The bane of any reporter’s life is returning from an interview and then having to transcribe the recording of it. Text reporters can get away with some shorthand and a few notes, as they probably only need a quote or two. But radio and tv journalists, and those seeking to squeeze a little more out of an interview, are stuck with the painstaking process of going over the recording and either correcting their notes or typing out the transcript afresh. It’s not fun.

Technology has been promising to fix this for a while. There have been products like Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which since the late 1990s has been chipping away at speech recognition, but this required training the software to be familiar with your voice, didn’t work well with other people’s and was, at least for me, a little too error prone to be genuinely useful.

But there are now options.

I’ve been testing a couple — Trint (trint.com) and Descript (descript.com) — which do an excellent job of automatically turning an interview recording into a transcript you can work with. And they’re relatively cheap: expect to pay about $15 for an hour’s worth of audio. It’ll take about five minutes for the transcript to be ready, and then both provide pretty good editors (Descript in app form, Trint in a web app) where you can tidy up the text and fix errors. The underlying audio is mapped to the text, so editing text and moving through the audio is painless. Keystrokes allow you to switch quickly between listening and editing. Descript even lets you edit the audio, so you could prepare an interview for broadcast or podcast.

I would say on the whole you save yourself a couple of hours per hour of audio. For a journalist this means you can the semblance of a transcript to work off within minutes of the interview finishing. If you’re under time pressure that’s a serious time saver.

There are several other apps offering something similar: Otter is an app from AISense that is in essence a voice recorder that automatically transcribes whatever is being recorded. In real time. Temi and Scribie are also worth checking out.

So how does this work? And why now? Well, as with a lot of tech advances it has to do with algorithms, cloud computing and data. The algorithm comes first, because that is the part that says ‘this sound is someone saying hello. So type ‘hello.” In the early days — before cloud computing came along — that algorithm would have to be very efficient: it needed to be good because it had to work on a personal computer, or mobile device.

Cloud computing helped change that, because then the companies trying to do this were not constrained by hardware. In the cloud they could throw as much computing power as they wanted at it. But it doesn’t mean that computers are doing all the work — the algorithms still need something to work from, examples they can learn from. So a lot of the advances have come from a hybrid approach: humans do some of the work and train the computer algorithms to get better.

And now, at least in the case of the ones I have played with, the job has now been handed over to algorithms entirely. (And with each bit that we correct in their app, they learn a little bit more.) These example-driven algorithms have replaced the old classical ones which must be trained precisely. These algorithms teach themselves; you simply give them a bunch of data, and tell them: ‘this is how people have transcribed it, now go away and figure out how to do that.’

This means I have to add a few caveats. This kind of machine translation is not trying to perfectly transcribe each utterance. It is applying what it has learned from previous transcripts, so if those transcripts aren’t great, the results won’t be great. This can be good: Trint, for example, leaves out a lot of the verbal tics we use in speech — ers, ahs, ums — because human transcribers would naturally do that. But it also can mistranscribe whole sentences which make sense, but bear no relation to what the speaker said. So whereas in usual transcriptions you might be scanning for the odd misheard word or mis-spelling, you need to keep an eye out for entirely incorrect phrases. This could be fatal if you end up using a quote in a story!

There’s a bigger caveat too: accents can easily put these services off. Trint can cope with most European languages but in one case it could not handle someone speaking English with a Middle Eastern accent despite their grammar and syntax being excellent. Likewise, when I used Trint’s option of selecting an Australian accent (over a North American or British one, the other options) for the transcription, the Australian interviewee appeared to be talking about crocodiles, tucker, barbies and tinnies, and other Australiana, whereas in reality he talked about nothing of the sort. The training data was used to such terms and must have applied higher probabilities to him using those words than what he actually said.

This means that I would not be confident recommending any of these services to situations where non-European languages are being spoken, but also those when a accent is used. This is largely because of a lack of freely available training data. Academics are working to fix at least some of these problems: I’ve seen recent papers addressing indigenous South African languages, as well as those where speakers switch between languages, such Frisian-Dutch.

Give these apps a chance if you haven’t already. Behind this is a big step into the future where computers can more readily understand what we say, and what we say can easily be transcribed and stored. It has both exciting and scary implications. But for journalism it helps ease a significant bottleneck in getting what people are saying into our stories.

I’ve been a nomad worker for some time. And I’m shocked at how few journalists seem to be prepared for mobile working. So I thought I’d offer a few tips.

