From 2004: Take charge of your own growth

This was the first post of my Training Tracks blog from the archive of No Train, No Gain, originally published May 25, 2004: Good reporters don’t take “no” for an answer when we’re pursuing a story. If a source turns us down for a key interview, we marshal our arguments and make another try. If [...]

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Bill Dunphy has the right approach: A columnist should be a Witness

Bill Dunphy wants my dream job. Bill wants to be a columnist. I have written hundreds of columns, but I’ve never been a columnist. In my 30-plus years in the newspaper business, I wrote columns about sports, religion, entertainment and agri-business. When I was the editor, I wrote a weekly column that might address something [...]

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My drive home last night: 3 miles per hour for nearly 9 hours

You may have seen on the news that Washington had some snow yesterday. I spent eight hours and 40 minutes driving in it. I wrote about it for TBD.

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Updated Q and A with Roy Peter Clark about Writing Tools

I’ve been updating old posts from my Training Tracks blog here, trying to resurrect my contributions to the No Train, No Gain archives. Usually I provide a brief update at the end. This post, however, was about Roy Peter Clark reaching the halfway point of his series, “Writer’s Toolbox.” Since that series became a book [...]

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From 2004: Trust and responsibility

This is another Training Tracks blog post from the archive of No Train, No Gain, originally published June 21, 2004: An intern asked a couple questions that wouldn’t even occur to a veteran in our newsroom: She was covering an event about three or four hours away and wondered if it would be OK to [...]

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From 2004: How do you learn from disasters?

This is another Training Tracks blog post from the archive of No Train, No Gain, originally published Aug. 23, 2004: After Charley swept through Florida, a colleague there wrote asking if I had a workshop on covering a hurricane. Working in Omaha now and having spent my career in the Midwest, I responded that I [...]

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From 2004: Don’t limit training to your strengths

This is another Training Tracks blog post from the archive of No Train, No Gain, originally published Sept. 6, 2004: I started out in training by playing to my strengths. I had spent most of my career as an assigning editor, a department head, top editor and reporter. So my early workshops taught reporting, writing [...]

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From 2004: Trainer, teach thyself

This is another Training Tracks blog post from the archive of No Train, No Gain, originally published Oct. 25, 2004: My initial reaction when an editor asked me to adapt my “Becoming a Storyteller” workshop to stress stories under 12 inches was cynicism. I thought (and still think) that newspapers risk shooting themselves into the [...]

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From 2004: Commitment, not size, limits training

This is another Training Tracks blog post from the archive of No Train, No Gain, originally published Nov. 11, 2004: I have long believed that a newspaper’s training program depends more on its commitment and ambition than on its resources. Peter Haggert and Phil Andrews are demonstrating that at the Telegraph-Journal, based in Saint John, [...]

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From 2005: Ideas on stimulating workshop participation

This is another blog post from the archives of No Train, No Gain, originally posted Jan. 14, 2005. I presented a workshop this week that illustrates some lessons I have learned about how participation can be more important than content in training. From the first, the content was strong in my workshop on generating story [...]

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From 2005: Calculating the return on training investment

This is another post from the archive of my Training Tracks blog on No Train, No Gain, originally posted Feb. 16, 2005, with my updates in boldface. I did not try to track down all the people to provide updates, and did not interrupt the flow to provide most updates about individuals. Few of the [...]

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From 2005: A humbling, exciting introduction to e-learning

As I noted earlier today, Bill Bradley helped me find archives of No Train, No Gain at the Internet Archive. So over the next few weeks, I will be posting my old contributions to NTNG, so I’ll have them in the archive here. I will try to place each piece in context, but won’t take [...]

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