indy Star and Midwest DOT worked together on search and more.
Visualizations can help make a complex story simpler. Play with simple data visualization tools, learn how to automatically import data into a map, and explore the elegant templates of Flourish.
An overview of the key data analysis tools and techniques used to produce investigative stories, with examples of stories that were made possible with these tools.
How are you sure that great source with the perfect quote isn’t too good to be true? Even great reporters can get tricked by fake names or sketchy backgrounds. We’ll walk through some websites and strategies you can use to create a routine and spot potential red flags before you get burned.
Find information faster by learning how to power search on special sites for datasets, images and court documents. See what users in your area are searching and discover story ideas on Google Trends. Explore Backlight, an AI tool for parsing massive amounts of documents.
How can you do your best work during this difficult period of perpetual work-from-home? We’ll explore how journalists around the company are learning to listen more, communicate better, celebrate good work, constructively identify areas for improvement and reconnect in ways that return some of the joy and fulfillment we’ve been missing. This session is packed with concrete examples of what’s working.
Writers experiencing mental health problems often feel that they are unable to share their situation with editors, writes April Reese. Freelance writers in particular may worry that requests for deadline extensions or other accommodations may not be taken seriously or could lead to loss of future assignments. That’s why it is important for editors to receive training about recognizing mental illness, so that they can step in early when warning signs appear. For both writers and editors, acknowledging the problem earlier allows for more flexibility, which can avoid missed deadlines. It’s also important for editors to allow for long-term adjustments that might wax and wane as a writer’s health fluctuates.
Tracking diverse content has become increasingly more relevant to understanding how your site is performing with target audiences. For more accurate diversity data, it’s critical to tag your content properly, and you need to understand what to tag and what not to tag.
We focus on what the key diversity tags are and examples of how to use them properly.
We also learn how a site challenged to grow audience relies on tagging as part of an ongoing strategy to raise the proportion of stories for communities of color.
We welcome as trainer Len LaCara of Rochester, a Gannett senior content strategist with a deep knowledge base in content strategy and understanding metrics.
Fan out training. Connect with your content strategist (for tier 1 and 2 shops) on how best to spread training to your teams. They’re ready to deliver a version of today’s talk to newsroom leaders (or entire newsrooms). For smaller community sites, we’ll worth with regional editors to figure out the best way to spread this out.
Start working on an editor column. It’s a great chance to recap some of your best work and remind readers of the value you bring to your city (samples below).
Bring your newsroom into the fold and work on best practices for responding to the community.
Focus on planning efforts for launch week and beyond. You’ll want to move into this with some strong journalism, but it’s important that you build subscriber-only enterprise planning processes to keep it up.
Resources:
The deck. It’s attached.
A recording of the conversation.Here’s the link. You’ll need the password (includes asterisk at beginning and period at the end): *5V3Ku$.
Spreadsheet of rough premium counts. Attached. This is only based on December data, but it should give you a ballpark number of premium stories per day.
More details on tracking. We’re still finding the best methods of tracking numbers of new subscribers based on premium work for some legacy GHM sites.
This report will show data for most sites (and others will appear in here soon). Attribution is currently defined as a “premium story read during a visit where someone subscribed.” If multiple stories are viewed during that subscribing visit, each gets credit.
Here is a dashboard link in Parse.ly that can be used to see readership of your premium work once you start posting it. Just change it to your website in the URL at the top.
Bonus: More expert editor voices
We didn’t have time to get to Brian Duggan, Caitlyn Stroh-Page and Cory Myers, all of whose expertise reflects great work in mid-size operations and premium journalism. There are some great tips below from editors who are excelling at subscriber only tactics:
Via Cory Myers, editor in Sioux Falls:
Double down on planning and discussion: We did the “what do we have that’s sub-only” for far too long, when it needs to be “what can we cover, what’s the unique angle, what smart analysis can we write that will ensure value for subscribers and differentiates us from competitors.” Every. Day.
Experiment: Three things we’ve done in recent months that we might not have produced have paid off:
We put all our election preview content subscriber only. Traffic numbers were about what we’d expect normally, but it also drove a couple dozen subs.
Most COVID coverage is free, but when South Dakota hit 1,000 deaths, we had a package of six or seven news obits along with a piece compiling a graph on every death we could confirm from our reporting. All premium, and that main story alone drove 42(!) subs last month.
Dining works. The TV show Diners, Drive-ins and Dives came to South Dakota for the first time recently. We did a ton of coverage, and one recent follow up we did about how the restaurants featured were dealing with the tsunami of customers we made sub only and in the first three days it has both 7 subs, but also around 8,000 pageviews.