If you can afford it, buy your own equipment.

I’ve been buying my own laptop for nearly 30 years, and while it brings pain to my pocket, I’d never dream of relying on my company’s equipment. In the old days it was because they were too slow and cumbersome, but nowadays it’s mainly because of compliance issues: restrictions on what software you can put on your laptop, as well as what the company is allowed to do and view on its hardware. I would rather retain control over how I organise my information and what apps I use.

Buy your own software.

I’m admittedly a bit of a software addict. (I think it’s probably a thing, I haven’t checked.) But there’s a reason for it: we spend most of our day at our computers, so it makes sense to find the software that best helps you. And with journalists, that’s a broad array of tasks: if you’re a freelance, you want to be measuring your word count and timing how long you’re spending on something. If you’re writing a lot then you want an app that looks aesthetically pleasing (I can’t stand Microsoft Word, and hate it when I see journalists writing stories in it, but that’s me). Then there’s how you collect and store information, be it from the net or from interviews. It needs to go somewhere and it needs to be easily retrievable when you want to write. More on this another time.

Get a decent mouse.

There’s a guy in my co-working space that still uses his Macbook touchpad, that rectangle near the keyboard, to move the mouse around. Very few people are adept at this, so it’s painful to watch guys like my co-worker waste hours a day scrambling around. Buy a mouse. Really. They’re cheap — you can even get a bluetooth one for less than $50 these days, so you don’t even need to take up a USB port. I guarantee it will save you an hour a day.

Save your own neck.

Mobile journalism can mean standing up, moving around, but most of the time it means bringing enough equipment with you to be able to work away from the office — a hotel room, a conference centre, or whatever. This is where I see far too many people hunched over a laptop, looking like Scrooge on Boxing Day. The problem with laptops is they weren’t designed for posture. But you can fix that, with a $20 stand. These are light, foldable, and lift the screen up to a height closer to eye level, which is where it should be. You’ll need to bring an external keyboard with you, but they’re cheap and light too, and your chiropractor will thank you.

While you’re at it get a second screen.

Here’s another tip: Laptop screens are too small to store more than what you’re writing on. If all your source mverkkorahaterial is also stored on your computer, then you’ll need a second screen. You likely have dual monitors in the office, so just because you’re on the road, why should you deny yourself that luxury? There are some good cheap monitors that don’t even require a power supply — plug them into your USB port and they’ll draw the power from there. For several years I had a AOC monitor, which was basic but did the job. I recently upgraded to an Asus monitor which is a beauty, and has made me much more productive and the envy of my co-workers — even the guy fiddling around with the touchpad.

A word of warning to Mac users: recent updates to their operating system have broken the drivers necessary to get the most out of these second screens, but there is a workaround that half fixes it. Email me if you need help.

Be safe.

Being mobile with cool equipment does leave you vulnerable to theft, either financially or politically motivated. Don’t take your main laptop with you to places like China. Have a cheap backup laptop with just the bare essentials on it. Always put your laptop in the room safe, and, if you want to be super clever, buy a small external USB drive to store any sensitive data on, and keep that in your pocket. Samsung do some nice, SSD (solid state, and hence smaller, faster) drives, the latest called T3. I attach mine to the laptop with velcro and then remove it and put it in my pocket when I’m heading off to dinner.

Stay connected.

Don’t trust other people’s wifi. Bring your own. I have a wifi modem, still 3G, which does me fine. Buy a local data SIM card and fire it up. Everyone in your team now has internet access — and the bad guys sniffing the free hotel or coffee shop wireless network will be frustrated.

Finally, stay cool.

By far the most popular thing in my mobile toolkit is a USB fan. Most conference venues are either too hot or too cold, and it’s amazing what a $2 fan can do.

Mary Meeker. Photo Credit: Jasveer10 [CC BY-SA 4.0] from Wikimedia Commons

Slide 186 is simple enough: global shipments of smartphones by year, from 2007 until last year. It’s the decade when everything changed, when our computers were replaced by devices many times smaller, and when everything became mobile. The key thing from that chart is that it’s s-shaped, meaning it starts out slow, rises precipitously, before levelling out. In short: We bought no more smartphones in 2017 than we did in 2016. The S-curve was discovered by Richard Foster in 1985 and made famous by Clayton Christensen, who invented the term ‘disruptive innovation.’

