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Staff Training

Daniel Ross-Jones, 3/31/2005, 7:58:23 PM

I'm the incoming EIC of a weekly tabloid at a 2,000 student private school. We have a Communication program but it is very broadcast-oriented and only one journalism course--Intro to Journalism--which is taught as a General Curriculum course during our January interim term.

One of the things that we've been working to create with our newspaper is an effective avenue for students to dig into a working production steeped in the tools of the journalistic trade. A number of students are interested in going into journalism, however I'm looking at what other papers have done to create effective, preferably high-intensity staff training programs.

We do one massive, required staff training ("Bootcamp") in the fall, the first weekend of the school year, and one staff retreat in the spring semester.

What works for your school? What doesn't work? What would you include in a staff manual and what would you include for training breakout sessions?

Daniel Ross-Jones
Production Editor
The Current -- Carthage College
Kenosha, WI
drossjones@carthage.edu

Responses

Michelle Garcia, 4/24/2005, 12:34:01 PM
Hi, I'm the e-in-c at my school and luckily I get to do it 2 years in a row. Usually, we've been pretty lax in letting people come and go as staff writers as they please, but we've realized that this gets very stressful so for next year we're chaing the infrastructure a little.

We're doing a mandatory bootcamp for each staff writer. I am currently constructing the packets for them will have: a code of ethics, grammar, style, tips on writing for each beat (news, Arts, Opinion and Sports) how to approach features, where to get information for stories and ideas, and submission protocol.

I'm also thinking of making sure people sign contracts so that they take writing for our paper seriously... I just don't want to be a scary e-in-c, though so I don't know.

Anyway, then we're going to do writer's critiques for the first four weeks a writer is published (they can start writing for us whenever they want) so they know what they're doing wrong and they know how to improve for the next issue. It's going to be a basic comment card attached to their proof.

I hope that helps. if you have any questions just email me at mgarcia1@oswego.edu. good luck!

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