Newsroom skills and essential training

Advice from head of operations at the Financial Times’ Lisa MacLeod on changing newsroom culture at the 13th International Newsroom Summit, from 10 ideas from the FT for digital change in newsrooms – journalism.co.uk, a few choice points and quotes:

‘Training 101’

Skills such as “basic web production, tagging, hyperlinks [and] understanding media law that applies to the internet” are all important areas that may seem like a given for young journalists in 2014, she said, but are areas in which an organisation needs to be responsible for training its staff.

all newsrooms and journalists should understand how, why and when their audiences read stories.

‘Decoding code’

Coding lets staff “take journalism and turn it into something functional on the web that is easy to use”, she explained, and is something all journalists should at least have a passing knowledge of.

‘Creative collaboration’

Different departments and teams are regularly invited to work together to come up with new ideas, she said.

‘Communicating and educating’

The FT has an in-house editorial blog, where journalists are invited to share ideas from inside the newsroom but also anything they spot from competitors that may be of value, said MacLeod.