The key thing here is that we’re are at that levelling out part. That’s when both Foster and Christensen predict disruptive things happen. Foster called discontinuities, Christensen called it disruption, but it amounts to the same thing: other companies, peddling other technologies, products, innovations or platforms, are poised to steal a march on the incumbents and leave them by the side of the road. But what?

Well. If much of the past decade has been driven by smartphones, and it has, then we’re near the end of the smartphone era. It’s been an interesting ride since 2007/8, but shipments tailed off in 2016, and my interest in what the new Galaxy or iPhone might be able to do tailed off about then too. That means uncertain times, as incumbents search for new technologies, new efficiencies to ward off newcomers, and the newcomers experiment with a disruption that works. I believe the future will have to be beyond smartphones, to the point where we don’t need to interact with them at all and will stop treating them (and fetishising them) as prized objects. That, of course, is some way off. But it will come.

For now though, there are some interesting opportunities, especially for the makers of content.

The first one is this: Apple won the hardware value war, but has probably lost the peace. Consider the following, all taken from Meeker’s data:

• Other operating systems than iOS and Android have disappeared for the first time (slide 6). The platforms are now clear: Android will not be forked and owned by any hardware maker. (When did you last hear of Tizen in a phone?) Nor will any other challenger survive. There is absolutely no point in trying to build a new operating system for the phone. For other devices, maybe.
• Google’s Android has maintained market dominance: three-quarters of all smartphones shipped last year ran Android. You would think that as the average selling price of phones increases, high-end Android devices would succumb to the more flashy iPhones. Why not finally get that iPhone you’ve been dreaming of. But people don’t. Why? It’s probably because Apple phones are still significantly more expensive, meaning that the shift would usually be to one of the older, cheaper, discontinued, sometimes refurbished, models. (A significant chunk of iPhone users are those on older devices.) In status-conscious places like China, that’s not an acceptable switch. Better a new model of a lesser brand, now that those brands are pretty nice looking: think Huawei, Xiaomi, Samsung. Bottom line: as phones go into a replacement cycle, more and more high-end rollers are going to be on Android.

So. What does this mean for media and content producers? I believe it represents an opportunity. As the market for hardware slows — fewer people buying new phones, more people taking longer to replace their old ones — more money is freed up to be spent elsewhere in the ecosystem: on software and services, in-app subscriptions, purchases etc. Apple has traditionally benefited more from this — iOS users spend more in app stores and in-app purchases than Android users (per download a user spends $1.5, as opposed to about 30 cents per downloaded app for Android users, according to my calculation of App Annie data for Q1 2018.) But this gap is narrowing: consumer spend on Google Play grew 25% that quarter, against 20% on the iOS store.In other words: Despite the obvious growing affluence of many Android users, the operating system is still ignored by several key media constituencies — the most obvious of which is podcasts, which are still mostly the domain of iOS users, because Google has been late to make it a core feature of Android. That is changing, offering a window of opportunity. Any effort in focusing on Android is likely to have benefits, because as an OS it clearly isn’t going anywhere, and despite the fragmentation within Android, there’s still huge markets to win over. Don’t ignore the Droid!

This is part of a bigger picture, a larger shift for the main players as markets get saturated. All the big tech players are competing increasingly on the same field. While part of it is what I would call equipment (hardware and software) most of it is going to be over what you use that equipment for. As Ms Meeker points out:

• Amazon is (also) becoming an ad platform, sponsoring products on its websites and apps
• Google is (also) becoming a commerce platform (via Google Home ordering)

You might add to that

• Netflix, Google, Amazon, Apple are all creating content.

Everyone is trying to do everything because they can’t afford not to.

All recognise that the future lies not in hardware, or software, or even platforms, but in stacking the shelves of those platforms. This is not, per se, about e-commerce, but in being the place where people live within which that e-commerce — that buying, subscribing, consuming — takes place. The most obvious example of this is the voice-assistant — Google’s Home or Amazon’s Alexa. These are spies in the house of love: devices that become part of the family, learning your wishes and habits obediently and trying to anticipate them.

It’s artificial intelligence geared towards understanding, anticipating and satisfying your inner selves.

For makers and purveyors of content, the challenge is going to be to understand this shifting playing field. Somehow you need to elbow your way into one of these channels and provide a service that fits their model. Obvious targets would be to ensure you have a ‘skill’ on Alexa’s platform, where users can easily activate your news service over others. But deeper thinking may yield other opportunities — spelling games for kids that leverage your content, etc. I’ll talk more about these opportunities in a future column, and would love to hear your ideas and experiences.

