ESSAY
Connecting the Project Team to
the Newsroom — and the News

BY AMANDA BENNETT

Stand-alone project teams have played a special role in newsrooms. Often isolated from the rest of the staff, they are given the time and space to make a difference, and sometimes they do. But just as often they unload an obscure and nearly unreadable 200-inch blob that practically screams “Don’t read me.” We can do better.

Still, we don’t need to abandon project teams. We just need to bring them out of their isolation. We can use them better. A well-thought-out team can deliver the barnburners that our psyches crave and our readers demand. It can energize, motivate, and drive the culture of a newsroom.

How? By encouraging project reporters to pair up with beat reporters around the newsroom. By pouring the newsroom’s best resources into strong projects that grow organically out of the news.

The philosophy is simple: the best projects don’t come out of editors’ heads. They grow from reporting. The best reporting is — or should be — done on beats. Many beat reporters would love to do projects, but don’t yet have the necessary critical skills to carry them out. So the trick is to marry the two — the projects team and the rest of the newsroom. (And to do that without worsening the traditional hostilities — jealousies, turf guarding, story-poaching, and defensiveness — that often separate the project elite from the working stiffs). I see three critical steps in this process.

1. Select for cooperation:
At the heart of great projects are great project reporters and editors. You can hire them from the outside, choose them from your stars, or grow your own. But they all need two attributes. One is top journalistic skill. They should be mad-dog reporters, good writers, and wise analysts.

But they also need something less obvious — a cooperative spirit. They need to have enough confidence to work alongside someone less experienced. They have to be willing to teach and lead as well as report and write. Sometimes they have to be willing to take the second byline — or no byline at all.

I’ve seen the system work wonderfully well at The Oregonian, where editor Sandra Rowe insisted that the great, prize-winning reporters she hired also be generous human beings. For example, one senior Oregonian project reporter walked every step of the way alongside two very young bureau reporters. Together they produced an excellent investigative piece on nationwide cell-phone tower interference with police and fire communications (see Laurels, cjr, March/April). The paper got a strong story it wouldn’t otherwise have been able to write. The two reporters learned tons about setting standards of proof and about assembling documents to meet those standards. The senior reporter took no byline. He didn’t need one. He was getting plenty of attention himself, including a Pulitzer, working on other stories.

2. Break down barriers:
You may have high-skill project reporters with hearts of gold, but your assigning editors may not let any of the beat reporters near them. Why? The editors may fear that the project reporters will steal their ideas, meddle in their work, or, worse, that a story idea mentioned prematurely will turn into a premature assignment, with a deadline to match.

To solve that problem you have to make, and keep, a promise: the beat reporter owns his or her story idea and has the right to choose what to do with it.

Of course, with ownership comes responsibility. Whoever owns the story on the beat actually has to do it; it can’t vanish into a to-do list. Yet if the beat reporter needs more help, he or she can readily get it from the project team. This project-team person will actually be a partner, not a master.

3. Redefine Projects:
How many projects across the country have been launched in editors’ offices with the phrase “Let’s take a look at . . .” — and ended with a dud of a five-day series? And how many projects go in the paper — even when they reveal nothing new or obvious — because too much time has been spent on them to do otherwise?

The truth about great projects is that all they are is great enterprise carried to a logical conclusion. The best ones arise when someone finds a string on a beat and starts pulling to see where it leads. So you get lots of good projects if you are pulling lots of good strings. If it turns out the string is connected to a very big fish, then we can throw all the resources at it that we need to reel it in.
What do you get from all this?

• You create the kind of newsroom cooperation that we all need now in order to succeed with fewer resources;

• You give invaluable on-the-job training to reporters and editors;

• You get projects the organic way — from beats — which makes it more likely they’re grounded in the real world;

• And you honor your most valuable reporters by asking them to train the next generation — the ones who will be doing projects long after we’re all gone.

---

Amanda Bennett, former managing editor/enterprise at The Oregonian, is editor of the Lexington Herald-Leader.