Michele McLellan: Personal Statement

The news industry is a very low-training industry, investing only a third of the national average on training. As a result, Starbucks baristas often get more ongoing training than a mid-career journalist. With the help of a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, my team developed a strategic approach to training and demonstrated how it might work in 17 newsrooms. Those that used the strategy were highly successful in improving their journalism, and they learned that they could draw on their own staffs for a lot of what they needed to learn. Several of the newsrooms cited the project as the breakthrough they needed to begin to transform their traditional newsroom into one that could produce digital journalism and engage more productively with the people and communities they serve. A national survey at the end of the project showed that one-third of U.S. news organizations had increased their training and most of these had adopted a strategic approach. Findings of the project and the survey are contained in the book News, Improved: How America's Newsrooms Are Learning to Change, which I co-wrote with my associate Tim Porter, and published in March 2007 by CQ Press. The Knight Foundation distributed 1,500 copies of the book to editors and other media executives. It is still available at amazon.com and other outlets. The main obstacles were convincing newsrooms and their staffs to adopt a relatively unorthodox approach to training and to invest in making it work - at a time when there is a certain hopelessness about training in newsrooms.

Personal challenges: Mine seem pretty small. The biggest challenge was that the work was very, very wearying because it involved talking with journalists at a time when newsrooms were often cynical, fearful, and highly resistant to change. It was gratifying to play a role in opening them up to new possibilities, but very draining nonetheless.

Contact Michele by email or phone (937) 238-5930 (w).

 Back to Michele's Profile