An effective newsroom leader understands how much creative control and authorship means to journalists.

My grandmother, Francena H. Arnold, was a novelist who once rejected a publisher’s suggested story line, saying, “I could no more write someone else’s story than I could birth someone else’s baby.” Journalists don’t have quite the freedom Grandma did to choose their own stories, but they share her parental and possessive feelings about their work. Good editors respect and nurture this sense of authorship even while they have to provide more direction to their staff’s work than Grandma allowed.

Ask reporters to come up with Digital First beat coverage plans. Some will come up with ideas you wouldn’t have thought to suggest (though you might suggest them to other reporters). Some won’t go far enough and you’ll need to ask them how they plan to use some digital tool or technique they overlooked, such as curation, liveblogging, video, data or social media. Either way, you can work with them to set priorities and plans, prodding where you need to but respecting the desire (and the responsibility) to be the authors of their own work.

You need to continue this respect for authorship in carrying out daily work. Where time permits, identify problems with a story and give it back to the reporter for rewriting rather than rewriting yourself, whether it’s the lead or the whole story that needs rewriting. When you do rewrite and the reporter doesn’t like your version, don’t insist on your approach. Explain clearly what was flawed in the original draft and challenge the writer try to improve it herself.

On a day-to-day basis, it might feel easier to just fix a story yourself. But you will save time in the long run (and develop a better staff) if you expect people to improve their own stories and help them set higher standards. You also will earn their respect as you show respect while upholding high standards.

How have you (or an editor you worked for) showed respect for a journalist’s pride of authorship?

Earlier posts with advice for editors

Ask, don’t tell

Make training a priority

Do what you say you’ll do — by being organized

Lead Digital First meetings

Lead and stimulate discussions of ethics

Stand up for your staff

Stand for accuracy and accountability

Admit your mistakes

Deliver criticism with a challenge

Praise is free but priceless

Disrupt your newsroom culture

Be aware of your example

Listen

How do your daily budgets reflect multi-platform planning needs?

What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better?

Why editors should be active on Twitter

The Buttry version of social media best practices for editors

How the crowd can save your career

Leading your staff into the Twitterverse

Mentors don’t always see their seeds blossom

Upcoming topics

Here are topics I am planning on covering in this series (the order is tentative). What other topics should I cover?

• Face-to-face communication
• Personal life
• The editor’s blog
• Role models
• Time management
• Mobile
• Developing new leaders
• Diversity
• Teamwork
• Hiring
• Firing
• Fun

The posts probably will run daily Monday-Friday for the next few weeks. If you’re another Digital First editor (or a leader or former leader in another organization) and would like to propose a guest post as part of the series, email me at sbuttry (at) digitalfirstmedia (dot) com and we’ll discuss. Sue Burzynski Bullard provided such a post on organizational tools.

I’m not interested in a post of general leadership tips. I’d rather have a post on a particular leadership topic. Feel free to suggest a post that might address a topic I’ve already covered, but from a different perspective. I welcome posts that disagree with my advice. I will invite a few editors I respect to write posts.

Sometimes a new editor inadvertently squelches staff creativity and initiative by telling staff members what they should be doing and how. An editor can communicate priorities and stimulate staff creativity by asking, rather than telling.

Whether you’re asking about general staff performance or specific stories, good questions are effective leadership tools.

If you tell a reporter she needs to crowdsource this story and she’s already planning to do that, the reaction might be dismissive and disrespectful (or convey that she doesn’t think you respect her). If you tell a reporter to crowdsource and she wasn’t planning to, maybe you set off a power tussle unnecessarily. If you ask how she’s going to crowdsource, you are saying crowdsourcing is important to you. But you also show respect that you understand she knows this is a crowdsourcing opportunity (whether that is reinforcement to a reporter heading in the right direction or a prod to the resisting reporter). Whatever the reporter’s crowdsourcing plans, the resulting discussion is likely to be more positive: a briefing on effective crowdsourcing plans or some brainstorming on how crowdsourcing might be helpful.

Don’t drive this principle to extremes. Sometimes you will have to tell your staff what to do (especially if the answers to your questions show the staff member is headed in the wrong direction).

But keep this in mind: When you tell, your staff gets the benefit of only your ideas and creativity. When you ask, you unlock the creativity of your staff.

How have you (or an editor you worked for) used effective questions to guide journalists to creative solutions?

Earlier posts with advice for editors

Make training a priority

Do what you say you’ll do — by being organized

Lead Digital First meetings

Lead and stimulate discussions of ethics

Stand up for your staff

Stand for accuracy and accountability

Admit your mistakes

Deliver criticism with a challenge

Praise is free but priceless

Disrupt your newsroom culture

Be aware of your example

Listen

How do your daily budgets reflect multi-platform planning needs?

What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better?

Why editors should be active on Twitter

The Buttry version of social media best practices for editors

How the crowd can save your career

Leading your staff into the Twitterverse

Mentors don’t always see their seeds blossom

Upcoming topics

Here are topics I am planning on covering in this series (the order is tentative). What other topics should I cover?

