NEWSROOM MANAGEMENT

The course aims to provide supervisors with guidelines on staff issues, recruiting, management theory, the marketing environment, legal procedures and performance reviews. As pre-course reading, joiners are asked to spend some time looking at management theory, but the course itself concentrates on practical advice for handling typical problems in a newsroom. This will include performance reviews, budgeting, innovation, delegation, planning and project management, workplace organisation, leadership and information management, health and safety and staff development through coaching and mentoring. Reviews offer participants facilitated discussions to extract learning points from all sessions. [*The course can also be broken down into short modules.]

Skills addressed during the course

Self management, auditing operations for efficiency, recruiting. performance reviews, budgeting, innovation, delegation, planning and project management, workplace organisation, leadership and information management, health and safety, coaching and mentoring, conflict resolution and ethical decision making.

Course Objectives 

After completing the course, participants can expect to be able to:

1. •Explain important issues determining good self and time management
   

2. •Undertake an audit of operations and suggest operational efficiencies
   

3. •Apply resolution principles to make quick ethical decisions
   

4. •Create planning documents for major news events
   

5. •Write job descriptions and undertake recruitment interviews
   

6. •Demonstrate an improvement in performance reviews
   

7. •Prepare an innovative project plan in a team, with a budget
   

8. •Build development plans
   

9. •Delegate work with adequate supervision
   

10. •Brainstorm for innovation
    

11. •Identify ways to improve information flow to staff.
    

Course Outline

On the first day participants, usually mid-level managers of media companies, will be asked to prioritise the 12 broad management units that run through the course to focus on their required learning. The course than assembles trainers, managers, human resources staff and marketing executives to provide an overview of the operating environment and clear, practical, guidelines on how to manage a group of journalists or writers. Participants must regard all discussions on this course as confidential.

Pre-course work

Before attending this course participants will already be practicing journalists operating in a management capacity or about to take on such a position. They should be ready to discuss an ethical dilemma, must have read their own organisation’s code of conduct and completed pre-course reading on management theory.