When I was a news photographer I carried a lot of gear in the back of my car. Perhaps the most important thing – and most seldom used – was a small blue duffel bag that I called my “go-kit.”

Inside the go-kit were the essentials for an unplanned overnight stay, just in case. A change of clothes, basic toiletries, a bottle of water, some food and about 50 bucks in cash. After September 11th, I thought about adding a gas mask, and when I worked in Baltimore I carried an old (and dangerously outdated) bullet-proof vest. Those last two items were ones that I, thankfully, never needed.

Tuesday’s earthquake in Mineral, Va., was a big surprise for anyone on the East Coast. While many news operations were simultaneously preparing for likely hurricane coverage this weekend and monitoring the situation in Libya, the tremor below their feet literally shook their day’s coverage.

While it was a relatively minor seismic event, it rightfully was a major news story. The public needed to know why the ground shook, that they were indeed not the only ones to feel it, and that the region’s infrastructure was being monitored for damage.

For news managers, this should serve as a dry-run for their major incident planning and operation. How is your organizational “go-kit” holding up?

Here are some thoughts to get started:

• Is there a standard operating procedure in place for news employees in case of a major event? Should staffers call in to see if their services are needed, or standby to hear from you?
• What contingency plans should the crews follow in case cell phone service is tied up and calls can’t get through? How will they communicate with you, with sources, with each other?
• Are all news staffers capable of gathering news content that is presentable? Have they been given basic training in gathering and sending visuals, stills, or sound with smartphones?
• Are all company-owned smartphones and news gathering equipment in good, working order? Do batteries need to be replaced, or phones upgraded? A small investment in upgrading equipment can bring a big difference in newsgathering.
• Do you have a staffer that can be assigned to receiving and vetting a large volume of audience-generated content? Is this staffer also putting station information out via text messages, social media etc? Are they using social media to research stories, such as searching tweets to find story angles?
• Is your management tree organized, in case the news director is out of reach when major coverage decisions need to be made?
• Do you have a good working relationship with newsrooms in other parts of the region, in case you need to share field production services, such as satellite trucks?
• If you had to evacuate your newsroom, where would you go? How would you put out a product?

Working in news means working in an environment that is always unpredictable.  The unexpected is our commodity, and we need to be prepared to serve our audience with information and context as quickly as possible. Taking time now to assess the response to this dress rehearsal will make your organization that much better prepared for when the go-kit needs to be opened.

[Editor's note: Stan Heist teaches journalism at the University of Maryland. He is a former NPPA national TV news photographer of the year. For more on disaster planning, check the disaster and crisis coverage handbook Deborah Potter co-wrote for ICFJ and these earlier coverage tips and advice on how to develop an emergency plan.]

KING’s Mark Mrozinski just arrived from WAVY, where he was runner-up for photographer of the year. Jeff Christian, another relative newcomer to Seattle, was hired from KCCI. KING’s news director, Mark Ginther, used to run KCCI’s competition, WHO-TV, which won two Station of the Year titles under his leadership.

Something else worth noting: All three of the stations had a clear goal–to become known for great visual storytelling, Jensen writes. And all are repeat winners of the station of the year award.

At WAVY, chief photographer Jeff Myers persuaded the news director to pay for NPPA memberships for the entire photojournalism staff. Then he enlisted the staff in judging regional contests. “We started seeing other people’s work and started throwing ideas around,” Myers says. Three years ago, the station submitted its first SOY entry. A year later, they won it. And now they’ve done it two years in a row.

KCCI won its third title in five years. Here’s the station’s 2011 entry:

KING, on the other hand, hadn’t won in years. In almost 30 years, to be exact. But after Ginther took over a little more than three years ago, Jensen writes, photojournalism became valued again. A pendulum that had swung away from storytelling when high story count was king at KING has now swung all the way back.

General manager Pat Costello, himself a former photojournalist, says KING’s recent success has a lot to do with how the consumption of news has changed.

How do you cover news when you know that everybody at 5:00 has seen pretty much what you’re going to tell them? How do we give them something of value? What you do is you make them feel it.

In the end, that may be the most encouraging secret of all.

All stations have about the same equipment and physical resources. What makes one station different from the rest? The people working there. Chemistry among the team is important in this business. Dealing with people under pressure with major time constraints is sometimes difficult. It’s amazing how different people can become once the pressure is on. How you handle these professionals will go a long way between being adequate and being the best.