• Respecting authorship
• Teamwork
• Face-to-face communication
• Personal life
• Time management
• Mobile
• Developing new leaders
• Diversity
• Hiring
• Firing
• The editor’s blog
• Role models
• Fun

The posts probably will run daily Monday-Friday for the next few weeks. If you’re another Digital First editor (or a leader or former leader in another organization) and would like to propose a guest post as part of the series, email me at sbuttry (at) digitalfirstmedia (dot) com and we’ll discuss. I’m not interested in a post of general leadership tips. I’d rather have a post on a particular leadership topic. Feel free to suggest a post that might address a topic I’ve already covered, but from a different perspective. I welcome posts that disagree with my advice. I will invite a few editors I respect to write posts.

A Digital First editor leads a lot of change in a newsroom. So you need to be sure that your staff receives the training to execute the changes you are leading.

I help with this in my visits to the newsrooms of new editors for Digital First Media, but the need for training continues and the editor should make training part of the newsroom’s culture and routines:

• Join the Digital First Media Journalism Careers Facebook group, and encourage staff members to join, so you and they will know about opportunities for webinars or regional training.
• When staff members master skills you want their colleagues to learn, ask them to lead workshops and/or coach their colleagues in developing those skills.
• Lead some workshops yourself, where you have mastered the skills your staff needs to learn. When the busy editor takes the time to prepare and deliver training, that underscores the importance of that particular skill and of training in general. I made the time to lead workshops for the newsrooms I led in Minot and Cedar Rapids.
• If no one on your staff has a particular skill, invite a colleague from a nearby newsroom to lead a workshop for your staff. Or perhaps someone from your community who is not a journalist might be able to teach a skill that would be helpful. For instance, a local librarian might be able to teach some digital research skills your staff needs.
• Check out the training resources at the Digital Ninja School and pass the appropriate links along to staff members who are trying to develop new skills (or need to start trying).
• Make sure that your staff members working in engagement, data or video belong to the DFM engagement groups on each of those topics. These are great resources for learning from colleagues, either by asking your own questions or just by reading discussions among your colleagues. (These are internal DFM discussion groups, but I encourage developing similar groups among your colleagues if you’re a non-DFM staffer reading this.)
• Give some staff members time to learn new digital tools and then to teach their colleagues. Tools such as Storify, Tout and RebelMouse are fairly easy to use. If you encourage an interested staff member to spend a few hours exploring a tool and to use it in a few upcoming stories, you quickly develop a staff expert who can teach colleagues pretty quickly.
• Seek out other opportunities for your staff to learn from colleagues, such as the NICAR-L or IRE-L email discussion lists and services offered by beat-focused organizations such as the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, Society of Environmental Journalists, Education Writers Association or Religion Newswriters Association.
• Watch for low-cost online or regional training opportunities through News University, the Reynolds Center for Business Journalism, Online News Association, state press associations and journalism organizations.
• In planning your budgets in coming years, advocate for increased money for training, so you can send staff members to such important training opportunities as Poynter seminars, IRE and NICAR conferences and Knight Digital Media Center programs. When staff members return from such seminars, they should lead workshops back in your newsroom for their colleagues to spread the learning.

How have you (or an editor you worked for) provided effective training opportunities for the newsroom staff?

Related reading

Newsroom Training: Where’s the Investment?

Earlier posts with advice for editors

Do what you say you’ll do — by being organized

Lead Digital First meetings

Lead and stimulate discussions of ethics

Stand up for your staff

Stand for accuracy and accountability

Admit your mistakes

Deliver criticism with a challenge

Praise is free but priceless

Disrupt your newsroom culture

Be aware of your example

Listen

How do your daily budgets reflect multi-platform planning needs?

What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better?

Why editors should be active on Twitter

The Buttry version of social media best practices for editors

How the crowd can save your career

Leading your staff into the Twitterverse

Mentors don’t always see their seeds blossom

Upcoming topics

Here are topics I am planning on covering in this series (the order is tentative). What other topics should I cover?

• The power of questions
• Respecting authorship
• Teamwork
• Face-to-face communication
• Personal life
• Time management
• Mobile
• Developing new leaders
• Diversity
• Hiring
• Firing
• The editor’s blog
• Role models
• Fun

The posts probably will run daily Monday-Friday for the next few weeks. If you’re another Digital First editor (or a leader or former leader in another organization) and would like to propose a guest post as part of the series (as Sue Burzynski Bullard did), email me at sbuttry (at) digitalfirstmedia (dot) com and we’ll discuss. I’m not interested in a post of general leadership tips. I’d rather have a post on a particular leadership topic. Feel free to suggest a post that might address a topic I’ve already covered, but from a different perspective. I welcome posts that disagree with my advice. I will invite a few editors I respect to write posts.

Sue Burzynski Bullard

A piece of advice someone once gave me became my rule to live by as an editor: “Always do what you say you’ll do.”

Sounds easy, doesn’t it? But the transition from being responsible only for you to being responsible for others – reporters, copy editors, and photographers – isn’t simple. Suddenly, the demands on your already packed schedule get even crazier. Everyone wants you. Everyone needs you. Right now.

And you want your team to be able to depend on you.

So “do what you say you’ll do,” or to “be where you say you’ll be” means getting organized. And if your idea of organized is smacking Post-it notes all over your computer, you’ll quickly discover you need a better way.

