Newsroom development by staff, for staff

By Naomi Ishisaka

In an era of resource scarcity in newsrooms, the cost and time commitment of conferences and external training can feel daunting. But you might already have the resources you need right under your nose.

Leaning on the skills and knowledge of your team can add new levels of staff development to your newsroom while providing an opportunity to showcase your colleagues’ expertise and build relationships.

Shawna VanNess, the associate managing editor for content strategy, metrics and several teams at New York’s Newsday, said her newsroom did just that.

Newsday, which has about 200 editorial staff, has in recent years launched and evolved a number of staff development initiatives that have garnered significant engagement.

We will explore three of them: reporter roundtables, data office hours and alternative story formats.

Reporter roundtables

A few years ago, Newsday’s editor at the time came up with the idea of monthly roundtables for reporters to learn from one another through casual conversations. He tapped a former longtime reporter to lead the effort and asked colleagues what they would like to learn.

VanNess said it’s important to have a wide range of reporter-driven topics from the broad to the very specific, such as a deep dive into an enterprise project about the Canadian border with New York; an exploration of how to use data to investigate police misconduct; and a session on what it’s like to cover professional baseball.

She said the staff development part was important, but the benefits go beyond that.

“​​I think what’s more important is morale and camaraderie. It’s the rare time where reporters can just be with other reporters,” VanNess said. “The editors, some of us do go, but we’re very intentional about not being an editor in that conversation. This is a program that’s by reporters for reporters.”

Data office hours and alternative story formats

Newsday’s “data office hours” are another way staff help one another grow critical reporting skills. For more than a year, investigative data reporters Arielle Martinez and Anastasia Valeeva have led sessions twice a month for staff who want to improve their skills.

The sessions create a low-barrier way for reporters to ask questions, pose problems and expand their knowledge base. The sessions have led to successful stories, such as a look at persistent summer beach closures and a comparison of Long Island Rail Road commute times for different areas.

Newsday also wanted to think beyond narrative storytelling and have multiple ways to create unexpected moments of “surprise and delight” for readers, VanNess said. In 2021, under the leadership of Associate Managing Editor Bob Shields, the newsroom launched a six-week workshop for all staff designed to help reporters and editors think about how to present their projects differently at the beginning of the reporting process.

Held four times a year, the workshops were a “design boot camp” that leveraged the talents of editors, copy editors, digital designers, print designers, photo experts and video experts. Reporters brought enterprise stories to the workshop, and the group helped think through how the story could be told in an alternative story format.

“After a few rounds of a few reporters presenting their projects, everybody starts to see, ‘Oh, this is how you use the feature grid template. Oh, this is how you use the scrolling story template.’ And it starts to become easier for people to think about that at the onset,” VanNess said.

Newsday evolved its program to more of an office hours approach, where storytelling coaches guide reporters and editors at the beginning of their reporting. VanNess said readers are responding and staff are seeing strong engagement from audiences on the alternative storytelling projects.

“How do we break things down that are more visually pleasing and scannable without completely watering down our journalism?” VanNess said.

VanNess said that for smaller newsrooms, you could identify one story a week with a data element and then find ways to “jazz it up a little bit” without needing to understand web development or HTML.

Projects that resulted from these workshops include:

• Smashing the second color barrier, illustrations and graphs that highlight the lack of Black people in baseball’s top positions
• Asteroid Apophis’ path near Earth in 2029 offers rare lessons in defending planet, which illustrates an asteroid’s predicted path past the planet
• Cap on SALT deductions: Long Islanders saw less of a tax savings, while some paid more, an example of a reporter’s first time sorting data

Tapping into talent you already have is the best way to start working on this, VanNess said.

External training and trainers are great, “but we also have a lot of expertise in the room, and we have a lot of people who are really willing to share their expertise,” VanNess said. “They’re just waiting for an invitation to be asked.”

Naomi Ishisaka is a member of the 2024-25 Table Stakes Alumni Advisory Board. A journalist and photographer, she is the assistant managing editor for diversity and inclusion and the social justice columnist for The Seattle Times.