Home > View from the Newsroom > Archives > 2008 > August > 05 > Entry
Time out for training
One of the many advantages of working for the company that I do is that it is full of very talented people. And the company does everything it can to spread that talent around.
One of those things is what has come to be known as Cox Academy.
Every year Mike Schwartz, an all-around good guy who hails from Atlanta and is Cox Newspapers’ training guru, contacts editors at all Cox papers and asks them about their training needs.
Then he finds people in the company who can provide the training we need and brings them to our locations. It’s a great opportunity for all of our staffs. We get world-class training and don’t have to pay to send people somewhere else.
Over the years we’ve had seminars on all manner of things — story telling, photography, page design, headline writing, feature writing, media law and a host of other topics.
This week about half The Daily Sentinel staff is being tutored in how to create compelling video for GJSentinel.com. Teaching the class is John Lopinot of the Palm Beach Post.
Video is a new medium for those of us who grew up in the newspaper business. Some might say one has about as much chance of teaching newspaper people how to shoot and edit video as one would have teaching a dog to fly.
My age is showing.
In fact, the younger members of this staff — and even a few of the long-time staffers — are both able and eager to learn new skills. New skills and new ways of telling stories are what the newspaper business is all about in 2008. Video, in particular, is becoming more and more important as we move into the digital world. John is among the best. He’s a great videographer and a great teacher. He’s also a great photographer. Check out his website and see for yourself.
He’ll be followed later this week by Rick Crotts, a page designer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Rick’s been here before and we know that he knows his stuff. I expect many of you have noticed that our front pages have had a new look in recent weeks. They have been much more colorful and more graphically intense. That is largely the work of a talented young page designer by the name of Erik Lincoln. (More about Erik in a future post.) We expect Rick to take that effort to yet another level.
Look for the results from this week’s Cox Academy in future editions of The Daily Sentinel and on GJSentinel.com.
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