How will you bring out the best in your people?

It’s your job as an assignment editor to put your people in the best possible position to be successful in what they are doing. You do this by quickly evaluating situations, solving problems and providing the best information possible in a timely fashion.

Dealing with field crews

You’ll get the most out of your human resources by treating them respectfully.

I had a photographer named Chris Jolly who left a station I was working at for the bright lights of L.A. A few months after he left he sent me a hand written letter thanking me, not for what he learned from me or to reminisce about the stories we covered but to encourage me to continue treating people with the same honor and respect I gave him. News stories will come and go, honor and respect last forever.

In order to achieve this type of respect the main concept to remember is complete communication. They might not like what they hear, but at least they’ll understand why you’re doing it. People will do a lot more with less grumbling when they understand the importance of what they are doing and how it relates to overall newsroom operations and the success of the team.

Above all, treat your field crews the same way you would like to be treated. Ten years from now the people you manage will not remember the stories as much as how you treated them. This business is very mobile. Remember, the person you insult today, could be your supervisor tomorrow.

Newsroom demeanor

Keeping a calm head is vital. You cannot be “The boy who cried wolf,” on every scanner call. The newsroom will quickly learn that if you treat everything like a big deal they will treat nothing like a big deal. Showing excitement over a story should be the exception, not the rule. Your people should say, “If the desk is excited it must really be big.”

There was a time when a mentally challenged man went on a shooting rampage in a store parking lot killing several people. The man was still on the loose. As I alerted the newsroom and started moving resources around, people dropped what they were doing, listened and responded without hesitation. This happened because they trusted my information and had the confidence that my excitement represented a real need to respond to the story quickly. Due to our quick response we got exclusive video of the suspect being apprehended.

As an assignment editor you will be constantly bombarded with questions and requests. It is not important that you know all things, it is important that you know how to find all things. The newsroom must have confidence that “you’re on it.” They need to know that you are filling their requests. You should anticipate possible questions and requests they may have and begin working on them before the request is made. This will help to develop their confidence in you.

Since you are the thermostat of the newsroom, your demeanor gives your newsroom confidence in their assignment desk and lowers their anxiety level.

An excerpt from “Assignment Desk 101, A practical guide to Broadcast Newsgathering in 2010 & Beyond”  published on lulu.com and also available from Amazon.

Joe Enea is assignment editor at KNXV, the ABC affiliate in Phoenix, Ariz.

The standard excuse is that everyone is just too busy to make that happen. A news director can’t possibly spare the time to help every reporter through every story every day. A chief photographer who also shoots can’t possibly help other photojournalists do better work on a daily basis. Fair enough. But managers aren’t the only people who can offer assistance. The truth is that anyone can do it, by becoming a coach in the newsroom.

Coaching basics

Coaching means sharing responsibility for what goes on the air. Photographers help reporters write. Reporters and photographers offer newscast producers material for teases and tags. Assignment editors ask questions instead of just giving orders. And it doesn’t have to take much time to help a colleague produce better journalism.

The key to a coaching culture is simple yet profound: journalists have to learn to listen to each other.

Coaching often begins in the morning editorial meeting. Instead of running through a list of “must do” stories for the day and assigning them at the start, coaching newsrooms solicit story ideas and encourage everyone present to weigh in with suggestions on how to approach those stories. At some stations, staffers share responsibility for running the meeting, rotating the assignment week-to-week. The only rule is that managers are never allowed to be in charge. “Giving people a little bit more power and control,” says photojournalist Mike Plews of WOWT in Omaha, “they really get excited about bringing stuff in.”

Coaching one-on-one

Coaching also happens outside the newsroom, often in the car on the way to an assignment. Reporters and photographers who coach each other apply what former NBC correspondent John Larson calls the rule of thirds. They can complain about the boss or the assignment or the weather, but only for a third of the time they spend driving to a story. The rest of the time they have to discuss and plan what they’ll do that day.

Teams that coach don’t practice “standing around journalism,” to borrow a phrase from Lane Michaelsen, news director at WTVJ in Miami, Florida, and a former news photographer. The reporter doesn’t wait in the car while the photographer shoots the b-roll, and the photographer doesn’t go for coffee while the reporter does pre-interviews. Instead, Michaelsen says, they stay together and talk frequently so they both know what they’re getting and what they still need to tell the story.

