Chapter 4

Small Newsroom Guidelines

Five percent of the respondents from the survey were from small newsrooms. Of the small newsrooms, only three newsrooms said they had some sort of process for on-boarding and off-boarding, even if it wasn't formalized. For this pool of newsrooms, there was two people that I was able to interview. As I noted at the beginning of the guide, I feel that calling out certain newsrooms for their issues is not actually helpful. I'd much rather talk about the issues in general and talk through some solutions for the newsrooms.

In general, the issues with small newsrooms are the same as medium and large newsrooms as I pointed out in chapter three. For small newsrooms, the biggest issue with getting these processes put into place is time and general adoption of understanding why documentation is so important.

A note about the categorization of newsrooms:

For the categorization of what is considered a "small" newsroom versus a "large" newsroom, I used the Online News Association Awards categories found here.

A small newsroom is 50 or fewer employees.

Here's a list of some of the small newsrooms that responded:

Small:

• KPCC- Southern California
• Center for Public Integrity
• De Correspondent
• The Trace