Recruitment and Training of journalists

David Montgomery's memo to staff: 
Recruitment and Training of journalists

The following is an outline proposal that needs to be further refined and debated. However the objective is to professionalise the Content Department of all of our franchise centres.

At the same time we need to maintain flexibility to admit recruits of exceptional creativity or with exceptional relevant experience and from unusual backgrounds.

A loose graduate only recruitment programme is suggested and certainly not necessarily from media studies departments. The key attributes are a high degree of literacy, inquisitive and presentational skills, strong but not necessarily confident personality and a broad general knowledge manifested in part through educational attainment.

It might be regarded that these are some of the accepted traditional requirements but the critical difference is that candidates should have a combination of the skills of multi-platform communication and organisational and management ability. Enabled with a broad and deep general knowledge, particularly in current affairs, this will allow the recruit to fly solo at an early stage. The old-fashioned publishing structure that acted as a hydra-headed nanny will no longer exist.

Training should be predicated with short print and online writing techniques courses but with no attempt to standardise reporting as has been the practice for decades. Instead there will be a tolerance to individual styles and an emphasis on comprehension in line with the culture where people are communicating successfully with each other on their personal devices minute by minute.

Then recruits should understudy a number of content segment senior journalists as well as becoming familiar with the content and commercial direction by following the executives in these areas.

All recruits would immediately develop a live content stream based on their own personal experience or activities provided it is relevant to the local community and then expand their role gradually working up to senior journalist status.

Finally none of this role definition defies the traditional practices of journalists. Each must be able to cover any unfolding situation or production task but these skills are a very small part of the expanded role of the new operating model journalist.

Structure of the Content Department

David Montgomery's memo to Local World staff:

Structure of the Content Department

Like any fully digitised business the content department will be in continual development seeking to enhance and enrich its offering not just in the substance and range of content but also in the user and reader experience. The Content hierarchy - Content Managers and Directors - will work with developers and designers to constantly upgrade the products. This resource will be directed at group level but in specialist areas, for instance farming and tourism in the West Country franchise areas, may be attached to those products.

Depending on the size of the franchise area and the number of products the Content Director and Content Managers will split their time between direction of the day to day products and the dynamic evolution of content to suit the needs of the community and also its businesses and advertisers. In this respect every senior journalist and Content Manager will have access to the audience measurement tool - prototype PANARAMA - to inform the selection and promotion of content.

It is often the case that local Centre MDs and Editors across Local World are embedded in the community through membership and often leadership of business and social bodies and are in prime position to judge the content preference of their constituency.  Clearly this should be mandatory in future and the authority of the publisher will be greatly enhanced by the senior journalists who will extend further the principle of partnership with third party institutions supplying an increasing amount of content.

The local centre Managing Director will preside over both the Content Director and the Commercial Director but all three will have a great deal of creative and commercial overlap and their responsibilities will inevitably merge in a strong business alliance.

However the Content Director will remain very firmly in control of the quality of the products and their audience and readership performance allied to the commercial needs of the business.

Senior journalists will be directed to that end and focused on the richness of their specialist content. However they will be expected to have the technical and digital skills to directly publish content so apart from the design and development function there will be no editorial support unit.

Humdrum tasks will be automated in the new wave of technology.

Role and skills of the Content Manager/Director

David Montgomery's memo to Local World staff:
Role and skills of the Content Manager/Director

There will be just one executive command layer within the modern content department. In the smaller operations there will only be one Content Manager. For the time being this remains a journalistic role but with audience data increasingly driving content exploitation it could in future mean that the content manager comes from a publishing background without having performed as a line journalist.

The Content Manager is the role traditionally occupied by the editor and his or her lieutenants. The Editor remains a prestige title and worthy of being continued if it describes the Editor-in-chief but that individual should be seen by all the company as being the Director of Content for the franchise across all platforms. And that role, like senior journalists, is far removed from tradition. The Content Director will spend little time selecting page leads and instead be concerned with high level decision making - the content strategy, the distinction of the different platform products, the quality and breadth of the content and setting the general tone and style in tune with the community served.

Those areas of taste, legalities, and newspaper style should be absorbed by the rank and file senior journalists as part of their responsibilities rather than being presided over grandly by the man in the glass office.

Once the content management systems have been refined or replaced it will be expected that every Content Director and Content Manager has the skills to single handedly assemble all content within a newspaper format which will be highly templated. On the smaller weekly titles a single individual, Content Manager, will skim largely online published content to create the newspaper in a single session or small number of sessions rather than a number of staff following a laborious and time-consuming schedule spanning many days of the week.

On daily papers only a handful of Content Managers will be office bound and will orchestrate all products across the platforms. Senior journalists will episodically visit offices with free seating to discuss strategic or quality issues rather than to sit and wait for a story briefing. News and content lists will be compiled by the senior journalists online rather than by the traditional processes of news and features editors and the Content Managers will be guided in their decision making and quality control by these. In this respect the senior journalists will be required to keep up with local, national and international content relating to their segment specialisation. For example the environment segment will be overseen by a senior journalist who knows that a storm is coming rather than being told that by the clunky old newsdesk which anyway will not exist. Nor will the farming segment journalist need to be told by the news editor (a defunct title and function) that Government has ordered a badger cull.

The high level functions of Content Managers will be acutely aligned to the commercial operation of the local publisher seeking means to exploit content in platform distinct ways.

Again the Content Managers will direct how the various products on the various platforms are differentiated from one another and complement each other.