Here are a few digital tools that may help you:

• Use a calendar. I prefer Google calendar because it’s simple to use and it connects with my Gmail account, contacts and other Google apps. Google has a slew of training videos on how to get the most out of your calendar. One of my favorite features is setting up text message alerts for events in my Google calendar. Check out these tips for using Google calendar from BetterCloud.
• Set up a to-do list using Remember the Milk.  It’s a free Web app that allows you to create multiple task lists. Create due dates, and Remember the Milk will send you reminders. Choose how often and which way you’ll get reminders. Organize tasks by using lists, separating personal chores from work.  Or perhaps set up a to-do-list of things you need to do for each of the people you supervise. Access Remember the Milk on your phone and connect it with your Google calendar.
• Can’t give up the Post-it notes? Create a virtual corkboard with NoteApp, formerly corkboard.me. It’s essentially a bulletin board with sticky notes without the paper. Color-code your notes to stay organized. Share them with your team.
• Reading a lot on the Web? Having trouble remembering where you saw that story you want to pass on to a reporter? Frustrated trying to find the Web site again? Social bookmarking sites can save you time and can help you share information with your team. Save and tag (you can use multiple tags) items in either Diigo or Delicious.  Both are a great way to save, find and share resources.  You also can find others with expertise in the area your team is covering and follow those sources if they’re using either site. And best of all, you can access your bookmarks from any device or computer.
• Need to share files, photos or even videos? Create a Dropbox account now. The best part: You can share Dropbox folders with members of your team.  And you can access files from any computer or device. You’ll never have to search through that email inbox you haven’t cleaned out again. Instead of emailing your team, start sharing on Dropbox.  For me, Dropbox is indispensable.

I use all of these digital tools to stay organized.

Here’s one I haven’t tried yet, but a colleague says it’s fun.  You may want to try it if you need a little push to get organized. Carrot is a to-do App with attitude. It rewards you for good behavior. And if you fail to complete tasks or ignore reminders, an angry Carrot doesn’t tolerate laziness. It might be what you need.

Bottom line: The hardest part of becoming an editor is realizing your success depends on many other people. And all of those people are depending on you.  Let’s face it — you don’t have time to be disorganized these days. Use digital tools to stay on track. Do what you say you’ll do – when you said you’d do it.

What tools help you stay organized and do what you said you’d do?

Sue Burzynski Bullard teaches editing, reporting and multimedia classes at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Before joining academia, Sue held a variety of editing positions at The Detroit News, including three years as managing editor.  During her career, she worked as a reporter and editor at newspapers in Michigan and New York. In 2011, Sue wrote “Everybody’s an Editor: Navigating Journalism’s Changing Landscape,” an e-textbook. She’s won numerous awards for teaching and for her journalism. In 2010, she won the Promising Professor Award from the Mass Communication and Society division of AEJMC.  The Society of Professional Journalists, Detroit chapter, gave her a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007.  She serves on the executive committee of the American Copy Editors Society (ACES).  Sue has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Michigan State University and master’s degree in administration from Central Michigan University.

Thanks to Sue for this guest post. If you’d like to propose a guest post as part of the series, email me at sbuttry (at) digitalfirstmedia (dot) com and we’ll discuss. I’m not interested in a post of general leadership tips. I’d rather have a post addressing a particular leadership topic, as Sue did here. Feel free to suggest a post that might address a topic I’ve already covered (or am planning to cover), but from a different perspective. I welcome posts that disagree with my advice.

Earlier posts with advice for editors

Lead Digital First meetings

Lead and stimulate discussions of ethics

Stand up for your staff

Stand for accuracy and accountability

Admit your mistakes

Deliver criticism with a challenge

Praise is free but priceless

Disrupt your newsroom culture

Be aware of your example

Listen

How do your daily budgets reflect multi-platform planning needs?

What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better?

Why editors should be active on Twitter

The Buttry version of social media best practices for editors

How the crowd can save your career

Leading your staff into the Twitterverse

Mentors don’t always see their seeds blossom

Upcoming topics

Here are topics I am planning on covering in this series (the order is tentative). What other topics should I cover?

• Training
• The power of questions
• Respecting authorship
• Teamwork
• Face-to-face communication
• Personal life
• Time management
• Mobile
• Developing new leaders
• Diversity
• Hiring
• Firing
• The editor’s blog
• Role models
• Fun

The posts probably will run daily Monday-Friday for the next few weeks.

Daily news meetings are an important place for editors to emphasize priorities.

If a morning meeting focuses on the next day’s newspaper, that will be the focus of the staff’s energies. A Digital First editor should place the focus, especially in a morning meeting, on plans and results for digital content. Don’t critique the morning paper (or, if you must, critique it briefly at the end of the meeting). Instead, you should discuss what’s resonating this morning with your digital audience: What’s getting strong traffic? What’s generating comments on your site or your Facebook page or on Twitter? Do you have plans (or should you make them) for advancing those stories through the day?

If you have projection capability in your conference room, show the site and/or your Facebook page and/or your analytics page(s) on the screen to aid in the discussions.