Reporter Kim Riemland and photographer Bill Strothman coached each other regularly when both worked at KOMO-TV in Seattle, Washington. Kim says Bill wrote the best line in one of her daily news stories about the protests against the World Trade Organization–”In downtown Seattle today, the First Amendment ended at Fourth and Spring.” Bill says Kim suggested the perfect audio transition, from the sound of a machine gun to a sewing machine, for one of his favorite long-form pieces on a woman who makes quilts for war refugees. But they weren’t just a two-person team. Each of them involved others throughout the reporting and editing process, asking for ideas and feedback from producers and editors, and sharing the compliments after a story aired.

The coaching culture

In a coaching newsroom, no one is shy about seeking the help they need and they often turn to peers to get it. When Bob Gould was chief photographer at WZZM in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he would invite other photographers into his edit bay to screen stories that he was working on as a kind of reality check, “to see if an edit works, if sound is understandable.”

Coaching newsrooms build on the positive. They may begin each morning meeting with a “daily win,” reviewing what went well the night before.  Scott Libin, news director at WCCO in Minneapolis likes to show tape from the previous day’s newscasts to celebrate successes.

Changing the culture may be more difficult in a television newsroom than at a newspaper, because the staff turnover tends to be higher. But even if only a few people are committed to the practice, coaching can take hold in what Riemland calls a “conspiracy of excellence”–a bottom-up effort that improves the product and makes the newsroom a better place to work. “When you get a few dedicated people who are committed to excellence to be supportive of each other, not only will your work be better, but others will notice,” Riemland says. “It can be contagious, and pretty soon that small core group has coached the management by example.”

Awkward? That would be ABC News president David Westin speed-reading his way through remarks accepting the First Amendment leadership award just a week after announcing plans for drastic staff cuts. When he stressed the importance of having “reporters out in the field doing the work that needs to be done and…the resources to support them” the silence in the room said it all.

The inspiration came later, from CBS Radio News vice president Harvey Nagler, who accepted the First Amendment service award and paid tribute to correspondent Cami McCormick, “one of the most courageous, fearless individuals” he’s ever known. And there she was among us, standing to be recognized, still recovering from the horrific injuries she suffered in Afghanistan when a roadside bomb destroyed the Army vehicle she was riding in. McCormick still faces more surgery but Nagler said she’s almost ready to return to work, which is what she wants most of all.

And the hilarity? That would be thanks to NBC’s Brian Williams, who accepted the Leonard Zeidenberg Award from his boss, NBC News president Steve Capus after an introduction that was so effusive Williams had to mock it right off the top.

Sorry, I couldn’t disable the autoplay feature on the video. I do wish embed codes wouldn’t make that automatic, don’t you?

California Watch, an investigative start-up based in Berkeley, recently did a little experiment that forced journalists to meet up with people in public. The idea was born out of necessity, says multimedia producer Mark Luckie, when the group moved to a new office. For one day, everyone had to work somewhere else–in his case, a neighborhood Starbucks.

Only a few people stopped by to talk about journalism, Luckie told me by email, but he still thinks it was worth it.

I definitely felt proud about doing my work in public for a change instead of hiding in the confines of the newsroom. Doing work among the people we report about made me feel a greater connection to my stories and I definitely want to do it again soon.

California Watch editorial director Mark Katches says he hopes to hold more open newsroom days, at least once every three months. “It’s a way to connect with readers and communities,” he says.

A European news group has gone that idea one better. PPF’s Nase Adresa (Our Address) publishes weekly newspapers and hyperlocal Web sites in the Czech Republic. And their newsrooms are permanently located in or adjacent to coffee shops. So far, the group has coffee shop newsrooms in three regions; the city of Olomuc alone has seven. As Roman Gallo, director of media strategies at PPF told the New York Times. “It’s a feeling for the reader that you can touch your editor and tell them what you want.”

With many newsrooms now expecting reporters to shoot, edit and file from the field, I’m wondering if any of them have set up a semi-permanent office at a local coffee shop. If you’ve done it or you know someone who has, please let us know!

Update: July 26, 2010

The Washington Post is trying an experiment in “coffee shop” journalism this week. The paper’s website says six reporters will be in coffee shops around the D.C. region “to find intriguing stories about you. They’ll write up what they discover and then you — the reader — will have the chance to vote on which story will appear in the print edition of The Washington Post.”

