Published: November 11, 1999
Last Updated: January 26, 2000
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Hiring issues

Newspapers of all sizes have complained about the difficulty in filling vacancies. Many of the hires lack certain basic skills or experiences. So more and more editors are frantically looking for ways to provide the necessary training.

Training has always been an important issue but one that tends to get chopped at the first sign of budget pressure. It doesn’t have to be that way.

The Small Newspapers Committee has been soliciting low-cost training ideas from newspapers of all sizes. These ideas have ranged from ways to improve interviewing skills to ways to do writing critiques. The thing they all have in common is that they don’t require a lot of money. The added bonus is that most of them don’t require a lot of time or travel.

The following offers just a taste of what editors have to offer:

• Set up a telephone conference call on a speaker phone. The out-of-town expert can converse with as many people as you can fit in the room for the price of a long-distance phone call.
• Invite journalism professors to spend some time during the summer or their seasonal breaks to offer their thoughts on various areas.
• Trade speakers with other papers in the area. You send them a reporter who is known to have good interviewing skills and they send you a copy editor who is great at teaching headline writing.
• Set up a bus tour of your area to familiarize your staff with the history and different neighborhoods.
• Find out when authors will be doing book signings and invite them to spend some time with your staff and discuss writing techniques.
• Identify people in your community who do interviewing as part of their jobs — police detective, psychologist, personnel manager — and ask them to share their tips.