Discuss digital coverage plans for the day: What video are you shooting? What stories might you be able to supplement with YouTube videos? What stories provide good crowdsourcing opportunities and how should you pitch them to the community? What are photo gallery opportunities, and are you planning to shoot them (and/or to seek community photos)? What events will you be covering live this day (and the next)? Will you be livetweeting them, liveblogging, livestreaming or some combination? Are you planning a live chat about an event or timely issue (or should you?)? Discuss what you’re promoting (or will promote later in the day) on social media.

The meeting also should reflect that mobile content and audience are growing in importance (more than one-third of Digital First newsrooms get half or more of their digital audience on mobile platforms). Look at your tablet and phone apps during the meeting to see whether the right stories are featured and how your content is displaying. If you can project a laptop or phone screen, that would be great, but holding a device up or passing it around will work. (At a recent meeting of Digital First senior editors, one editor showed that a photo was displaying improperly on his newsroom’s iPad app and quickly messaged back to his newsroom to get it fixed.) Discuss opportunities for engaging with your mobile community.

For the morning meeting, the print product should be an afterthought: Perhaps a brief mention of which stories have page-one potential or of any graphic elements for print that will need attention early in the day.

Two Digital First newsrooms that have an excellent digital focus to their morning meetings are the York Daily Record and Salt Lake Tribune. The Bay Area News Group, which has a morning conference call of editors from multiple newsrooms, has dramatically changed the focus of its morning meetings in the past couple years from print to digital.

If you have a late-afternoon meeting, that can focus appropriately more on print. Most of your day’s digital news traffic and coverage is behind you and the print deadlines are approaching. Go ahead and make your page-one plans. But even here, you need to mix in some digital discussion. If you have some evening events, discuss your live coverage plans. If you have an afternoon or evening iPad edition, discuss which stories will be ready and how they will be played. Facebook use gets a boost in the evening, so you should also plan some evening posts.

Maybe you should overhaul your meeting(s) in other ways. Should you scrap them altogether and communicate through a shared Google doc or gchat and/or smaller conversations with one or a few staff members at a time? Should you invite all staffers into a meeting that’s now just for the editors? Or should you invite staffers from remote bureaus or sister newsrooms to join by conference call or Google Hangout? Should you meet in the middle of the newsroom instead of a conference room?

Should you livestream the meeting or invite the public to attend in person, as the Register Citizen does in Torrington, Conn.? If you do, you might want to tell staff to tone down foul language or edgy sarcasm, if your meetings tend to be foul or sarcastic. And you certainly need to tell staffers to be careful not to mention details that shouldn’t be public, such as confidential sources, juveniles whose names you won’t be publishing and speculation about people who might be charged with crimes.

In some posts in this series, I have discussed examples where my leadership was successful, which can come off as boasting. So I should acknowledge here that I was not successful in significantly changing how we conducted meetings when I was editor at the Cedar Rapids Gazette. I did not want to take over running the meetings, so I mentioned to an editor who led most of the meetings how I would like the meetings to change. I would often (if I attended a meeting) ask some questions about live coverage, video or other digital aspects of our coverage, but the focus of the meetings did not change as strongly as it needed to.

At one point when I engaged the staff in working on several aspects of change, a couple of staff members were going to study our meetings and make some recommendations about how to change them. I moved on from the editor’s role before we made those changes, and I don’t know whether or how they changed their meetings.

I think I directed my energies to important areas and made significant changes. But meetings are an important – if often boring and ridiculed – part of newsroom culture. I did not sufficiently change the strong print focus of our meetings at the Gazette. Five years deeper into the digital age, an editor with print-focused meetings needs to take charge of the meetings and ensure that they reflect and guide your newsroom’s digital focus.

How do your newsroom planning meetings reflect your digital priorities?

This series continues Wednesday with a guest post by University of Nebraska journalism professor Sue Burzynski Bullard.

Related reading

Jill Geisler’s What Great Bosses Know about Managing Meetings

Earlier posts with advice for editors

Lead and stimulate discussions of ethics

Stand up for your staff

Stand for accuracy and accountability

Admit your mistakes

Deliver criticism with a challenge

Praise is free but priceless

Disrupt your newsroom culture

Be aware of your example

Listen

How do your daily budgets reflect multi-platform planning needs?

What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better?

Why editors should be active on Twitter

The Buttry version of social media best practices for editors

How the crowd can save your career

Leading your staff into the Twitterverse

Mentors don’t always see their seeds blossom

Upcoming topics

Here are topics I am planning on covering in this series (the order is tentative). What other topics should I cover?

• Organization
• Training
• The power of questions
• Respecting authorship
• Teamwork
• Face-to-face communication
• Personal life
• Time management
• Mobile
• Developing new leaders
• Diversity
• Hiring
• Firing
• The editor’s blog
• Role models
• Fun

The posts probably will run daily Monday-Friday for the next few weeks, though I got busy yesterday and didn’t post one. If you’re another Digital First editor (or a leader or former leader in another organization) and would like to propose a guest post as part of the series, email me at sbuttry (at) digitalfirstmedia (dot) com and we’ll discuss. I’m not interested in a post of general leadership tips. I’d rather have a post on a particular leadership topic. Feel free to suggest a post that might address a topic I’ve already covered, but from a different perspective. I welcome posts that disagree with my advice. I will invite a few editors I respect to write posts.

