Journalists sometime wonder if newsroom leadership requires more than a kindly nature.
Well, yes.
“Employees are far
happier when they are led by people with deep expertise in the core activity of the business,” a new study argues.
That’s especially true in the news
business.
“The numerous challenges facing journalism—changing economic models, the need to integrate new technology and declining
audience—necessitate a robust consideration of the role of leadership in the journalistic field,” write Gregory P. Perreault, associate professor of media literacy at University of South
Florida, and Samuel M. Tham, assistant professor at Colorado State University, in their study "Effective Leadership in Journalism: Field Theory in how journalists evaluate newsroom
leadership.”
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They continue, “Based on interviews with U.S.-based journalists (n=27), this study reflects that–while bad
boss stories remain popular–journalists largely saw their bosses as exemplars within the field, inspiring their work, and helping grant shape to their career
goals.”
“Not all traits typically seen as markers of effective leadership were representative of what journalists saw as effective leadership… in
particular, journalists reflected quite little on persuasiveness among their newsroom leaders. A much heavier emphasis was placed on their supervisor’s expertise–as reflected in
their symbolic capital–and their ability to communicate effectively–which seemed to reflect a level of localized social capital.”
They
add, “Expertise or being good at what they do was the second major theme of leadership that emerged from interviews. This was demonstrated by their ability to perform a task or having expertise
in the field allowed them to provide oversight to their employees. Attention to the finer details of the job is something that respondents respect in their leaders. Several instances of this appeared
as qualities that their supervisors possessed.”
Case in point: One respondent described their supervisor as “quite good at mentoring [journalists] and
working with them to define their beat...to help them learn how to navigate dealing with people on the local city council or the cops, you know, officials, whomever.”
And where does such leadership fail? “When participants indicated a lack of leadership from their supervisor, they often linked it to a lack of internal social capital, with
comments such as ‘It is clear a lot of times he has not made much effort to come up to speed on some of our ongoing stories,’” the authors conclude.