Facts and discourses can be verified across borders, since most information is searchable globally. Data-crunching software can enable a journalist to spot a criminal pattern or abusive commercial practices in minutes. The possibility of classifying and extracting information from massive sets of leaked documents in coordinated global investigative journalism efforts, have made it possible for reporters to provide evidence on  shady dealings on a global scale. Social networks, transparent government practices, public databases, image recognition, mapping, geo-location and open source tools – most of them free – have grown exponentially. They provide an opportunity to any citizen with a computer or a smartphone, special training and good intuition to expose lies behind wars. And free applications and software make it easy for reporters investigating a public interest issue to link a name with a phone in many places of the world, or track criminals’ movements by connecting their usernames and locations.

Of course, journalists still have to do the tedious digging and street reporting, cultivating sources, and clinging on to stories until they make sense. They must have the courage to resist powerful pressures to give up, even when these seem unbearable. But to be a true investigative reporter today; to be able to cope and respond to challenges posed by globalised and sophisticated trends of crime, corruption and environmental depredation, among other evils, it is indispensable to fine-tune the old philosophy with three new practices: be Open, Systematic and Safe.

To be ‘Open’ means to look beyond the borders of your country. While it is true that most people prefer local stories, finding the links to the outside world would probably make them better, as facts can be widely verified and contrasted. Hence, if a reporter finds a corporation polluting a river in her country, she can go to international resources, such as Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project’s (OCCRP) Investigative Dashboard, or to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s Corporate Watch. She may find that this same company is owned by an industrial group with equally poor environmental practices elsewhere.

Sometimes a story is too dangerous or too complex for a reporter to cover it alone. So to be “Open” also means to collaborate, sometimes even with media competitors. Moreover, it implies that investigative reporters need to work with experts of other professions, which is partly what, for instance,  Finance Uncovered and Thompson-Reuters’ Reporting on illicit finance in Africa attempt to do in their cross-border investigations.

To be ‘Systematic’ entails a proficient use of tools and software to scrape data and clean it; to organise and visualise it so that the numbers can tell the story. This is what India Spend does so well to explain, for example, the magnitude of pre-trial detention in India, or what the Philippines Center for Investigative Journalism did to profile this year’s candidates in the general elections. The Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) has, among many other resources for investigative journalists, a complete list of tools to get anyone started on data journalism.

There is another side to practising a systematic investigative journalism. It means to look for information in an efficient way, for example, having at hand a template to continuously request public information and even inviting your readers to use it, like Atlatszo.hu does.  Investigative journalism of this kind can also mean systematically encouraging the public at large to help you complete investigations with data, documents, photos, like the OCCRP does with its OCCRP Leaks. Finally, reporters must be systematic in doing their searches. There are sites that help a reporter to connect a domain with a name; or see social media activity underway in a given place. These and many other tools and resources are explained by Paul Myers in his Research Clinic.

The third condition that an investigative journalist must include in their daily routines is Safety: physical, legal and digital. Watching out for yourself, your data and your sources in the digital environment is mandatory and there are many easy to use tools and tutorials – such as Tactical Tech’s resource-packed website – that can guide journalists. Physical security and legal protection are vitally important habits and below is a list of resources and organizations, which provide security advice and support to journalists.

The search tools, the global reach, and the efficient management of huge databases surely make today’s investigative journalist capable of going wider and deeper when fighting more complex and invisible abuses. Indeed, to take advantage of this potential, they must master new tools and make them part of their everyday journalistic practice. But, beware: for all the ingenuity of new digital tools at our disposal, investigative journalism is still about the story, getting it right, making it fair and uncovering wrongs to the public good that some prefer to keep hidden. And that has not gotten any easier!

This story originally appeared in https://medium.com/@OSFJournalism of the Open Society Foundation’s Program on Independent Journalism and is reprinted with permission.