Journalism ethics should be a topic of frequent discussions in a Digital First newsroom. I’ve already mentioned the importance of stressing and upholding accuracy in your newsroom. The editor needs to make standards clear to the staff. Even if you have a written ethics policy, your newsroom ethics need to be shaped by frequent discussions that the editor leads, joins, stimulates and guides.

I have frequently criticized newsroom social-media policies for being rooted too often in fear and ignorance. Editors who aren’t using social tools much, if any, dictate rules based on their fears that someone on their staff is going to make bad decisions.

Your staff is going to make better decisions in using social media if they’ve discussed with you (or with their direct editors, or, ideally both) how they should use social media: What’s the appropriate place (if any) for opinion in their social media use; how much they should or should not mix personal and professional social media use. You can hear their what-ifs and respond before something becomes a problem. If you’re still learning social media yourself (and we all are), discussing the ethical issues with staff members more experienced in social media use will advance your education.

Where ethical principles remain unchanged, your staff is still applying those principles in unfamiliar circumstances, so you should lead the discussion of how to apply those principles in day-to-day practice. For instance, your principles regarding confidential sources may not have changed. But you might discuss whether a reporter should be Facebook friends with a confidential source (or should at least discuss with the source whether that’s acceptable). You might discuss what electronic communications might show up on a source’s work computer or cell phone and be something to avoid, unless the source agrees.

To the extent that technology and changes in the news business change journalism ethics, you want to be discussing those changes with your staff regularly, so they understand the values you want to uphold in your newsroom. For instance, you may be rethinking the traditional notion of objectivity, so you should be leading newsroom discussions about when and where it might be appropriate for staff members to express opinions.

One significant way that I think technology has changed ethics is that linking has changed how we can and should attribute. I recommend reading my post on a show-your-work culture and leading such a culture change in your newsroom.

These ethics discussions need to be a mix of spoken and written discussions in staff meetings, smaller conversations and emails to the staff or Google docs shared with the staff. If an important topic comes up in the industry or in your staff, you might want to call an all-hands staff meeting and discuss it in person with as many staff members as possible (and follow up in writing to the full staff, since some people invariably miss even an all-hands meeting). But address the routine daily ethics decisions in your routine daily meetings and in informal daily conversations with staff (following up in writing to the individuals and/or the whole staff as needed).

In addition to providing guidance on the individual ethical questions, regular conversations about ethics in your newsroom underscore your commitment to ethical journalism.

If your newsroom has a serious breach of ethics, confer with your human resources department about how public you can be with the community and the newsroom about the offense and about your standards for staff behavior. You might consider an explicit statement in your employee handbook and/or ethics policy, stating that serious ethical violations such as plagiarism or fabrication will be explained in detail to the community.

Speaking of plagiarism and fabrication, be sure that you and your staff read Telling the Truth and Nothing But, the free ebook produced earlier this year by a committee (including me) representing a broad range of journalism groups. The book has advice for newsrooms and individual journalists on best practices to detect and prevent plagiarism and fabrication (and respond to offenses when they occur). The blog post on linking that I mentioned above comes from my contribution to the book.

As I explained in the post, I consider linking to be an important matter of journalism ethics today: the best form of attribution, an excellent defense against plagiarism and fabrication and a way to provide depth and context.

What have you (or an editor you worked for) done to set high ethical standards for your newsroom?

Related reading

Jill Geisler’s What Great Bosses Know about Ethics Traps

Suggestions for new guiding principles for the journalist

Earlier posts with advice for editors

Stand up for your staff

Stand for accuracy and accountability

Admit your mistakes

Deliver criticism with a challenge

Praise is free but priceless

Disrupt your newsroom culture

Be aware of your example

Listen

How do your daily budgets reflect multi-platform planning needs?

What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better?

Why editors should be active on Twitter

The Buttry version of social media best practices for editors

How the crowd can save your career

Leading your staff into the Twitterverse

Mentors don’t always see their seeds blossom

Upcoming topics

Here are topics I am planning on covering in this series (the order is tentative). What other topics should I cover?

• Meetings
• Training
• The power of questions
• Respecting authorship
• Teamwork
• Face-to-face communication
• Personal life
• Time management
• Mobile
• Developing new leaders
• Diversity
• Hiring
• Firing
• The editor’s blog
• Role models
• Fun

The posts probably will run daily Monday-Friday for the next few weeks. If you’re another Digital First editor (or a leader or former leader in another organization) and would like to propose a guest post as part of the series, email me at sbuttry (at) digitalfirstmedia (dot) com and we’ll discuss. I’m not interested in a post of general leadership tips. I’d rather have a post on a particular leadership topic. Feel free to suggest a post that might address a topic I’ve already covered, but from a different perspective. I welcome posts that disagree with my advice. I will invite a few editors I respect to write posts.

An editor must stand up for your staff.

This is one of an editor’s most important duties (and one you usually should avoid delegating because no one can do it as well as the editor).

Listen earnestly to critics. When your newsroom has made errors you need to correct and apologize. The obligation to stand up for your staff is not more important than your obligation to be accurate and accountable. But when you have not made errors and just have honest disagreements with critics, respectfully stand your ground and stand up for your staff. When news sources and public officials are restricting your staff’s access to records and events, you have to stand up for your staff.

