"NURTURING THE
EXPLAINERS"
How Mentoring Works Inside the IJNR Community
of Fellows
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All journalists who participate as Fellows in one of IJNR's
expedition-style Institutes are automatically eligible
to apply to become protégés in IJNR’s
mentoring program. Applying is voluntary. No fees are
charged. There is no prescribed limit to the number of
participants, nor does IJNR restrict the amount of time
participants may remain active in the program.
Building Baselines —
The IJNR staff develops "baselines" of performance-related
information about each journalist chosen to participate
in the year-round mentoring effort. Baseline information
includes personal interviews, written self-evaluations
and a collection of representative work samples.
Identifying Needs —
Interpreting this information helps the IJNR staff to
assess each journalist's background, work experience,
interviewing abilities, investigative skills and familiarity
with a range of topics and issues. The Fellows themselves
often ask for help in covering specific topics, such
as rural sprawl, water consumption, energy development,
public-lands management, fish biology, logging practices
and farming methods.
Recruiting Mentors —
More than 30 IJNR Fellows currently serve as volunteer
mentors in the program. All are highly accomplished
veterans who express a sincere interest in helping other
journalists to improve. The staff carefully pairs each
mentor with another IJNR Fellow who has been selected
to become a protégé in the program. Each
pair develops its own descriptive goals and plans. Most
pairs communicate frequently by phone and email. IJNR
also encourages face-to-face meetings when practical.
At least twice a year, the pairs are asked to revisit
and update the goals and to assess how much progress
has been made.
Assessing Progress —
In addition, the staff supports the pair by gathering
and assessing examples of coverage produced by the protégés.
These "fresh" work samples are compared to
pre-Institute works. To assess the quality and other
characteristics of each journalist’s coverage,
the team staff applies several descriptive criteria.
These criteria were developed by a team of prominent
journalists and news executives and were subsequently
tested for about three years as part of IJNR’s
assessment of 285 dailies in the North American West:
IJNR Criteria for Assessing
Quality of Coverage
• Do the stories describe and
explain significant issues accurately?
• Does the journalist consistently
provide a range of worthy viewpoints in the stories?
• Does the journalist acknowledge credible evidence
contrary to the story’s main point?
• Are stories on these issues
presented in ways that are clearly significant, relevant
and interesting to the audience?
• Do the stories provide sufficient
context (historic, scientific, economic, political,
legal or cultural) to help audiences reach sound conclusions
and judgments?
• Do stories go beyond routine
events and predictable quotes to reflect thorough explanation
and analysis?
• Do the stories cite relevant historical roots
of current developments, issues and trends?
• Do the stories examine scope, consequences,
results and broader implications?
• Do the stories provide a
useful basis for building public awareness of issues
or trends?
• Do the stories refrain from
superficial or trivial portrayal of complex, serious
topics?
READ ABOUT HOW IJNR APPLIED
THESE CRITERIA IN ITS STUDY OF WESTERN NEWSPAPERS >> |
In American newsrooms, mentoring used
to be a strong tradition. Accomplished, unselfish veterans
willingly coached, critiqued and inspired younger and less
experienced journalists, thereby sustaining from one generation
to the next the essential habits and standards of the craft.
In recent decades, as such coaching and nurturing practices
have waned, the overall quality of American journalism has
declined. So has the quality of work life for most journalists.
Especially since the 1980s, the ever-rising
pressures of ownership consolidation in the news business
have induced a survivalist mode of thinking and behavior in
many newsrooms. Incentives are fewer for veteran journalists
to help the less prepared and less confident ones. The former
view the latter as lesser-paid competitors in a shrinking
workplace. Many owners are increasingly more interested in
cutting costs than in breaking and getting to the bottom of
important stories. The news cycle, now closer to 24 minutes
than 24 hours, feeds and distorts itself with hasty and generally
shallow reports. Many of the craft's veterans feel they cannot
afford to take time away from their own news "output"
to mentor others among the news staff. Many of the inexperienced
feel overwhelmed by the frantic grind.
The decline of mentoring is especially troublesome
for journalists who cover natural resources and the environment.
This beat comes with extra layers of complexity
and context—economic, scientific, legal, technological,
regulatory, political, historical, cultural and ethical. Learning
curves are often longer and steeper. Environment-news issues
themselves have been simmering or smoldering, often for decades
or even centuries, and they are likely to persist for a long
time to come. Perhaps the most daunting factor is the sense
of isolation that environment-beat journalists typically face
in newsrooms.
In response to these workplace conditions, IJNR
has developed a program of structured and sustained mentoring.
These mentoring efforts complement the learning
experiences that journalists gain during the expedition-style
programs that we call Institutes. Having worked with hundreds
of editors and reporters since 1995, IJNR is convinced that
the vast majority of journalists hunger for more knowledge
of the subjects they cover—and for more skills as storytellers.
Rarely is that appetite greater—or more neglected—than
among reporters assigned to cover agriculture, fisheries,
forestry and rural-community development. On such beats as
these, even experienced journalists generally lack sufficient
preparation to cover a broad and increasingly complicated
range of trends and issues.
IJNR aims to expand professional development
and raise standards in coverage.
Better journalism depends on better journalists.
Without frequent, constructive feedback from talented peers,
journalists rarely improve. Retaining good journalists, helping
them continue to grow and preventing their disillusionment
are high priorities for IJNR.
At the same time, higher standards are
indispensable to increasing public awareness, community-level
understanding and informed decision-making.
IJNR's mentoring efforts have demonstrated
that persistent encouragement and nurturing can help journalists
become better informed and more aware, thus making their "voices"
more reliable and trustworthy. IJNR seeks to help reporters
and editors develop their own abilities to shape coverage
that offers deeper context, greater breadth of reputable sources,
and clearer presentation of central ideas.
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