Newsrooms are often fueled by passion, purpose, and plenty of burnout. For many journalists, the thrill of chasing a story is tempered by long hours, low pay, and a pressure-cooker environment.

It doesn’t have to be this way. News leaders have a responsibility for building a healthier newsroom culture that enables employees to thrive and managers to retain talent.

Jennifer Mizgata is a consultant and coach who specialises in improving work culture in newsrooms. She recently launched Building News Culture, a free email course for media leaders that offers templates to help build news culture and features a detailed look into three case studies.

We spoke with Mizgata about what it takes to build a better newsroom culture for both new and established media organisations. Here’s a roundup of seven tips based on our conversation.

1. Start building newsroom culture early – but better late than never

For new media organisations, newsroom culture will emerge whether you build it consciously or not. It’s not a good idea to postpone investing in a healthy work culture.

“I think the number one [mistake] that people make is that they think that you don’t have to pay attention to work culture, that you need to focus on your editorial first, and that once you are finished working on your editorial process, that then it becomes the time to work on work culture”, Mizgata says.

At the same time, catching up later is better than giving up. “I don’t think that any organisation is a lost cause, whether you’re established or whether you’re a new organisation who’s gotten really busy starting things up”, Mizgata notes.

2. When building a new organisation, provide structure and guidance on how people should work together

“When you’re really small, it’s not just about how do you set up your project management system, but it’s also about how do you create a culture where [employees] feel like it’s okay for them to ask about how to do things, where it’s okay to get feedback, and where people know where to go [to find a response to their question], so they don’t have to distract others when they’re busy with something else”, Mizgata says.

3. Be conscious of communicating organisational values

Mizgata notes that often founders have a strong idea of their newsroom values but don’t put enough time into letting other people know what those are. “As you grow the team, you move from 3 people to 10 people to 25 people. Employee 25 should know what the values are and what the mission is that guides that organisation”.

Communicating the values externally, to the communities the newsroom serves is also important but often overlooked by media leaders. In the course she offers the example of Arizona Luminaria, a local newsroom in the US that communicated its values to the team and shared them publicly.

Defector Media, which is organised as a worker-owned co-op, is another good example of transparency. Mizgata says that the organisation “has put transparency at the forefront as they have built a new media business. I love how their annual reports give a window into how they work and how they have built culture”.

4. Avoid leadership bottlenecks by normalising handing off responsibilities

Especially in smaller newsrooms, leaders might become a bottleneck because they hold onto too many responsibilities. Mizgata advises normalising the practice of handing off tasks and decisions.

Instead of the editor-in-chief being the only one who can sign off on story ideas, empower section editors to make those calls. Or, create clear processes for things like requesting time off or pitching projects, so team members don’t have to wait on a single leader’s approval.

5. For distributed teams, be mindful of communicating availability and work preferences

“For distributed teams, it is more important than ever to focus on being transparent about the work that they’re doing and their availability”, Mizgata says. “It especially matters for the organisations that are more flexible with start and end times, especially globally distributed ones… Just because somebody is on GMT time, you can’t assume that they’re working from 9:00 to 5:00 GMT.”

“I’m a big fan of team norming. At the beginning of projects, I like to check in around what people’s communication styles are, how they would prefer to get information. Do you want things in an email? Do you want them in a Slack message? Is it better for you to have a quick 10-minute phone call if we need to work through something difficult? There are these things that we can do all the time to be mindful. I can set my ‘out of office’ status when I’m not there. I can use an emoji in Slack when I’m in a meeting. But part of it is also realising there are times to be intentional with the people that you’re working with and to just do a quick check-in to make sure that you keep everything moving smoothly”.

6. For established organisations, use inflection points to make changes

Introducing change to established processes is hard and often faces internal resistance. Mizgata’s advice is to think about what inflection points might make changing processes more natural.

“A good example of that is when you’re kicking off a project, when you’re hiring somebody new, when you have strategy meetings where people ask you for your feedback around an annual budget or what are your goals for next year.”

7. Start with small actions and experiments

News leaders can feel overwhelmed and lack time for concerted culture work. It’s better to start small. “There’s little things that you can try that overall impact the culture. If we think about it feeling intimidating or you don’t know where to start, part of it is just getting started”.

This could be something as minor as asking at the beginning of every meeting how people are showing up today, or building in 10 minutes for feedback at the end of a standing meeting, Mizgata says.

Source of the cover photo: generated by ChatGPT, DALL·E

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