Once again … Stanford bingo time!

I never realized Storify was born from a Stanford journalism fellowship … I learned this by reading the full Knight Foundation study, “Digital Training Comes of Age,” released today.

Howard Finberg of Poynter does a fine job summing up the survey results here.

Below are my 5 favorite nuggets (many of them echo the highlights from “News, Improved,” written by one of the same authors) … the bolding is mine:

1. “Professional development will play a key role in the transformation of the news landscape. Not all news organizations will survive the transition to the digital age. The ones that make it will be nimble, adaptable. They’ll have learning cultures, where training is built into the daily routine.”

2. “Creating a ‘learning culture’ can be as important as skill training because most traditional news organizations historically are highly change averse and they must become more adaptive and open to change to succeed in the digital world.

3. “In assessing their shift to a more digital focus, the training and fellowship program leaders stressed the need to constantly adapt as well. ‘The most important lesson that we have learned is that it is essential to keep evolving. That means not just adding new things but getting rid of old ones,’ Bettinger said. ‘We now aim to shed 5-10 percent of what we do in any given year, freeing up time and energy to add things.’ ”

4. “Training that is strategic, training that focuses on goals, training that involves entire newsrooms can improve both the content and the culture of news organizations. Good professional development, by its very nature, emphasizes communication and breaks down internal barriers.”

5. In Wichita, editor Sherry Chisenhall says training is a key part of her newsroom reorganization. Every job description has been rewritten to reflect a multiplatform newsroom, where Web and mobile publication come first and print is at the end of the work cycle. The key to the success of her restructuring was a training plan designed ‘to help every person learn, on their work time, how to do the job now
expected of them.’ The newsroom set a goal – every employee gets at least 30 hours of training a year – ‘because what gets measured gets done.’ Chisenhall says it can be done without a large budget by using online services such as Lynda.com (at $2,000 per year for unlimited use), peer training, inexpensive webinars and seeking scholarships for outside training. This past year, she said, 80 percent of the staff met the 30-hour goal. Chisenhall said training is essential to progress. ‘It’s imperative to be more creative about how you define training, and to start with the position that it’s fatal for the newsroom and for people’s individual careers to do without it.’