Spark the Interest to get Reporters Learning
by Patricia Murphey
For years I lived with a pressing objective to impart basic Excel skills upon a group of reporters at a large publishing company in South Florida. I was on the beat to teach these reporters and journalists how to use Excel in a way that would improve their written stories and increase productivity when conducting research for articles.
For reporters there are many resources and reports available containing credible data to support and substantiate statistics and facts. These reports are often published in Excel database format that can be sorted, analyzed and charted if one knows the basics of Excel. My masthead was to provide the Excel skills necessary to capitalize on available data and to improve the credibility of stories being written.
The “stop the press” news is that reporters are short on time, deadline driven, and have little interest in learning software that doesn’t pertain to writing. In fact, NO reporters were attending my Excel classes despite efforts of offering them in a reporter friendly way. I even offered them pencil and paper to take notes in class, off the record of course!
While the reporters resisted Excel their co-workers and managers made it the top story broadcasting the merits of spreadsheets and advertising how it could improve stories and increase productivity of routine business activities. I continued to struggle to find ways to get the reporters interested in Excel.
Google Maps became breaking news. We’re all familiar with entering an address and have it pinpointed on a map. Imagine if you could take a list of addresses and have them ALL pinpointed on a map at the same time. With the first edition it caught their interest! They wanted Google Maps with multiple pinpoints making it simple for readers to visualize the demographics of a story. How easy with Google Maps to illustrate the number of murders per county this year!
To create multiple pinpoints with Google Maps you need to know a few things about Excel. This was my big chance, my breaking story. I conducted a brief training on Excel as it regards to Google Maps and that was enough to spark their interest. Now these reporters are showing great enthusiasm towards Excel with better stories, increased circulation and more productive workdays!
