Every now and then, an editor will call me with a question about changing reporters’ beats.
Sometimes the editor wants to create beats that change what the newsroom is covering. Sometimes the editor is coping with a downsized staff and wants to stop pretending those open beats ever will be filled. Sometimes the editor simply wants to shake things up.
Almost always, the editor asks: Where should we start?
That’s why Lisa McGinley‘s approach to reorganizing beats struck me as, well, logical: She talked to her reporters.
McGinley is assistant managing editor for reporting at The Day in New London, Conn. She says that makes her the city editor, supervising the work of roughly two dozen reporters in a newsroom with a reputation for aggressively covering its turf.
Eight months ago, she says, she and her bosses agreed it was time to shake things up.
“We had been a long time without reshuffling beats per se,” McGinley recalled in a telephone conversation. “We had already created a couple of new topical beats, like social services, and we still wanted to address the structure of the coverage.”
She added, “Some reporters felt stuck in their jobs, others felt stale. But most of the reporting staff had some reason to want to look at themselves in a different light.”
Newsroom editors decided the shuffling would involve the 12 reporters on McGinley’s staff who had been on their beats for more than a year. So she scheduled each of them for a 30-minute, private conversation with two city desk editors. The ground rules were simple: Reporters would have the opportunity to say whatever they wanted about their beats — what they didn’t like, what they’d rather do. “And there was no hesitation to say what they thought,” McGinley said.
That willingness to talk, she said, is likely a by-product of The Day’s system for generating beat notes.
Each week, beat reporters give their immediate editors a proposed agenda for the week, and the two then reach an agreement on what the reporter will cover. “It’s a system from which reporters get self-determination and editors get some control,” McGinley said. “It’s also a system that requires reporters to be experts — and during the weekly back-and-forth, we begin to hear the interests they lean toward.”
For the most part, then, editors going into those private, 30-minute conversations had some idea as to what they might expect from the reporters. But not always.
“We had one reporter who was fluent in Spanish and who had been covering courts for a long time. She told us she would love to cover minority communities,” McGinley recalled. Then, as if following a script, the reporter for casinos and Native American tribes told the editors she was interested in covering courts. Both reporters got what they requested.
Of the 12 reporters in the process, McGinley said, only two wanted things to stay as they were. Two were eager to try something new; the other eight were open to suggestions.
Regardless of the beat they were finally assigned, McGinley said, “reporters were pleased to be part of the process. They knew that what they said in those private conversations played a paramount role in the final decision.”
Now in place for four months, the shuffling has been an overall success, McGinley said. One reporter, having been placed in a beat she requested, ultimately decided she had made a mistake and left the paper. And an experiment that split a topical beat among several reporters has resulted in fragmented coverage; editors are discussing whether to revisit that decision.
While listening to McGinley describe The Day’s experience, I had a flashback. Back at The PhiladelphiaInquirer in the 1980s, I watched as editors gleefully challenged the notion that reporters’ experiences should dictate their career paths.
Consider: Steve Goldstein was tennis writer, then Moscow bureau chief, then Washington correspondent. Fen Montaigne moved from Atlantic City’s casinos to Moscow. Dick Polman wrote features, then covered local politics, then the Phillies and then national politics; Sal Paolantonio covered local politics and then the Eagles. Fawn Vrazo covered Camden, became our national correspondent in Houston and later took on women’s health issues.
From the outside, some might have considered such deckchair shuffling, well, reckless.
“Reckless? I’d say inventive and opportunistic,” said Jim Naughton, retired Poynter president who was executive editor of the Inquirer. Naughton usually played a role in the paper’s most creative assigning.
“Sometimes it was because another editor — usually named [Gene] Roberts — had discovered a latent talent that the rest of us had no idea existed. For instance, Rick Lyman was a brilliant street reporter. When there was a multiple murder in Wilkes Barre on a Saturday soon after Rick joined the Inquirer from Kansas City, he didn’t even wait for an editor to send him or consult a map. He knew it was somewhere north of Philadelphia.
“So he made for the Northeast Extension of the Pennsylvania Turnpike until he saw signs directing him to Wilkes Barre. Later that day, as the desk was hearing back from staff members who had been sent to the scene, they kept hearing, ‘Hey, who is this guy, Lyman? People say he’s already been here.’ And indeed he had.
“Yet when the paper was determined (or at least a guy named Roberts was) to create good capsule summaries of old films for the TV listings, Roberts remembered that Lyman had seen and liked the same movies Roberts had seen and liked. He had Lyman assigned to the task force that was writing the capsules, and Lyman did most of the writing — from memory. They were brilliant capsules. They led to his job as a film critic for the Inquirer and, later, a Hollywood reporter for The New York Times.
