Upcoming TAB Webinars for Newsroom Managers Focus On Efficiency, Newsroom Stress, Staff Retention

posted on 11.07.2022

Three sessions of this fall’s TAB newsroom webinar series are specifically for newsroom leaders seeking to improve the culture and environment of today’s newsrooms.

Other sessions in the series focus on journalism skills for all newsroom staff.

Click here to view and register for TAB’s November and December newsroom webinars featuring Kevin Benz and Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute. 

TAB is offering the free hour-long sessions to newsrooms thanks to stations’ continued support of TAB’s Public Education Partnership Program (PEP) which generates funding for many of TAB’s member services.

Each session lasts 60 minutes.  The sessions start at 11 AM CT in most cases.

Nov. 30 - Covering More...With Less…Smarter
Kevin Benz, a veteran of several Texas newsrooms and former RTDNA chairman will look pragmatically at how to deal with the reality of having to cover more and increase content, while dealing with less staff. This is not a session about how to feel good about smaller staffing and fewer resources. If newsrooms are going to do more with less, they should also be fundamentally changing their news gathering approach and how the newsroom is structured. 

Dec. 6 - Managing Newsroom Stress and Trauma
The stress and trauma affecting today’s journalists comes from all corners and it is taking a heavy toll on newsroom staff. The Poynter Institute’s Al Tompkins, a favorite trainer amongst Texas newsrooms, will talk about self-care for journalists. He will be aided in this session by his wife Sidney Tompkins, a licensed psychotherapist, with decades of experience.

Dec. 8 - Keeping the Keepers
Journalist burnout is leading to retention problems throughout the country. This session is for newsroom managers who are desperate to retain employees at a time when newsrooms are desperate to hire employees because of an extraordinary turnover rate in the last two years. 

In this session, newsroom managers will learn:

• the key motivators for why people stay in a job and why they leave
• new research on key life events that often lead to an employee deciding to leave their job
• how different generations of employees have different reasons for staying or leaving a job
• the one thing that 52 percent of people who left their job last year said might have convinced them to stay (it was not money)

TAB has budgeted time for attendee questions during and at the end of each session. 

The webinars are being recorded and are being made available for later viewing in the Video Archive portion of the Members section of www.tab.org. 

• TAB Members will need to login to view the archive page. 
• Forgot your password? Reset it here.
• Haven’t created a member account? No problem, create one now!  It’s easy and takes just a few moments.

Two past webinars from October and earlier this month led by Kevin Benz have already been uploaded for viewing.  

Covering Polarized Issues, Knowing Your Story - Abortion, Immigration, Politics
Polarizing issues will always be on the major coverage menu. Controversy, misinformation, and politics govern these issues, but covering controversy by itself never informed anyone. How can journalists educate and inform polarized audiences? This session looked at polarized topics such as abortion, immigration and political coverage, and answered that question simply and pragmatically.

Making the Right Call - The Principles of Journalism and How to Use Them
Great journalism requires thoughtful reflection and reasoned news-gathering. After all, audiences expect newsrooms to live up to the highest ideals of fairness and objectivity. Yet competitive speed has become the enemy of journalistic skepticism. Benz used real examples from Texas and elsewhere to get attendees thinking and reflecting more deeply about how they gather news. This session discussed the four principles of journalism as created by the Poynter Institute’s Bob Steele and offered a very simple set of questions to ask in order to hold a newsroom accountable.

Questions? Contact TAB’s Michael Schneider or call (512) 322-9944.
 

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