As news organizations adapt to a changing media landscape, strategic learning is critical for organizations that want to increase their audiences and maintain journalistic quality. News, Improved: How America's Newsrooms Are Learning to Change shows how leadership, goal-setting and staff development improve the culture of the newsroom and the content of the news product—both key drivers of audience appeal. Learn how American newsrooms are becoming more adaptive and creative, fueled by continuous, strategic training.

News, Improved focuses on the lessons learned from $10 million in training and research projects funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, including Tomorrow’s Workforce, a partnership of major news corporations, more than 50 national journalism professional and mid-career teaching organizations, and one of the nation's most prestigious schools of journalism. The four-year project was conceived to show how strategic investments in newsroom training and professional development can improve the appeal and value of quality journalism. It is based at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

McLellan and Porter’s work in newsrooms and their interviews with hundreds of newsroom executives and working journalists found that even in the newsrooms most committed to professional development, training had little impact on the content. It was often opportunistic and not aligned with goals. It was, in short, non-strategic.

News, Improved reports on how news organizations are learning to change by setting clear editorial goals and priorities, developing training at all levels to achieve those goals, and using professional growth as a way to strengthen readership.

Read success stories from newspapers featured in the book!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Success Story
Dothan Eagle Success Story
La Crosse Tribune Success Story
The Herald-Times (Bloomington, Indiana) Success Story

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1. Closing the Leadership Gap

2. Goals: Knowing Just Where You’re Going

3. Newsroom culture: No more whining

4. The well-balanced learning diet

5. Frontline editors: Guardians of the culture

6. Learning to Change: The Business Imperative

7. The Future

“Before you institute one more newsroom change program or schedule one more staff retreat in search of a transformational spark, absorb the lessons of News, Improved. Michele McLellan and Tim Porter give us a deeply reported, practical, up-to-date guide that is essential reading for newsroom leaders charting a new course in unknown territory.”

“Journalists face a daunting set of challenges in the digital age. Newsroom leaders don't have a neat set of blueprints to hand them. Instead, editors have to unlock the potential of their staffs to invent the future. And the potential is there. News, Improved shows how this has happened in newsrooms around the country and how you can make it happen in yours.”

“News, Improved has sweep and authority and big ideas, anchored in excellent, true-ringing specifics and observations from real newsrooms.”

“This is a must read for anyone involved in news, newsgathering, and news management. As news organizations try to come to grips with an elusive audience in a demanding business climate and are surrounded by critics who see the journalistic glass as constantly half-full, this book shows how journalism and journalists can recommit our craft to the best values that make journalism an indispensable agent on behalf of American democracy.”

Michele McLellan has been an editor and manager in newspapers for 25 years, most recently at The Oregonian, in Portland, Oregon, with assignments including politics editor, ombudsman, and special projects editor. She also has taught and spoken about journalism ethics nationally and internationally and is the primary author of The Newspaper Credibility Handbook for the American Society of Newspaper Editors. A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, she has taught journalism at Harvard, Northwestern, and at Royal University in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Tim Porter is an editor and writer with an extensive background in daily newspaper and online journalism. In addition to providing journalism, research, consulting and management services to news and other information-intensive organizations, Porter is the author of First Draft, a popular blog devoted to quality journalism.