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Feature Reporting Improves After Midcareer Training

Each year, hundreds of journalists take part in midcareer trainings intended to improve their understanding of a subject or technique.1 These programs often come at considerable expense to the journalists, to their employers and to the organizations that sponsor the trainings. The presumption is that the trainings help journalists do their jobs better. But do these programs work? That's a challenging question to answer because little systematic research has looked at the effects of these programs on the journalists in them, particularly the effects on the stories that they subsequently produce.This research evaluates the Ochberg Fellowship Program of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. It is an example of a popular format for midcareer training-the in-person, multiday offsite program focused on journalistic topics or practices. It's a relatively expensive way to deliver midcareer training, easily costing several thousand dollars per journalist once expenses for travel, lodging, instruction, overhead and lost labor are figured in. For both executives at news organizations and sponsors of these programs, the "do the benefits justify the costs?" question is reasonable to ask.The findings reported here cannot answer such a broad question definitively, as assessing the cost-benefit ratio of any training would vary across news organizations. This research did, however, examine two closely related questions: Did the stories that the journalists wrote change after they participated in the training, and, if so, how? Or, is the production of news so routinized and constrained that these short, intensive courses offer little hope for altering journalistic practice?Continuing Education For JournalistsJournalists have long valued midcareer training. In fact, many can't get enough of it. A 1990 NRJ article reported on an "explosion of interest" in newsroom training - even as it pointed out that the newspaper industry had historically invested little in employee development.2 In 2002, a national survey of 1,149 journalists found that about 64 percent of them had taken part in some kind of training since becoming a journalist.3 About 77 percent said they wanted more training.Today, universities and professional journalism organizations such as the Poynter Institute and the American Press Institute offer continuing-education programs in various formats-short presentations at conferences or in the workplace, one- or two-day workshops, online courses, "webinars" and extended fellowships.4 A 2006 paper by Becker et al. identified more than 130 midcareer training programs in the United States alone.5 All of these types of trainings require investments of time and money by journalists, by the organizations for which they work and by underwriters of training programs. Unfortunately, as the economic fortunes of news organizations have faded, marshaling resources for those investments often has become more challenging.6Research about the impact of midcareer training programs can be divided loosely into two groups-studies that ask journalists what they think about the value of training and studies that examine the impact of training on journalistic practice, usually as reflected through analyses of media content.A 2002 study by the Council of Presidents of National Journalism Organizations is a good example of the first type of study.7 That study, based on a survey of journalists and news managers, concluded that lack of midcareer training was the most important source of job dissatisfaction for journalists and that insufficient newsroom resources was the key obstacle to more training. The survey also found that journalists and their managers didn't agree about the best format for midcareer training. Journalists preferred offsite trainings, such as the Dart fellowships. News executives strongly favored shorter onsite programs. Cost-in dollars and in employee time-was a key reason.Another common way to evaluate training programs is to ask journalists to reflect on the value of them once they're finished. …