Lastly: Use your content strategist! Kelli, Tovah, Bill, etc are awesome, and it’s their job to help us be successful. And they’re good at it!
Via Brian Duggan, editor in Reno:
Planning, planning, planning: Start a premium budget now. Dedicate your planning conversations with your editing staff around it. As Eric Larsen said in Fort Collins: “Serendipity is not strategy.” In other words, don’t wait until the last minute to make a story premium.
Meetings: We dedicate a staff news meeting each week to discussing our premium journalism so we can do some group work shopping. That said, the philosophy generally needs to be premium is a natural part of the daily conversation between reporters and editors.
We have organized our newsroom into teams: A new audience team (primarily public safety/breaking folks), an investigations/enterprise team (government and business writers) and a premium team (food writing, features writers, sports). While the entire newsroom shares all of those missions, the team structure creates champions to push on each of those fronts.
Over communicate with your audience. Write columns thanking them for subscribing. Write columns telling them about what it’s been like to run a newsroom during a pandemic. Do whatever you can do to remind them that your staff are their neighbors and are doing an important public service. You can’t over do this.
Journalism should not be driven by press releases. Ever. Do whatever you have to do to unlearn that muscle memory. Instead, get in the habit of finding unique angles (unless, of course, the press release is announcing significant breaking news). And if there isn’t something worthwhile, be OK with moving on to something else.
Remind readers that public service still takes time: We’ve made critical public safety coverage of the pandemic free (stories about how to get vaccines, statewide closures, etc…) but at the very top of that story we make it clear to the reader that our news organization made that story free because it’s a part of our essential coronavirus coverage. We then immediately remind the reader to subscribe so they can support our public service.
Via Caitlyn Stroh-Page, editor in Athens:
Your headline and your promo image are your frontline sales team. The headline on stories can make or break subscriber-only opportunities. On stories that you know are going to be premium, spend extra time workshopping the headline. One thing we noticed while doing our hybrid test: we occasionally had stories that were missed subscriber-only opportunities where, with a small headline adjustment, the stories would have likely been strong converters. Recognizing the importance of headlines in S-O strategy also combats a lot of fears about quantity of premium stories. If you already have a practice of good story selection, this small trick will pay off!
Make sure your S-O selections have readership. We often fell into the trap of marking all niche content as S-O when, honestly, we either shouldn’t have been writing the stories OR we should have come at it from a different angle to be a more local voice. There are opportunities where niche beats can be S-O successes, but it can be a challenge to pinpoint them + not abandon them.
Not all S-O needs to be watchdog, enterprise, hard news. Chris White wisely advised that “convenient and compelling” is a great recipe for S-O. That may be something like a “The 25 Athens area high school football players you need to know” or “It’s hiking time! Here are the 10 best hikes within an hour of Athens”
As Leisa said on the call, your prime premium window is a M-TH publish day and having stories publish in the morning. Get comfortable at 3 p.m. saying “OK this can hold until tomorrow” on stories that are not time sensitive.
Celebrate digital subscription wins!! No need to minimize the importance of other metrics, but incorporate celebrating every single digital start into your everyday conversations.
Editors of small and mid-sized newsrooms take part discussion on digital subscription strategies that work in smaller markets. We’ll share metrics, best practices and ideas to try.
We cover:Difficult conversations that lead to positive, productive outcomes (Michael McCarter + Amalie Nash) and a series of what-ifs with HR partners Arthur Acuña, Perla Adame and Gretchen Pina-Breedy.
Essential Conversations (My Leadership Edge Session, August 2020) Presentation, Recording
NOTE: March 2021 My Leadership Edge Session will be How to Utilize the Gannett Manager Essentials Content. Managers can register in the Hub by going to the My Leadership Edge page and registering for the session of their choice under March 2021.
We cover: the career life cycle, including the art of recruiting, retention and hiring — with a focus on DEI (Michael Anastasi); managing virtually (Jean Hodges); and performance management — proactive, all year long, no surprises (Hollis Towns).
NOTE: February 2021 My Leadership Edge Session will be “How to Deliver Effective Performance Reviews.” Managers can register in the Hub by going to the My Leadership Edge page and registering for the session of their choice under February 2021.
We focus on Connecting mission, purpose and values with everyday work (George Stanley & Mizell Stewart III) and Motivation: Celebrating your people; elements of good communication, feedback, etc. (Mizell Stewart III)
All 10 of our active Table Stakes challenges are, in their own ways, designed to help us diversity our staff, our content and our customer base. Rochester’s work over the last year gives us a sturdy platform on which to build. In this conversation, we looked at what Rochester achieved, what obstacles they still face and how any of the other 10 challenges might lead to our next big breakthrough in pursuit of diversity and inclusion.