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This explains why in many countries, digital journalistic enterprises launched when social media was already mature rapidly run ahead of legacy newspapers, even those that made big cash injections into their digital operations. Of course, successful digital media must produce good journalism, but their true secret is creating a conversation around it.  They are open to their public and easily let them know who they are. In one example in Eastern Europe, despite the traditional formality of many East European media, a new digital outlet had no problem sending a video to their audience of the editor sitting in her kitchen apologising saying she was sorry for a boring newsletter they had sent. In Latin America, new digital outlets have also successfully broken with the formal, ceremonial tone so characteristic of serious media there. Reporters tell the stories behind their best stories; introduce themselves with slang, as if to friends; constantly correct their mistakes; and when they have a conflict of interest about an issue, are candid about it. They let their public know that the media is only human.

These journalists offer their audiences a new, more transparent, and freer horizontal culture. However, sometimes, even those passionate journalists forget it takes two to tango. They want to tell their readers a lot about themselves, but do not care to listen.  Recently I saw journalists from Central America and the Middle East marvel at how little they knew about their readers after taking an intensive “read your analytics” course.  They said that knowing their Google stats and monitoring their following on social media makes a big difference to knowing how their stories are received.

But they, along with other media, including the largest US newspapers, have been realizing that tracking graphs and trends is not the same as talking with your public. (“We can count the world’s best-informed and most influential people among our readers”, said the New York Time’s 2014 innovation report. “Yet we haven’t cracked the code for engaging with them in a way that makes our report richer”).

Media in digital era know now they should invite readers to discover the world with them: open doors so that their audience can check the public discourse with them (like many of the 100+ fact-checking outlets around the globe are doing today); know the experts among their readers so that they bring insight into their news; call upon those with a generous heart to help them go through the millions of documents they just got from a source and build a database; ask the furious and the bullies, who write insults under their articles, where does their anger come from and, listen; open a space to let readers decide which reportage they should do; invite first-hand witnesses to document a problem they are investigating… the list of how much they can enrich their journalism is endless.

For those journalists with blinders who believe that engagement with audience is the business of marketers, Monica Guzman in her great guide about audience engagement  published this year with the American Press Institute proves them wrong. It is not about delivering a product, it is about making sure your readers know you respect and value them, she says, “showing them that together, they have important things to teach each other.”

Around the world independent journalism becomes stronger on the shoulders of the communities they serve.  Eldiario in Spain and Mada Masr in Egypt define themselves as a culture, a way of being, a clique, an idea of the society they want to be. And they build this dream together with a community that feels invited to be part of their world, well-treated, partaker, equal, like in any really good conversation. The “talky” public is here to stay and those journalists who fail to see their luck in this new era are likely to fade away.

This story originally appeared in https://medium.com/@OSFJournalism of the Open Society Foundation’s Program on Independent Journalism and is reprinted with permission.

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Ingram explains that some critics say that Sullivan’s retirement signals the death of blogging, while others claim that it actually died a long time ago. BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith has argued that blogging disappeared when people like himself started to use it as a tool to power their own career. “Ben is saying that some bloggers stopped thinking as much about being part of a larger ecosystem — one in which they linked to and sent traffic to other bloggers, and in turn relied on their resources and links — and started thinking about becoming their own independent media entities instead. In effect, they turned inwards, and became more concerned with creating their own content and building up their readership, and turning that into a business.”

Ezra Klein, co-founder of Vox, thinks that the rise of the social web forced blogging to change. The niche, specialist nature of blogs that linked to other blogs, creating community and conversation, has been replaced by the search for virality through Facebook and Twitter.

In Ingram’s opinion, the truth is that blogging hasn’t died; it has changed. In fact, we are now surrounded by it. When it started, blogging was the quickest way to publish your voice, to share your thoughts and listen to what others were saying. Now, with Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook, all the elements that we used to think of as blogging are everywhere, immediately available to us all, easier to use than traditional platforms, and providing far larger audiences.

“Clinging to a specific form like blogging is an anachronism,” he says. What newspapers like the New York Times have done is to get rid of their blogs as separate entities, and incorporate that content into the rest of the paper.

Each section has a collection of posts on the steps publishers need to take to transform their newsrooms into effective digital news gathering and publishing operations, organised in the following way:

The unbolted newsroom: Several posts giving an overview of unbolting issues.

Getting your newsroom started: Carrying out a newsroom assessment to help set priorities.

Cover events and breaking news live: “Live coverage provides depth, immediacy and interactivity for the digital audience. You should always cover breaking stories as they unfold.”

Unbolt enterprise from the Sunday story: Instead of planning enterprise stories (articles that explain the forces shaping events, rather than simple reporting of those events) for the Sunday newspaper, plan them to appear first on digital platforms at the best time to reach your digital audience.

