Train all staffers to be journalists in case of emergency

The always insightful Al Tompkins of Poynter has a terrific suggestion: when you have training sessions for your journalists, the sales people should be right there with them. So should the engineers, marketing staffers, PR, and everyone else in the building. Why? We’re paring stations down to the bones. So when an emergency hits, everyone should know the basics. (Plus we could all stand to know more about each others’ jobs.) Al offers this in his trainings, “And yet few newsrooms take me up on the offer. They just don’t think of sales folks as ever acting in a journalistic role.” But just as journalists must learn about sales, so too must we all have the basics down in journalism. Al points us to a three-part series by trainer Valerie Geller (Part One, Part Two, Part Three) that has some excellent advice on this. In emergencies, I worked robo cams, playback, prompter and once, even – terrifyingly – audio. We need cross training. Not just for emergencies, but for better understanding.