MIAMI, Fla. — Increasing the effectiveness of existing training and boosting the news industry’s investment in professional development are the twin goals of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s $10 million newsroom training initiative, fully funded this month with grants to the remaining launch partners.

The newest grants approved by the foundation’s trustees are:

• Tomorrow’s Workforce: Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism will work with CEOs and other news leaders on a four-year, $1.96 million project to encourage the $100-billion-a-year news industry to invest more money and time in the development of its own people.

   

  The project will develop workforce diagnostics and other measurements to help newsrooms discover what kind of training they need and track the ways they meet those needs.
  
  “Successful professional development experts in many industries, including the news industry, contribute greatly to the financial health and longevity of their companies,” said Tomorrow’s Workforce director Michele McLellan, a former editor at The (Portland) Oregonian, Nieman Fellow in 2001-02 and author of the Newspaper Credibility Handbook for the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE). “We’re going to help them show how they do it.”
   

• The Learning Newsroom: The American Press Institute and ASNE will work with top editors on a four-year, $1 million project to create the concept of a self-training newsroom nationally.

   

  The concept was first described in The Learning Newsroom, a guide to newsroom training produced by ASNE’s Craft Development Committee. A dozen U.S. newspapers will run pilot programs, including The Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, whose editor, Frank Denton, is chairman of the ASNE committee.

  Said Denton: “It’s rethinking how the newsroom operates so it can build in continuous learning.” API vice president Warren Watson says Learning Newsroom concepts will become part of all the institute’s training.
  
  

[editor’s note: Frank Denton left the Wisconsin State Journal in early 2004 and is now editor of Tampa Tribune, which is one of the pilot newsrooms for training.]

Associated Press senior vice president Jonathan Wolman sees regional training as a move toward satisfying “a demand for training that is almost insatiable at every level.”

Said Nunnelley: “NewsTrain is based on the premise that journalists need to be better at what they do. The public expects it. Journalists want it. The training exists to make it happen.”

Two major grants were announced in April. The Poynter Institute will develop News University, a $2.8 million, five-year project to help thousands of individual journalists nationwide find free self-directed training using e-learning techniques. Said director Howard Finberg: “We are building News University not only to help journalists get the training they need and deserve, but also to help journalism organizations provide online education to their membership and beyond.”

And a $2 million, three-year grant to the Committee of Concerned Journalists will reach 4,200 journalists with its “traveling curriculum.” Topics include accuracy; bias; business pressure; meaning of journalistic independence, and conscience and communication in the newsroom. Said Tom Rosenstiel, committee vice chairman: “The curriculum’s goal is to lead to more conscious journalism.”

The newsroom training initiative was announced in April at the ASNE convention. It has been in the planning stage since 2002 when a Knight Foundation study for the Council of National Journalism Organizations, Newsroom Training: Where’s the Investment?, found that 8 in 10 journalists say they need more professional development, and 9 in 10 news executives agree.

Experts estimate the news industry spends .7 percent of payroll on staff training, while the average American company invests 2 percent.

“Lack of training is an artifact of the newsroom culture,” said Eric Newton, Knight Foundation director of journalism initiatives. “Newsrooms are filled with people who are paid to find out things. So, historically, there’s been a feeling in many newsrooms that journalists don’t need to be trained because they can just find out whatever they need to know.”

But that’s changing as a new generation of news leaders tries to manage more professional coverage of a more complex world. The Knight research showed that journalism training has increased over the past decade. An estimated one in 10 journalists received regular training a decade ago; now, the number is closer to three in 10.

Successful experiments by organizations like the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association, which provided training to 7,000 employees in a whirlwind year of weekend seminars, are also proving hopeful. In early 2003, Knight partnered with SNPA to continue the traveling program for four years while the association raises a $10 million endowment to pay for it permanently.

After Newsroom Training: Where’s the Investment? was published, a coalition of professional journalism groups said a “call to arms” was in order to encourage greater investment in training and education of journalists. Northwestern got the nod as the site to coordinate that call.

“Newsrooms may or may not get bigger as the economy recovers,” McLellan said. “But no matter what, they will have to get smarter.”

Assisting in the effort are Knight Foundation’s existing training and education partners, which reach an estimated 12,000 journalists annually. They include programs at universities such as Michigan, Maryland, Southern California, California-Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard and MIT; and organizations such as Investigative Reporters and Editors and the Robert C. Maynard Institute of Journalism Education.

At their September meeting, Knight Foundation trustees approved a $2.42 million grant to expand the reach of one of its most important existing programs, the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism at the University of Maryland. The center trains journalists to cover complex subjects. Since 1988, it has offered short, intense seminars to more than 1,700 journalists from 400 news organizations. Earlier this year, the foundation approved a $1.85 million expansion of the Western Knight Center, a similar program now in its fourth year and run by California-Berkeley and USC.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation promotes excellence in journalism worldwide and invests in the vitality of 26 U.S. communities. Knight Foundation has given more than $200 million in journalism grants in the past half century. To see active grants, go to www.knightfdn.org.