Cover routine daily news as it unfolds: Change the daily routine so reporters produce content throughout the day, not in the evening for the next morning’s newspaper.

Focus on mobile success: Prioritise mobile.

Newsroom meetings: “Daily planning meetings need to focus on digital platforms, rather than the next morning’s newspaper.”

Leading the unbolted newsroom: Include data and interactive specialists in story-planning, hire staff with digital skills, get the right CMS, let people lead, and more.

Editing: There should be fewer editors but more journalists who can edit their own work.

Measuring success: It’s challenging, but there will be a mix of subjective ratings and measurable metrics.

How the Berkshire Eagle is unbolting: A case study of one ‘unbolting Master Plan’.

Working Digital First: Posts on other issues to consider.

The internet is not a deli: “The first misconception newspaper veterans have is the notion that interactive news teams are simply new-fangled print graphics desks.” While there are similarities in their creativity, editors shouldn’t turn to the web team as a support desk once they have finalised the story. Journalist-developers should be included in the assigning process and involved in stories from the start.

Hire new skills: You won’t find people with skills in web design, programming and motion graphics if you advertise positions in the usual journalism job pages/websites. These are the types of skills you’ll need to bring to your newsroom either through staff development or external recruitment.

Herd all the cats: Doing digital news well means bringing together staff with a wide range of skills, often from different departments. In this type of situation, the traditional newsroom chain of command doesn’t work, so you’ll have to foster new ways of collaboration. “Anyone can lead a project, but somebody must lead.”

You need a sandbox: An interactive team needs space to experiment in a way that doesn’t jeopardise the entire system: “Most CMSs are designed to prevent the kind of monkeying around that this new kind of online storytelling requires…If you’re starting a team from scratch, the very first thing you have to do is give it the tools it needs to succeed, and an autonomous development sandbox is at the top of that list.”

Iteration leads to bigger success: Experiment and adapt. Be prepared to fail. Carry out post-mortem reviews for all your projects, note what worked, what didn’t and how you’d fix it next time.

Be the journalist you want others to become: Start building a culture that supports the digital development of your company. Encourage journalists to learn about data analysis and web development – you might be surprised at how many want to be part of the digital future.

Read more: Things I never learned at newspapers about making news on the internet

1) Data will become even more of a strategic resource for media.

2) Better tools will emerge that democratize data skills.

3) News apps will explode as a primary wayMeasuring the impact of data-driven journalism for people to consume data journalism.

4) Being digital first means being data-centric and mobile-friendly.

5) Expect more robojournalism, but know that human relationships and storytelling still matter.

6) More journalists will need to study the social sciences and statistics.

7) There will be higher standards for accuracy and corrections.

8) Competency in security and data protection will become more important.

9) Audiences will demand more transparency on reader data collection and use.

10) Conflicts over public records, data scraping, and ethics will surely arise.

11) Collaborate with libraries and universities as archives, hosts, and educators.

12) Expect data-driven personalization and predictive news in wearable interfaces..

13) More diverse newsrooms will produce better data journalism.

14) Be mindful of data-ism and bad data. Embrace skepticism.

Read more:
The Art and Science of Data-Driven Journalism
Data Journalism Handbook

“A significant portion of your newsroom is hiding from you. They’re not openly resisting the push toward ‘digital first,’ or even disagreeing with it. They simply don’t know how to proactively step out of their comfort zone.” What journalists need are newsroom leaders to engage them one-on-one to share the strategic vision of the company and explain how they fit in and can help deliver the changes that are needed.

Putting digital people in charge won’t bring about effective recruitment, put ongoing learning at the heart of the organisation or help staff embrace change. What will is appointing someone who is “devoted to managing human capital, specialized in journalism and the challenges journalists face today”.

Here are some of the reasons why:

Shrinking newsrooms – as newsroom numbers fall, management need to be able to manage poor performers up or out, while also ensuring that top performers don’t jump ship.

Career counselling – “The best way to bring newsroom staff out of hiding is to engage them in a very personal dialogue about how your organization’s needs and priorities mesh with their own performance and career path.”

Constant change – However much change you’ve led your organisation through, you can be sure there’s more to come. Newsrooms need leaders who can identify and hire the right people and enforce change on staff who are struggling to adapt.
Read more:  Newsrooms need HR specialists, not just technologists, in top leadership