A good panel, covering about the nuts-and-bolts required for today's B2B publishing workforce. Lots of talk about writing a story several ways for different audiences, getting digital natives who are ready to make a transition to the mainstream publishing workforce, getting your staff to the point where they're thinking about how to maximize the value of a story to audiences. Need to think about flexible employees, with the ability to work on a broad variety of tasks with an open outlook. There may not be the same career paths, with people moving from departments such as circulation to much different roles. People need to be curious, to like challenge and change. This does not always equate to younger staffs - some younger people may not have that level of curiosity. Recommended site: j-learning.org, lots of basic block-and-tackle resources for journalism. Book on Amazon and elsewhere: "Writing for the Web." Managers need to push constantly to challenge editorial staffs. Blogs can be useful tools, but they can be a "time sink" - just one more thing to do. Job descriptions can be a problem, in that people are talking about being creative and breaking down role barriers and yet job descriptions are designed to maintain command-and-control structures.

Bottom line there are changes underway in staffing and empowering people to be more curious and creative but there's a gap to fill between internal staff who are able to make the transition and external people who may be more open to change but lacking some of the basic skills required for online and print publishing. An example was given of a piece written about the Chinese markets where a new reporter wanted to express some opinions about the Chinese government as on a weblog and the reporter had to be told how to express some of his thoughts objectively in the traditional editorial style. This has its merits, but at the same time publishers need to learn how to deal with opinions as useful insight much more effectively.

Labels: ABM, Best Practices, Digital Velocity, events, Harris Publications, Paul Conley, Workforce Management