How do most newsrooms break in new reporters? "Unfortunately, it can be a lot like the Russians teaching kids to swim," says Brad Remington, news director at KTVI-TV in St. Louis, MO. "You throw them in the water." The result is that far too many of them--or much too long--wind up depending on the desk to stay afloat, doing stories they're assigned rather than generating their own.

It doesn't have to be that way. Newsrooms that value enterprise are finding ways to cultivate it from the start, by helping new hires learn their way around the station and, more importantly, the community. At WZZM-TV in Grand Rapids, MI, new reporters undergo a full week of orientation that includes in-house training with all departments, not just the newsroom. News director Cheryl Grant also assigns each new hire a veteran journalist as a buddy to introduce them to contacts and give them a tour of the town. "If you put some work in up front," she says, "they are better reporters overall."

John Clark, news director of WOWT-TV in Omaha, NE, finds that many young reporters need that kind of help getting up to speed. "They can put together a good package," he says, "but they don't know where to turn to develop the story in the first place."

The sheer size and diversity of many local television markets can make the job of uncovering news stories more difficult. But there are techniques all reporters can use to find "entry points" into their communities. It starts with getting to know people outside of the office, says Hearst-Argyle broadcast news executive Candy Altman. "We all need to stop talking to ourselves," she says. How do you start?

• Get maps of the entire coverage area and explore during downtime.
  
• Study the latest census figures to learn more about the community's make-up.
  
• Discover places where young people, ethnic groups or other subsets of the community gather, and use them as "listening posts" to find story ideas.
  
• Go to public meetings to learn the issues and who's involved in them.

To find good stories, new reporters need to learn how things work in the community. They can start by collecting budgets, histories, organizational charts, annual reports and newsletters from important local agencies, businesses and other groups like civic leagues. How to find them? A starting point could be a bookmark file or Web page of the most useful local Internet sites, including all area newspapers, modeled after the local news resources AssignmentEditor.com has assembled online for several large cities. To show what that could look like, NewsLab created a start page for KOMU-TV in Columbia, MO.

Young journalists, in particular, may not only need help to find information but also to manage it. They'd benefit from more than a quick introduction to the station's computer system. They need to know how and where to store names and numbers, as well as tips for future stories and follow-up ideas. Supplying new hires with computer software or a PDA device, such as a Palm Pilot, pre-loaded with basic contact information could be well worth the initial investment.

News managers committed to encouraging enterprise make enterprise a major factor in hiring. Some ask applicants during the job interview to suggest local story ideas, just to see what they've noticed about the community. Jim Ogle, news director at WKYT-TV in Lexington, KY, says he follows up by asking reporters' references how enterprising they are.

Managers also should make clear what they expect from all new hires. How many story ideas must a reporter offer each week? What counts in performance reviews? John Cardenas, news director at WBNS-TV in Columbus, OH, spells that out early on. "One of the criteria we have in evaluations is the new contacts you've developed." At WOWT in Omaha, assistant news director Mike Plews counts "initiative and motivation" in evaluations, which includes the number of story ideas pitched by each employee, photographers as well as reporters.

"Expectations are set up and explained to each reporter," says Tamara McGregor, until recently the news director at KREM-TV in Spokane, WA. "It's also important to reward people." She sometimes provided gift certificates for dinners or wrote letters of praise to spouses, and she regularly recognized good work in the morning meeting.

The bottom line, says Mike Devlin, news director of KHOU-TV in Houston, TX, is that reporters have to be able to work independently to dig up stories that aren't on the daybook or the scanner. And they need a newsroom that values their independence, rather than expecting them to take orders like good soldiers. Too often, Devlin says, what happens to good soldiers is "they get shot." That's why he believes that reporters should view themselves as entrepreneurs: incisive self-starters who deliver the goods.

To achieve that goal, they have to know where to look-and the sooner, the better. A newsroom that invests a little time early on to help new hires learn their way around will reap rewards more quickly in the form of better and more original stories.

"It will take a reporter a year to really learn about the community," says KTVI's Remington. "I hire smart, aggressive, people. The rest of it you can teach." That teaching should start the moment a new reporter walks in the door.

NewsLab consultant Walter Dean contributed to this report, originally published in 2001.