Blending the Best of Old and New

By: Gretchen A. Peck

When the world of news—and the world as a whole—mourned the loss of beloved newspaper icon Ben Bradlee last October, friends, family, and colleagues gathered to memorialize him at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. It wasn’t difficult to measure how the man inspired and bettered lives. To hear his colleagues and coworkers at the Washington Post tell tales of Bradlee in professional action is to get a sense, too, of how he ran a newsroom.

“Ben prowled the newsroom, wolf-like, in search of news, gossip, the hidden but emerging truth,” Bob Woodward said of his friend and editor at the funeral. “He was a journalistic warrior—unequaled and probably never to be matched. He had the courage of an army, a lion in all seasons. He wanted his newspaper to be like the Navy Destroyer he served on in World War II.”

Carl Bernstein recalled his former editor when he spoke at the memorial service, “There was no safe line except the truth. No group-think. ‘What was said? What happened? Why? What is the context? No sensationalism. Keep digging.’”

The tone Bradlee set, the expectations he established, the way he both challenged and supported journalists in his stead became the stuff of newspaper legend. Under his leadership, The Washington Post’s newsroom inspired generations of aspiring reporters who wanted to be Woodward or Bernstein, and who wanted to work for an editor like Bradlee.

To say that the news landscape has changed since Bradlee was a catalyst for the toppling of a presidency would be an understatement. Publishing leadership has shifted; mergers, acquisitions, and shutdowns have collapsed the market. There are fewer people, but more publishing models to scale; classified advertising has vanished, and there’s a void where those revenues used to be. Journalists and news organizations are under attack from all sides—from governments and corporations that don’t want them to publish, to average citizens who blame “the media” for whatever ailment-du-jour afflicts the nation.

The question becomes: How can news organization leadership create, nurture and inspire a healthy and prosperous newsroom culture despite these challenges?

The worst of times, the best of times

“Newsroom culture is very important,” said Linda Shapley, director of newsroom operations at The Denver Post. “We all know that the narrative in journalism—in newspapers in particular right now—is not good. That’s one of the things that really frustrates me—that everybody says, ‘Oh, newspapers are dead!’ But that’s not true. It may be a case of fewer people looking at print, but that’s not the only place where we do journalism anymore.”

It’s because of multi-channel and social-media publishing that technology plays an increasingly important and complex role in shaping a newsroom’s culture. What are the tools reporters need in order to create exemplary work in this new digital age? What are the systems and workflow processes that have to be designed in order to share and distribute information in new ways, to new audiences? How can technology help amass information, cull, and adjudicate information? And is the publisher able and willing to make these kinds of investments?

But then, what’s next? What will likely be the next technological innovation to rock the world of news? Will the newsroom be ready for it?

Shapley, for example, has seen technology not only transform her own career—which blossomed out of production and design roles—but the entire business model. Today, everything we do in news comes down to questions about how best to leverage technology and data, she affirmed.

Popular memes depicting newsrooms that are challenged to compete in new media with old tools resonate with journalists. They’re darkly funny, and funny because they’re often true. When journalists and editors feel starved of the tools and training they need to develop as professionals, it shapes culture.

At the Minneapolis’ Star Tribune, reporters have been equipped with smartphones and tablets, according to Terry Sauer, assistant managing editor/digital. “They’re required to shoot video and report through social media.” But tossing hardware and software at journalists only goes so far to enable them in their new and changing jobs. They also need training and go-to mentors, experts who can teach them how to best communicate information across platforms, media, and audiences.

Sauer offered an example of a new hire there in Minneapolis, a great addition to the staff who will help reporters discover the best ways to distribute and display stories, and offer guidance on how to leverage digital media to acquire information.

It’s not only unrealistic to expect that journalists will just naturally evolve as experts in all things new media, creating a culture that shames them for what they don’t know reductive when news businesses need to be at their progressive best.

“Sometimes people don’t like to ask questions in the newsroom because they fear it gives the impression that they don’t know a lot about digital and new media,” Sauer said. “You see reporters or editors who sort of hang back a little because they don’t want to expose what they don’t know. But a lot of us don’t know a lot of things.” So the newsroom needs to be a safe space to explore ideas, to ask questions, to try new things, to explore and learn.

Mark Cohen, publisher of the Akron Beacon Journal and Ohio.com remarked how important data is to newspapers today. He said that “making decisions solely by gut should go the way of the typewriter,” and that data should reveal to publishers how best to reach and communicate with audiences.

“We are emphasizing utilizing social media, … a constant theme for us,” Cohen added. “Tweet it! Post it! Write it! And the utilize your video. This is a work in progress, and with less people and few support staff, the message of ‘more’ doesn’t always resonate. This change will happen over time, so we must be patient, but we also need to be persistent about this culture change.”

