July 06, 2004
Follow the Money – If You Can Find It
My latest newsletter for Tomorrow's Workforce looks at how one newspaper company budgets for training and sketches a broad formula for thinking about a training budget. It starts this way:
"Here’s a familiar scenario: Your newspaper’s top executives say they are committed to training. But the money put aside for it disappears, perhaps spent on something else when a hard financial choice had to be made. At year’s end, the money is gone and the training never happened."Reid Ashe, president and COO of Media General, thinks he has found a way to break budget-but-don’t-spend cycles: He has told the publishers and editors of Media General’s 25 daily newspapers that budgeted training dollars cannot be used for anything else. If they don’t spend the money it will be charged against their bottom lines nonetheless.
"In other words, Media General newspaper execs who don’t train will still feel the financial pain."
Read the rest here.