I got a gift from the University of Iowa Athletic Department when I was advocating liveblogging as editor of the Cedar Rapids Gazette. Some staff members responded enthusiastically to my initial call for liveblogging, which was a pretty new technique at the time. Others resisted. Some weren’t sure but gave it a try.

In our first Hawkeye game, we showed our inexperience at liveblogging. We covered the Hawks with two reporters and a columnist, so each had his own liveblog. That left them all competing for attention on our website and gave each of them the pressure of blogging through the whole game and fielding questions and comments from fans. We got good traffic, though. So it was kind of a mixed experience. We quickly recognized the need to have all the staffers working out of one liveblog for the second game, but the chaotic first game hadn’t really energized the sports staff about liveblogging.

At the coach’s press conference the following Tuesday, the Athletic Department passed out copies of the NCAA blogging policy (it has been updated, so the link isn’t exactly what our sportswriters received), which limited posts to five per half (we had posted dozens of times each half). If we continued liveblogging, our journalists could lose their credentials and be expelled from the press box.

Suddenly we had an access fight on our hands. Journalists rally to an access fight. I fired off a letter to the university’s athletic department and the NCAA, challenging their limits on every grounds that I could think of (the First Amendment, the stadium was state property, it was bad business to disrespect a media partner and avid Hawkeye fans that way). I noted that it was clear from the comments and questions of fans on the liveblog that many were watching TV, so the liveblog didn’t interfere with broadcast rights. I even invoked American troops serving abroad, saying Hawkeye fans serving overseas in the military couldn’t watch the games on TV, but they could follow our liveblog. Iowa backed down quickly (the NCAA said its policy applied only to NCAA events) and the liveblogging continued.

Sports departments often feel like Rodney Dangerfield in a newsroom, disrespected as the “toy department.” But when the editor has your back in an access battle, respect becomes mutual.

The sports staff became regular and effective livebloggers. One was ready to defy the limit if it hadn’t been rescinded, getting tossed from the press box if it came to that. We had enthusiastic liveblogging not just for football games but for the state volleyball tournament and into the winter sports season.

It wasn’t just because I’d stood up to the Hawkeyes. The sports staff enjoyed the community’s response to liveblogging and enjoyed doing something new and being ahead of the curve in the news business. But I could see that the access fight and my swift response helped galvanize the staff about liveblogging.

And when I blogged recently about the Gazette CEO’s suggestion (much later) that I had “lost” my staff, I got a nice personal message from a sports staffer, assuring me that I didn’t lose the staff.

How have you (or an editor you worked for) stood up for the staff?

Social media response

Lex Alexander provides this response on Facebook:

Countless times through my 22 years at the News & Record, John Robinson stood behind me and my colleagues on stories that took time, cost money, made lawyers nervous and made subjects furious. When I took him out to lunch after he quit and thanked him for it, he basically said, “Look, I asked y’all to go out and do awful [stuff] sometimes for low pay and in lousy conditions. The least I could do was stand behind you.” And when my dad was dying, and when chronic, severe depression rendered me unable to work to anywhere near my capabilities, he hung right in there with me and so did the editors between him and me, particularly Ann Morris, Mark Sutter and Teresa Bailey Prout. And they could do it because JR set the tone.

Earlier posts with advice for editors

Stand for accuracy and accountability

Admit your mistakes

Deliver criticism with a challenge

Praise is free but priceless

Disrupt your newsroom culture

Be aware of your example

Listen

How do your daily budgets reflect multi-platform planning needs?

What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better?

Why editors should be active on Twitter

The Buttry version of social media best practices for editors

How the crowd can save your career

Leading your staff into the Twitterverse

Mentors don’t always see their seeds blossom

Upcoming topics

Here are topics I am planning on covering in this series (the order is tentative). What other topics should I cover?

• Ethics
• Meetings
• Training
• The power of questions
• Respecting authorship
• Teamwork
• Face-to-face communication
• Personal life
• Time management
• Mobile
• Developing new leaders
• Diversity
• Hiring
• Firing
• The editor’s blog
• Role models
• Fun

The posts probably will run daily Monday-Friday for the next few weeks. If you’re another Digital First editor (or a leader or former leader in another organization) and would like to propose a guest post as part of the series, email me at sbuttry (at) digitalfirstmedia (dot) com and we’ll discuss. I’m not interested in a post of general leadership tips. I’d rather have a post on a particular leadership topic. Feel free to suggest a post that might address a topic I’ve already covered, but from a different perspective. I welcome posts that disagree with my advice. I will invite a few editors I respect to write posts.

The Digital First editor needs to lead the staff in mastering the art of reporting the unfolding story accurately.

Your staff needs to understand that getting-it-first and getting-it-right are not conflicting choices but essential dual priorities. If you don’t have it right, you don’t have it first – you don’t have it at all. But you work to get it right quickly. Your staff needs to work urgently to report news as you verify facts.

Demand verification. Ask frequently, “How do you know that?” Then ask, “How else do you know that?” (I’m not sure which journalist first started stressing the first question, but I first heard the “How else …” question from Rosalie Stemer.)

Much attention lately has been paid to the importance of verifying information from social media. You need to demand verification in all situations: not just information reported in tweets, but information from routine sources and from unnamed sources. You don’t just accept the he-said-she-said story from reporters; you insist that they dig past the conflicting stories and report the truth.