“Other times it was part of the belief, again instilled by a guy named Roberts, that you looked for self-starters when you wanted to put people on beats. Beats of all kinds. Geographic, governmental, building, topic. Especially when you were sending someone to the national or foreign staff, you wanted a reporter who would not need or want hand-holding from the desk, who would not wait to be told to jump on a plane and get to the scene of the latest big story, who would almost be visibly wearing a parachute.
“There were a few cases of putting people on beats to give them a new chance, to invigorate someone who was tired at what she or he had been doing, to pursue the Roberts dictum that if we keep trying we’ll figure out what that individual is really good at.”
To be sure, the size of the Inquirer’s staff gave editors there a good deal of flexibility. But staff size does not determine how flexibly editors approach beat assignments.
At The Day, for example, in addition to reassigning the courts reporter to minority communities, McGinley said, editors noted that the town reporter covering Waterford had an aptitude for reading the long, arcane, highly technical postings at the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant and had begun to break stories of importance to engineers across the country. The reporter, McGinley said, seemed a good candidate for covering business and other industrial issues, including electric deregulation — and now the reporter is working on The Day’s business desk.
Another reporter, who had been at the paper less than a year, suddenly was reassigned to the defense beat, covering the region’s submarine base, submarine manufacturer and the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. Just before he took over the beat, he got a tip that led to breaking a national story concerning rape charges against a senior cadet.
So, does The Day’s experience argue for major beat shuffling for all newsrooms?
Not necessarily.
In McGinley’s case, The Day found itself facing an economic slowdown even as it was expanding its coverage area — something McGinley said “was the right thing to do,” despite the challenges it presented.
“We needed a better way to cover everything,” she said.
Many newsrooms face similar situations. But they often find themselves restraining their desire to shuffle due to a concern that moving people out of beats can reduce the newsroom’s expertise. While it’s true that some reporters grow stale in a beat, others deepen their knowledge and the coverage grows richer over time.
So how does an editor decide when — and how much — to shuffle?
Perhaps these questions might help an editor decide how to proceed:
- Is our beat coverage strong — or stale? Are we using our “expertise” to break news, creatively frame issues, tell the stories that no one else is telling? Or are we turning out predictable coverage that relies on too many of the same official sources and too much inside baseball? Is anyone reading what we’re writing?
- Do our beat reporters feel challenged — or stuck? Does our newsroom encourage reporters to be self-starters? Do we invite them to take chances with stories — and with their careers? Do we post beat openings? How open is our system to all applicants, even those with no experience in the beat that is open?
- How is our audience changing? Do our beats get at the stories of how people in our community are living today? Where do we go to determine what the people in our community are doing and thinking? Do we turn to the same old experts and other sources of information? Are we organized to cover all of the people in our community — or just those who understand how to get covered?
- Are we kidding ourselves about our beat structure? Have staff reductions caused us to leave beats open indefinitely? Are editors growing frustrated, trying to cover what they no longer have the resources to cover? Are we making the same decisions about our coverage priorities every day — instead of once and for all?
There are, of course, many other questions that can help frame a newsroom’s discussion about shaking up beats. In the end, a successful beat assignment should pass a few basic tests:
- The new beat produces coverage that breaks news, explains, entertains and only rarely follows the pack.
- The reporter learns something new, and, as a result, becomes a better and more ambitious reporter.
- Readers respond, either by engaging in some form of public dialogue or by otherwise acting upon the information provided by the newspaper.
A tall order? Yes. And McGinley believes a beat’s chances for success depend, in large part, on the mindset of the reporter assigned to it.
“You get the most and the best work from people when they’re enjoying themselves,” she said.
Naughton agrees. Take, for instance, Walter Naedele.
“Roberts was on my case,” Naughton recalled, “about wanting to do a better job of covering all the conventions that came to Philadelphia and spent loads of money. I tried one after another staffer, hoping they might agree with my notion that it would be like having a national assignment without leaving home. I tried job applicant after job applicant. Every single one treated it like a crappy assignment that they wouldn’t want to do if you paid them double.
“And then into my cubicle came Walter Naedele. ‘What if you were to cover conventions?’ I asked. His eyes lit up. ‘You mean,’ he said, ‘I could go and listen to what they’re discussing and write stories that might be about science, or politics or religion or almost anything?’ My heart beat faster. He took the job. His first week happened to coincide with the arrival in Philadelphia of the National Rifle Association. They were, as usual, a big story and Walter was the one who had the smarts to realize he had a national beat based in the Philadelphia Convention Center.”
Take it from McGinley. Take it from Naughton. Take it from Walter Naedele. Before you change your staff members’ beats, talk with your reporters.
You might be surprised at what they say.