Amy Webb at IJNet says many reporters were ill prepared to get to work immediately when they arrived in Haiti. At a minimum, she says, journalists need to carry the right equipment and know how it works. Here’s part of her gear list:

• Laptop, additional laptop battery, as well as the laptop’s power supply with international adapters, if necessary.
• Mobile phone – with data plan – that’s capable of taking photos and video. You should already have your email accounts set up.
• Additional mobile battery or battery pack, as well as the phone’s power supply and international adapters, if necessary.
• A digital camera capable of taking high-resolution photos, along with an extra memory card and a card reader (or necessary cables) for your laptop. Extra batteries for your camera.
• An extension cord and portable outlet strip.

Notice the emphasis on batteries? Without them, you may be out of business, says Webb, so “recharge and refresh often!” She also has these good suggestions for how to report in a crisis situation:

• Aim to report in small chunks, to keep yourself (and your notes!) organized. Don’t wait until the end of a long, traumatic day to start piecing together what happened in the morning and the interviews you conducted. Have a good process in place and use it.
• File short stories immediately, and when you’re ready write or produce the longer features or analysis pieces.

There’s a lot more advice on how to cover disasters in a manual I wrote for the International Center for Journalists that’s just been posted online. Co-author Sherry Ricciardi of Indiana University provided the section on dealing with trauma. Take a look now so you’ll be prepared when the next disaster hits.

In fact, KUSA no longer has a newsroom. Two years ago, it was renamed the “Information Center” in a Gannett-wide reorganization. And as chief photographer Eric Kehe tells News Photographer magazine, the photo staff now is somewhat smaller and and a lot busier.

Photojournalists now write scripts, write for the Web, produce their own material, generate more content and story ideas, run live trucks, fill in on the assignment desk, edit more, build slideshows, take still pictures, answer phones and make coffee.

Kehe tells me his own job is very different from the one he signed up for. “I sit in the middle of the Information Center right next to the Information Desk,” he wrote in an email. “I answer phones, help with logistics, deploy resources, operate live trucks, manage a lot more equipment and teach and critique photography to all our multimedia journalists.”

KUSA still has more photojournalists than many local stations–20 in all–plus five “backpack journalists” who shoot and report every day and two reporters who regularly shoot their own stories. In addition, Kehe says, about 15 newsroom employees–producers, writers, editors, managers and assignment editors–”can leave what they’re doing, grab camera gear and go out and shoot.”

The KUSA team produced an NPPA entry that won praise from the judges for “great reactions, great moments,” that was “solid all around.”

So what’s KUSA’s secret for doing excellent work in tough times? To hear Kehe tell it, it’s really all about attitude. They’ve been through unpaid furloughs, pay cuts and buyouts, but Kehe says the storytellers at KUSA still love what they do, still want to be there and still want to do good work. “Once you decide [that] then you find ways to overcome obstacles,” he says. As he puts it, you have to retrain your brain to solve problems instead of identifying them.

• Change the agenda. The way you start the meeting sends a message about what matters in your newsroom. Do you begin with a review of last night’s ratings? A post-mortem of yesterday’s “disaster?” Try starting with what some stations call “the daily win,” and celebrate enterprise to help your newsroom build on success. When you must review what went wrong, think about whether it really was a “disaster” or a case of “we could have done better.” That changes the tone of the discussion from “blame patrol” to “what can we learn from this?”

• De-emphasize the daybook. The events on the daybook will still be there at the end of the meeting. If you start with them, you’ll probably assign the bulk of your limited resources to those “must covers” before you get to any enterprise ideas. Give other stories a chance by discussing them first.

• Set a place for viewers. Your viewers should have a place at the table. Some stations live blog their editorial meetings or invite “public representatives” to attend. Others assign someone to monitor and report on e-mails and phone calls. Consider passing the job around.

• Encourage participation. If the same few people attend your meetings, they’re likely to come up with the same ideas, time after time. Encourage photographers, interns, and people from departments outside the newsroom to come to your planning meetings. If you have a conference bridge as part of your phone system, let people who can’t attend the meeting in person call in and participate via speakerphone. The more perspectives you can bring to the discussion, the more story ideas you’ll have to choose from.

