Improvements through investments

As media companies emerge from their economically induced cost-cutting modes, media executives say they are making a refreshing investment in their employees in 2013. Two out of the three top responses to media companies’ stated potential areas for improvement and development are commitments to training journalists and sales people. Journalist and sales person training have been a consistent priority for respondents of the four-year study.

Respondents rated developing journalist skills No. 1 for areas of improvement and development through investment, 60 percent; followed by convergence of multimedia operations, 52.5 percent; developing skills of sales people, 45.8 percent; paid-for digital content, 45.8 percent; invest in development of tablet products, 43.3 percent; encourage understanding and cooperation among departments, 41.7 percent; develop good working environment, 38.3 percent; upgrade content management systems, 37.5 percent; and marketing/ branding of news title, 35.8 percent.

Among the innovative training programs for journalists were the Global Editors Network Hack Days, a traveling training workshop to teach journalists the techniques of data journalism. Among the cities for the training in 2012 were Cairo, Delhi, New York, London, Paris, Berlin and Argentina. For more information, go to www.GlobalEditorsNetwork.org. An innovative sales training program, called “Street Fighting,” developed by local advertising sales trainer Mike Blinder, provides a cross-media sales technique of multimedia sales for media companies around the world. For more information, go to www.mikeblinder.com.

The data set is a part of a collection of 500 revenue and usership trends in mobile, social, Internet, tablet, video and other digital categories, published in the 200-page Global Digital Media Trendbook 2013. GDMT, in its eight year, is to be published by World Newsmedia Network, a not-for-profit media research company, in September 2013. To subscribe to the PDF report and/or the tablet edition, go to www.wnmn.org, or contact mstone@wnmn.org.