Encourage or require your staff to use an accuracy checklist. Craig Silverman has developed a good checklist and it inspired mine. Maybe you should appoint a staff committee to develop a checklist for your newsroom, paying special attention to breaking and unfolding stories. Maybe you share your draft of a checklist with the staff in a Google doc and invite everyone to edit.

Maybe you designate staff members to lead workshops on using the checklist, verifying information from social media and other accuracy topics.

When you and your staff make errors, be transparent in acknowledging and correcting them. Make sure corrections run in whichever platform the error appeared in.

I think that means checking to see who retweeted an erroneous tweet or a tweet linking to a post or story with a major error and tweeting at those people to ask them to also retweet the correction. Accountability means a posting the correction in comments on reposts where people have shared your post on their Facebook pages. (If you’re developing a large Twitter or Facebook following, that can be time-consuming, but you benefit from the traffic those people steer your way; you should reach out to correct major errors in social media. The work of correcting the error will underscore the importance of accuracy and of getting your facts right in the first place.)

Editors need to discuss errors with the staff members who made them, usually not punitively but prescriptively: Ask what the staff member is going to do to ensure that this error is not repeated (and, if it is, the discussion becomes more stern).

An editor who shows a commitment to accuracy sets an important tone for the newsroom. You will lead many changes in your newsroom, but if the commitment to accuracy changes at all, you must make it stronger.

How have you (or an editor you worked for) underscored the importance of accuracy to your newsroom?

Twitter responses

@stevebuttry Thanks. I needed that. I’m really feeling like the enforcer today

— Wanda Murren (@wmurren) May 8, 2013

I swear you’ve quoted conversations between @petebannan and I. MT @stevebuttry: Stand for accuracy, accountability: stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/adv…

— AndyStettler (@AndyStettler) May 8, 2013

You are, @stevebuttry! If @petebannan and I had a word cloud of our conversations, “how do you know that” would be the largest words.

— AndyStettler (@AndyStettler) May 8, 2013

“If you don’t have it right, you don’t have it first – you don’t have it at all.” MT @stevebuttry #advice4editors goo.gl/jDQMn

— Michelle Karas (@bannereditor) May 8, 2013

Related reading

Craig Silverman’s Regret the Error blog

My list of resources to help with accuracy and verification

Earlier posts with advice for editors

Admit your mistakes

Deliver criticism with a challenge

Praise is free but priceless

Disrupt your newsroom culture

Be aware of your example

Listen

How do your daily budgets reflect multi-platform planning needs?

What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better?

Why editors should be active on Twitter

The Buttry version of social media best practices for editors

How the crowd can save your career

Leading your staff into the Twitterverse

Mentors don’t always see their seeds blossom

Upcoming topics

Here are topics I am planning on covering in this series (the order is tentative). What other topics should I cover?

• Standing up for your staff
• Ethics
• Meetings
• Training
• The power of questions
• Respecting authorship
• Teamwork
• Face-to-face communication
• Personal life
• Time management
• Mobile
• Developing new leaders
• Diversity
• Hiring
• Firing
• The editor’s blog
• Role models
• Fun

The posts probably will run daily Monday-Friday for the next few weeks. If you’re another Digital First editor (or a leader or former leader in another organization) and would like to propose a guest post as part of the series, email me at sbuttry (at) digitalfirstmedia (dot) com and we’ll discuss. I’m not interested in a post of general leadership tips. I’d rather have a post on a particular leadership topic. Feel free to suggest a post that might address a topic I’ve already covered, but from a different perspective. I welcome posts that disagree with my advice. I will invite a few editors I respect to write posts.

You’re not perfect. You know it and your staff knows it. Admitting your own errors (and apologizing for them, if an apology is due) builds credibility with your staff, especially if you’re going to be critical of them.

That workshop on leads that were too long (discussed in the previous post) started with a lead of mine that was too long. I made some fun of my own work (self-deprecating humor is an important management tool), and then turned to staff-written leads and what they needed to do to start writing tighter, better-focused leads.

Few things annoy journalists (who can be tough critics) more than editors who think they’re always right. Admitting an error to the staff underscores that you’re all learning together. If you’re not good at tweeting or editing video, admit that to a staff member who is good and ask for some coaching. Or ask the staff member to lead a workshop (and round up some other staff members who need to work on that skill to join you).

Your staff needs to be learning new skills and tools and new ways of thinking about news and storytelling. While it’s important to provide the training (a topic of a future post), the culture of a learning newsroom is even more important. The editor can lead that culture through humility and by learning along with the staff.

We all know mistakes are part of learning. If you make a mistake and don’t admit it, the staff will be talking both about the error and about your stubbornness and your arrogance. If you admit the mistake to your staff and share the lesson(s) you learned from it, the staff will be talking about the lesson or will be talking positively about your leadership.

Twitter response

Something I aim to do more: Advice for editors: Admit your mistakes | The Buttry Diary buff.ly/16joVDA via @stevebuttry

— Stephen Sidlo (@StephenSidlo) May 9, 2013

Related reading

Jill Geisler’s Would You Get an “A” on the Three C’s of Leadership?