A collaborative effort

Melissa Bell, senior product manager and executive editor at Vox Media, Inc., spoke about newsroom culture at ONA14 in Chicago. Bell, who joined Vox after a career at The Washington Post, suggested: “You can have a culture of creativity and startup in any newsroom, anywhere, right now…The time I spent at The Washington Post was some of the most innovative and creative time in my career.”

Later during her conversation with News Deeply CEO Lara Setrakian, Bell pointed out how lines once drawn between disciplines are gone. At Vox Media, teams are fueled by blended skills and perspective; they cooperate and collaborate.

“What we want to do with our team is to have it as integrated as possible—to have developers sitting next to designers, to have reporters talking to videographers, to have that constant creativity and flow happening, so that we can be really creative with our formats, so we don’t get stuck with one type of article,” she said.

Corey Johnson spoke about newsroom culture from his first-day working under the editorial direction of Bill Keller at The Marshall Project. Johnson has the unique perspective of having worked in both newspapers and non-profit news—most recently, at The Center for Investigative Reporting. He concurred that collaboration is increasingly important in how reporting is done, how stories are told, how information is shared.

Johnson offered a personal example: For more than a year, he worked on an investigative story about safety concerns in California schools. He worked alongside a diverse mix of colleagues—representatives from finance, IT, community outreach and other project stakeholders.

“There was a woman sitting at the table who said, ‘Hey, we need to figure out ways to get this to the people who are impacted the most, and that’s the children.’ She came back with an idea for a coloring book, a (companion) to the story. Don’t you know, by the time that story published there were thousands of people clamoring for the coloring book—senators, legislators…very important people in California…People who wouldn’t have ordinarily have read that story got a way into it through the coloring book.”

Today’s news leadership needs to understand the value of that kind of collaboration, particularly at a time when potential audiences are vast and diverse, and news organizations are challenged by multi-platform, multi-channel publishing, according to Johnson.

“At the same time, one has to resist the temptation of being innovative for innovation’s sake,” he said. “It has to have purpose…Craft people can distinguish themselves still by how well we do the core mission. We need leaders who aren’t tempted to throw the first thing up on the Web just to get clicks, but wants you to make sure you get the story right, and will give you the time and space to make sure you get the story right.”

News is a daunting profession, with serious and profound responsibility. Editors and journalists are tasked with writing “the rough draft of history,” according to Johnson.

“That’s important. The better, more accurate your story is, the better you’re contributing to ‘the record,” he said. “What investigative reporting does is go beyond that…to the big issues of the day, the things that people need to know but wouldn’t know otherwise, because the government or business interests don’t want them to know. Those stories are risky; they’re expensive, and it takes strong leadership.”

Support systems

Thinking back over the course of his nearly 34 years with the Philadelphia Daily News city editor Gar Joseph said he felt lucky for the editors who mentored him along the way. “Gil Spencer, Zack Stalberg, and Michael Days—every single one of them was utterly committed to quality journalism, high standards of professional journalism and cared more about that than anything else. They were, in a sense, our buffer with the corporate ownership…They had your back, and the only thing they asked of you is that you shared their value and that you didn’t let them down, that you did the best job you could, that you were a fanatic for accuracy, and that you were committed to investigative reporting.”

 “Every newsroom has a culture,” Joseph continued. “We’re a tabloid, so our culture is going to be radically different than what The Washington Post was once like, for sure…We’re a tabloid with a very tiny staff, and we’re owned by the same company that owns our competitor here in town, The Philadelphia Inquirer. So our culture is basically of the neglected, down-trodden underdog! Feisty! The red-headed step-child—whatever metaphor you’d like to use.”

But being the underdog in a big market proves to be a good motivator in the newsroom, according to Joseph. “We’re all in it together, so there’s no such thing as fighting among ourselves because we can’t afford it. We all have to pull in the same direction. We’re all driven by the need to do the best possible journalism and break the big stories, and do strong investigative stories—and to do it with a third less of the resources that the other paper has.”

It is that sense of being constantly besieged that makes for a united front in the newsroom, Joseph said.

In the day-to-day, it helps, too, to be part of a newsroom where colleagues can share a quip, offer some perspective, and be empathetic about the weight of the job.

“To keep your sanity, you have to have a great sense of humor,” Joseph said. “This is a newsroom that laughs a lot, I’ll tell you that. This newsroom has a lot of fun…That’s very much part of our culture.”

That’s something else that Ben Bradlee got, according to his many protégées and colleagues: News is hard. The job is stressful, the challenges and obstacles often seem monumental. Humor and perspective help right the ship.