Bad information is dangerous, especially in uncertain times. Learn how to verify images and video, investigate social media posts, and identify misinformation with open-source intelligence tools.
A discussion on developing a documents state of mind — the key to doing solid watchdog work on a beat. We’ll explore key records on a variety of beats and give practical tips on using open records laws. We’ll give you a checklist of what to know before you make a request and advice on wording your requests for documents and data.
The protests that have become familiar across the country are likely to continue. This will mean our journalists will cover protests. In order to ensure the continued safety of our employees, we will cover:
For reporters and photographers: Sensing and avoiding dangerous situations, while still bearing witness to events. This will include identifying and avoiding encirclement maneuvers, planning escape routes, working with buddies or in teams, with spotters, etc. The objective of the training is to ensure employees have the information and preparation they need to stay safe at all times.
For assigning editors, we will cover elements of the reporter/photographer training described above, and also will cover how to prepare safety briefings and communicate situational awareness before, during and after protest events.
Our No. 1 goal is for our employees to remain safe. The presenter, Garett Jaco, is a combat veteran with experience in urban clashes in Iraq and is a federally certified hostage negotiator. You also can direct questions to security@gannett.com.
Covering Unrest: When Journalists of Color Become the Target. This important session was led by Martin G. Reynolds, who is the co-executive director of external affairs and funding at the Maynard Institute.
The Committee to Protect Journalists: Civil scenarios from crime scenes to riots can generate unpredictable and dangerous conditions. Journalists need to be mindful of self-protection measures to avoid putting themselves at physical or legal risk.
These are stressful times. Being out in the world as a journalist carries an element of risk. But a world without engaged journalists watching over it is risky, too. Our aim is to identify as many risks as we can and take steps to reduce them, prepare for them, and neutralize them if they do arise.
This 75-minute session led by the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma and the Committee to Protect Journalists provides reporters, editors, managers and other news staff with practical digital security steps and psychological precautions to take before, during, and after online harassment and attacks. The briefing covers both digital and psychological safety in the lead-up to and post-U.S. presidential election. The training will be delivered by Elana Newman, PhD., a clinical psychologist and research director for the Dart Center, and Ela Stapley, a digital security expert with the Committee to Protect Journalists and a former freelance journalist.
There’s a lot coming at you as a leader, in good times and in bad. In this conversation, Mizell Stewart III connects historical events with your everyday leadership challenges, and inspires you to do even better for your team and for the mission.
The truest sign of our health as a business and the fulfillment of our mission: paying subscribers. In this conversation, learn how your newsroom can keep existing customers and win the business of new ones.
The safety and welfare of our employees is our highest priority, especially during these recent months of COVID-19 and protests across the nation. We have had numerous discussions, training sessions, and initiatives on safely reporting in the midst of the pandemic and unrest. During the summer, we held specific training sessions about how to safely report during protests and what to do if you are detained. We encourage all of our frontline newsroom employees to review the training session in advance of the upcoming election. And we constantly reassess and update safety measures on behalf of all of our properties.
This conversation is specific to editors/managers. What we covered:
Ensuring the buddy system;
Designating editors to monitor the whereabouts of employees during coverage and equipment best practices;
Simple and effective systems to monitor/check in;
How editors can assess threat conditions, especially in fluid/dynamic situations
Tennessean editor Michael Anastasi, a longtime champion of investing in diversity in all respects, led a discussion on nurturing careers with a special focus on diversity.
Advice from front-line journalists, lawyers, and behind-the-scenes personal safety experts on how to cover unrest while maintaining your Constitutional rights and your personal safety.
Related resources:
Covering Unrest: When Journalists of Color Become the Target. This important session was led by Martin G. Reynolds, who is the co-executive director of external affairs and funding at the Maynard Institute.
The Committee to Protect Journalists: Civil scenarios from crime scenes to riots can generate unpredictable and dangerous conditions. Journalists need to be mindful of self-protection measures to avoid putting themselves at physical or legal risk.
These are stressful times. Being out in the world as a journalist carries an element of risk. But a world without engaged journalists watching over it is risky, too. Our aim is to identify as many risks as we can and take steps to reduce them, prepare for them, and neutralize them if they do arise.
How to typically approach a tough conversation –– any memorable ones stand out that you feel like you navigated really well or really poorly without providing too many details and what you learned?
How do you know when it’s time to put someone on a coaching plan or a PIP?
When you think about coaching, especially challenging employees, what tactics have worked best for you?