Jill’s What Great Bosses Know about Conquering the 5 Toughest Daily Challenges

Earlier posts with advice for editors

Deliver criticism with a challenge

Praise is free but priceless

Disrupt your newsroom culture

Be aware of your example

Listen

How do your daily budgets reflect multi-platform planning needs?

What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better?

Why editors should be active on Twitter

The Buttry version of social media best practices for editors

How the crowd can save your career

Leading your staff into the Twitterverse

Mentors don’t always see their seeds blossom

Upcoming topics

Here are topics I am planning on covering in this series (the order is tentative). What other topics should I cover?

• Accuracy and accountability
• Standing up for your staff
• Ethics
• Meetings
• Training
• The power of questions
• Respecting authorship
• Teamwork
• Face-to-face communication
• Personal life
• Time management
• Mobile
• Developing new leaders
• Diversity
• Hiring
• The editor’s blog
• Role models
• Fun

The posts probably will run daily Monday-Friday for the next few weeks. If you’re another Digital First editor (or a leader or former leader in another organization) and would like to propose a guest post as part of the series, email me at sbuttry (at) digitalfirstmedia (dot) com and we’ll discuss. I’m not interested in a post of general leadership tips. I’d rather have a post on a particular leadership topic. Feel free to suggest a post that might address a topic I’ve already covered, but from a different perspective. I welcome posts that disagree with my advice. I will invite a few editors I respect to write posts.

Your staff doesn’t always deserve praise. Sometimes you need to identify problems for staff members to address, and you need to do that directly.

Focus your criticism on the action and result and on solutions, not on the person: Instead of saying someone’s a bad writer or can’t write a good lead, show a cumbersome, unfocused lead and talk about some techniques to help the person writer better leads. (If the staff member is aware of the problem, move straight to the instruction and challenge without piling on with the criticism.)

Journalists respond well to challenges. Don’t just tell a reporter that her leads are too long. Challenge her to write a strong lead for the story she’s working on today in fewer than 20 words. She will be able to meet the challenge. She’ll probably see that it’s better than the long lead from yesterday that resulted in the challenge. And your challenge will turn the criticism into a positive experience, not an ass-kicking.

Criticism needs to be clear and direct, delivered face to face (but possibly followed up in writing), with eye contact. But the criticism is not as important as the challenge that accompanies it.

For individual problems, criticism should be handled privately, to avoid embarrassment and minimize defensiveness. But if you have a problem that’s widespread, you need to address it openly.

When I became editor of the Cedar Rapids Gazette in 2008, I noticed quickly that too many stories had leads that were unnecessarily and intolerably long. As much as I believe in the value of praise, I couldn’t solve this problem simply by praising the leads that got to the point quickly and clearly. I needed to address the leads that were too long.

I identified the problem in a message to the staff. I scheduled a workshop on writing leads. In the slides for the workshop, I used several rambling, unfocused leads written by our staff. I thought using staff examples helped show people who probably wouldn’t think I was talking about them that I was talking about them. I didn’t have time to discuss everyone’s long leads individually and discussing them collectively was more efficient. I used enough too-long leads in my slides that I’m fairly sure no one felt singled out. I showed techniques for improving those very leads and getting quickly to the point. And I challenged them to write shorter, better-focused leads.

When you present a challenge to your staff, follow up and let them know how they are doing. After my workshop and message on long leads, a lot of my praise over the next few weeks focused on the best leads of each day. And I also chatted or emailed with a few reporters about leads that were still too long.

The instruction and the praise for strong leads were important parts of our subsequent improvement. But we started improving because I was direct and blunt about the problem and challenged good journalists to work better.

A challenge helps journalists move beyond the sting of criticism.

How has a good editor helped you to better performance by criticizing and challenging you?

Related reading

Jill Geisler’s What Great Bosses Know about the 10 ways to sabotage a tough talk

Jill Geisler’s What Great Bosses Know about Tough Conversations

Earlier posts with advice for editors

Praise is free but priceless

Disrupt your newsroom culture

Be aware of your example

Listen

How do your daily budgets reflect multi-platform planning needs?

What new beats would help newsrooms cover local news better?

Why editors should be active on Twitter

The Buttry version of social media best practices for editors

How the crowd can save your career

Leading your staff into the Twitterverse

Mentors don’t always see their seeds blossom

Upcoming topics

Here are topics I am planning on covering in this series (the order is tentative). What other topics should I cover?

• Humility
• Accuracy and accountability
• Standing up for your staff
• Ethics
• Meetings
• Training
• The power of questions
• Respecting authorship
• Teamwork
• Face-to-face communication
• Personal life
• Time management
• Mobile
• Developing new leaders
• Diversity
• Hiring
• Firing
• The editor’s blog
• Role models
• Fun

The posts probably will run daily Monday-Friday for the next few weeks. If you’re another Digital First editor (or a leader or former leader in another organization) and would like to propose a guest post as part of the series, email me at sbuttry (at) digitalfirstmedia (dot) com and we’ll discuss. I’m not interested in a post of general leadership tips. I’d rather have a post on a particular leadership topic. Feel free to suggest a post that might address a topic I’ve already covered, but from a different perspective. I welcome posts that disagree with my advice. I will invite a few editors I respect to write posts.