First Draft by Tim Porter

Your Most Important Audience: Your Staff

Here is the beginning of my latest column for Tomorrow's Workforce, focusing on how newsroom newsletters are a easy and effective tool to communicate standards, single out good work, offer ongoing training and focus the entire staff on a newspaper's primary goal: Doing good journalism. It begins:

“The greatest problem in communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.”

– George Bernard Shaw

Any newspaper managers who don’t provide regular feedback and guidance to their staffs with an internal newsletter are ignoring an easy opportunity to address one of the most persistent and bemoaned bugaboos afflicting our newsrooms – lack of communication.

Lamentations abound of the lousy communications skills of people paid to communicate, as do exhortations urging newspaper managers to do a better job or risk losing the hearts and minds of the newsroom to naysayers.

(Read the rest of the column here.)

Posted by Tim Porter at November 28, 2004 04:12 PM