We’re in really challenging times right now, and it’s important we recognize that and give people as much understanding and flexibility as possible. At the same time, there is work that needs to be done, and we have to continue to hold people accountable. How do you think about performance management during this particular time?
These are tools for both managers and employees. They facilitate difficult conversations by keeping things focused and measurable, which can cut the tension with difficult employees.
Jeremy McBain, who leads several small newsrooms in northern Michigan., guided a conversation on maintaining big ambitions while managing multiple small newsrooms — all in a remote environment.
We know it’s been a challenge to plan for the elections amidst all the other breaking news happening in 2020. But if you’re a journalist who is working hard to be a reliable source for your community during this election season, don’t let your work be discarded as part of “the media.” Instead, defend your coverage, explain it, and demonstrate to your audience why you’re a credible source. Trusting News wants to help support you in doing this crucial work in as many ways as we can. That’s why we’re excited to share a new resource with you all — a FREE SMS course with tips for earning trust with elections coverage. Through the 10-day course, you’ll learn about common misassumptions people make about your journalism and how you can defend your credibility and earn trust with your audience as you cover local and national elections. The course includes tips and resources on topics like:
– Defending your work – Telling your own story – Meaningfully engaging with users – Getting credit for the ethics and fairness behind your coverage
Additional resources from Trusting News Get 10 days of trusted elections tips through text message: bit.ly/trustworthyelectionsms
Get in touch any time with questions. Joy Mayer // @mayerjoy // joy@TrustingNews.org Lynn Walsh // @lwalsh // lynn@TrustingNews.org
What are “Family Forward” and “Know the Score,” and why are they so key to unlocking potential subscriber growth? This first in a series of dissecting our total potential local readership will delve into the content these two groups say are most likely to win their business.
In order to preserve our integrity, we must live up to the highest standards of objectivity, truthfulness, completeness, fairness, accuracy and impartiality. This can get tricky. Being proactive and communicating our standards clearly helps, but sometimes we slip up. Here’s a primer on what to watch out for, and how to steer clear of trouble.
Language is powerful. How we use terms, categories and concepts in our coverage matter a lot — especially to people who often been denied control over the language used to describe them. In this conversation, you’ll learn from a handful of expert colleagues. What words matter most, and why? Which should be avoided, or never used again? How should we think through even the most ordinary stories to include the experiences and viewpoints of trans people? This conversation was a safe and welcoming environment.
Additional resource: Trans Journalists Association style guide.
A primer on how to get local stories in USA TODAY (and vice versa), how to take advantage of shared resources like Center for News Design, Digital Optimization Team, recruiting, training, etc. — and whom to call on for help.
It’s a big job. It’s a fun job. It’s tough job. It’s also different than it’s ever been. In this program, you’ll will: – Learn your way around; – Master managerial skills, especially in this company; – Channel your best leadership instincts; – Build a reliable network of colleagues, friends and confidants
Betsy O’Donovan and Melody Kramer interviewed two dozen journalists and data analysts across 20 organizations, hunting for practices that are broad enough to be useful to most newsrooms, but specific enough that they provide at least a basic blueprint. Here’s what they found:
The newsrooms that are most effective at using metrics are the ones that help journalists understand which metrics they can control and how — and how that fits into the organization’s overall success.
Having regular conversations with journalists about what the numbers are showing and why is the best way to build data savvy in the newsroom.
Newsrooms should do regular gut checks to see if focusing on a particular metric is having the desired effect on the bottom line. For example, does trying to increase newsletter opens or page views actually help convert readers into subscribers, if driving subscriptions is the overarching goal?
Metrics should be viewed as an opportunity for experimentation, rather than a report card measuring a journalist’s performance. Newsrooms that celebrate success and analyze failures in a constructive way help drive journalists’ natural curiosity and dispel any distrust around metrics.
Experts warn that much of the discourse voters see this election will be laced with false information, misleading or out-of-context claims, and targeted disinformation. Most of that will be designed to suppress voter turnout and undermine confidence in our election system and election results.
And it is spreading. According to ProPublica and First Draft, nearly half of recent top-performing posts on Facebook related to mail voting “contained false or substantially misleading claims.” NBC News has similarly found Google serving ads that contained false and misleading information about registering to vote.
The principal concerns fall into four categories:
False information about the time, place or manner of voting or registering to vote.
False claims about election administration practices, including how ballots are processed, verified and counted, with the intent to undermine faith in the election process and election results.
False or misleading claims about the extent of electoral and voter fraud.
Narratives and information presented without context, with the intent to suppress voter turnout.