• Talk content, not just logistics. If your story meeting is devoted to logistics, that’s what people will spend their day worrying about. If it’s devoted to content, they’ll focus on that instead. Of course you need to discuss logistics, what stories will go in which newscasts, and which ones are top priorities for the Web, but you can do that in a smaller meeting afterwards among the people directly involved.

• Give everyone a part. Not everybody is great at coming up with story ideas. Find another important job you can delegate like monitoring the competition, reading the papers or scanning the Internet. That makes it possible for everybody to bring something to the table. And it’s one less thing you’ll have to worry about.

• Be more of a coach, and less of a player. The news director or assignment manager isn’t the only person who can run the meeting. Let somebody else do it. Better yet, rotate the responsibility among several people. One station has a rule that no one in management can run the meeting. Ask open-ended questions to encourage others to contribute ideas. And watch the body language that can send an unspoken signal that those contributions won’t really be considered. Nothing shuts down enterprise faster.

• Advocate for others. Support suggestions that have potential, even if they can’t be turned into packages that day. Pitch ideas on behalf of others who simply can’t or won’t attend the meeting.

• Have a holding pen. Create a place for unused but valid story ideas that everybody can see. It may be on a dry erase board in the newsroom or in a computer file or on the sheet of assignments you hand out every day. The goal is to find a way to keep these ideas on everybody’s radar screen so they can eventually find their way into a newscast.

• Recap and review. Do this at the end of every meeting. It’s a good way to ensure that everyone is on the same page, and that the next steps you’ve agreed on will actually be taken. Then share the plan widely. Why not have somebody bring a laptop into the meeting, take notes and mass mail them to your news staff when it’s over?

• Set an example. Get out of the office and bring back some story ideas. See how many you can come up with in a half-hour walk or drive. Tell people how you did it and encourage them to try it themselves. Then support their ideas to encourage more enterprise efforts.

Increase efficiency. Improve morale. Reduce turnover. Raise the ratings. How, you ask? One word – communication. Yes, I know that sounds like a trite answer, but a professor at the University of Miami has done a survey that ‘proves’ just that.

Terry Adams at the University’s School of Communication surveyed producers and directors in various markets around the country. Part of what she found out, anybody who has been in a television newsroom knows. Most directors are older males who have been at the same station for a long time while most producers are young females who have only been at the station for a couple of years.

Interestingly, although not surprisingly, the producers had a generally positive view of the directors with nearly all of the producers (97%) saying the director helped the process and nearly as many (88%) saying the director provided the information necessary and four-fifths (80%) rating the director as “competent.” It wasn’t quite the opposite with directors, but it was substantially different, with less than half (48%) of the directors agreeing that the producer helped in the process, and only slightly more (54%) saying the producer provided all the information necessary and nearly half (46%) of the directors rating the producer as “incompetent.”

Even more interesting and the key take-away from the survey (at least, to me) was Adams’ finding that there was a “significant relationship” between whether producers and directors held a show meeting and how they assessed each other’s competence. Those who held show meetings were more likely to consider their counterpart either the best they had worked with or at least competent.

And it gets even more interesting. Adams found that the “quality of information” the producers and/or directors received from their counterpart was “significantly correlated” to their overall job satisfaction. That, in turn, also showed a relationship to job turnover which Adams rightly noted is a major problem with producers. And both defined the “perfect” producer or director in terms of communication.

Finally, the piece de resistance, the stations with the highest reported levels of communication also had the highest ratings. In academic speak, Adams says, “correlation analysis shows ratings to be significantly related to the amount of information relayed.” To her credit, she also put it in plain English: “simply put, companies can make money out of good communication.”

YET… yet… (do you detect a note of frustration?), three quarters of the producers (75.9%) and directors (73%) did not have regular daily show meetings. And most (68%) work in different parts of the building so any ad hoc communication is impossible. Directors are less likely to take part in meetings in the news department than the other way around. Adams says the key finding is that not only do producers and directors not communicate well, they don’t even communicate minimally although, as she rightfully notes, “One cannot succeed without the other’s participation and involvement.”

And that note of frustration? That’s the consultant in me. I have recommended at EVERY station I have either worked at or consulted that the director be part of the editorial meeting. And there are always excuses why the director can’t do it.

Michael Castengera teaches broadcast news writing and production at the University of Georgia. He writes the weekly MfM (Message from Michael) newsletter, from which this article is excerpted. Contact him at Michael@MediaConsultant.tv