“The best journalists are lifelong learners,” says Vicki Krueger.
BY SALEM SOLOMON
NNB Student Reporter
ST. PETERSBURG – Seated in her bright office with sunshine streaming through floor-to-ceiling windows, Vicki Krueger stared at two computer monitors.
On one, a live webinar being filmed next door showed the image of a reporter and a host talking about “Interviewing: The Art of the Two-Way Conversation.” Questions from an online audience around the world popped up second by second.
On the other, Krueger, 53, was receiving a flurry of emails about an afternoon meeting with the marketing department of her employer, the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. The Poynter is a nonprofit school for journalism.
“I have 4,000 unread emails in my inbox. There’s a lot of triage every day,” she said. On a giant white board she managed a complex, color-coded schedule for Poynter classes the rest of the year.
It was a busy day. Her head was still buzzing from a morning meeting with the institute’s board of trustees.
“They are the Poynter’s governing board; they come quarterly and they get updates on a bunch of different stuff,” she said. “I usually have two to five minutes on a couple of initiatives that we’re doing at NewsU.”
Krueger, shown chatting with Lauren Klinger, Poynter’s interactive learning producer, and Craig Koop of WUSF Public Media, started at Poynter as a part-time copy editor.
NewsU is an online learning platform for professional journalists, educators and those who are interested in the craft of journalism. Krueger said that her role is to be the digital bridge and help “traditional journalists, mainstream media or legacy media” understand the world of digital media.
This, said Krueger, is vitally important as journalism migrates online and journalists are asked to master a wide variety of tasks including social media, multimedia and other skills. Journalists today can’t afford to define themselves only as scribes or broadcasters.
“You just don’t know what the world will look like in 10 or 20 years, so just do what’s interesting and turn it into something,” she said. “I think the best journalists are lifelong learners.”
NewsU helps journalists prepare for the future in a shifting environment. Founded by Howard Finberg in 2005, NewsU now offers 300 courses on everything from old-fashioned reporting to newfangled multimedia techniques. It boasts more than 250,000 registered users, including about 15 percent from outside North America.
“We want to leverage the power of the Internet so that people can have access on-demand, and we know that people are used to learning online so we want to make it as available as possible,” Krueger said. “One of the important roles that we play with e-learning is to be a resource or a library so that they can come back and have access.”
Krueger earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Northwestern University. Early in her career, she never imagined a job like hers would exist.
She moved to Florida in 1987-1988 from Indiana with her husband, Curtis. They met at the Journal Gazette in Fort Wayne, where she was a copy editor and he was a reporter. She says that Curtis knew one of the first things he needed to know is that copy editors are serious about spelling people’s names right.
She joked that if “you misspell my name, I will break your leg.” Curtis overheard and asked, “So, you’d break my leg, huh?”
“So, that’s how we met – by threatening to break his leg,” she said. They have been together since 1988. “We were one of five couples to meet and marry from that newsroom,” she said.
She worked for five years on the copy desk at the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times). He still works there, covering Pinellas County courts.
Following maternity leave, she asked Poynter if there was something she could offer because of her background in copy editing and love of working in a newsroom. Krueger’s work at Poynter started with part-time copy editing.
She edited books between 1993 to 2004, including memoirs and spirituality books. As her two sons grew older, she said, her work “evolved with their little lives.” Pictures of Jimmy, 21, and Jackson, 19, are displayed in a corner of her office.
Soon enough, she would start working through Poynter’s high school program, which brought in working journalists as consultants to area high school newspapers.
“There was a makeup composition room down at Poynter and the kids could come and print out their stories, and they could paste everything up and then they would take it and print it,” she said. “Poynter has had a long history in investing in the scholastic press.”
Krueger understands the importance of building relationships in a learning environment and that translates to her online interaction. She acknowledges that transforming from in-person teaching to an online platform is a challenge.
She said that in itself is a process and educators have to think about how to make it “relevant, practical and engaging online because if it’s boring, people will tune out.” Making it relevant comes naturally for Krueger, a gregarious extrovert with a boisterous laugh that fills a room.
Dr. Casey Frechette, assistant professor in the Journalism and Media Studies Department at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg and an adjunct teacher at the Poynter Institute, worked with Krueger for about 10 years before moving to USFSP full time. He said that “in many ways, Vicki is the ideal colleague. She’s generous in sharing her knowledge, but she’s always eager to learn more.”
Salem Solomon | NNB
The turning point for Poynter’s online learning offerings came after 9/11, says Krueger, shown conferring with Kim Tobin, the institute’s marketing communications strategy manager
Parallel to her personal experience, the Poynter.org website evolved over time. More specifically, the turning point for the institute’s online learning offerings came after Sept. 11.
The site gained relevance and a wider audience because the institute “realized what it had and being able to help journalists around the country and around the world do better journalism,” she said.
Telling stories about the events during the terror attacks that claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 people and getting the coverage of its aftermath in these communities right was important, she said. “I think, at that point, Poynter realized that it had a website that can reach journalists,” she said. The website started gaining traction as a resource for journalists.
The Poynter Institute was founded as the Modern Media Institute in 1975 by Nelson Poynter, the principal owner of the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times). Poynter wanted to ensure that his beloved newspaper would remain private, independent and locally owned when he died, so in his will he stipulated that the majority of his stock in the paper would pass to the institute.
Six years after Poynter died in 1978, the institute was renamed in his honor, and in 1985 it moved into a gleaming new building at 801 Third St. S.
For years, the institute thrived, its finances buoyed by multimillion-dollar annual dividends from the Times. In the last decade, however, the Great Recession, the digital age, and changes in the habits of readers and advertisers have devastated metropolitan newspapers like the Times.
In recent years, the Times has dramatically slashed its staff, sold several pieces of property and two affiliated publications, given up the naming rights to the ice hockey and entertainment arena in Tampa, and three times cut employees’ pay.
The newspaper is no longer a viable source of support for Poynter, which in response has created a fund-raising arm, shaken up its teaching program and entered a non-binding agreement to sell property next to its building to the University of South Florida St. Petersburg for $6.2 million.
In November, Poynter announced that it lost $3.5 million in 2013 and expects to have another loss at the end of 2014. Poynter lost $1.7 million in 2012 and $3.8 million in 2011, according to public documents.
Despite the grim numbers, e-learning at Poynter is thriving. Finberg said the future of NewsU “is going to be brighter than it is today. And with new technologies, with new methods, new kind of classes, I think that you’ll see that it will continue to grow.”
Krueger is at the forefront of this growth. NewsU must strive to meet users’ needs while staying affordable.
“That’s why we try to keep our prices low. We need to make the money to keep the lights on, but we don’t want to price it so much so people can’t access it,” she said.
Some of the webinars and self-directed courses, for instance, are free courses while others have price tags ranging from as low as $25 per course or module to over $500. The courses span from one hour to weeks-long skills training seminars. Users have to sign up for an account, but that means they will have ample access to materials produced by respected journalists.
Krueger says beyond understanding what the audience wants through e-learning, NewsU will always have content “that will be cutting edge, that will not necessarily drive much revenue” but will always keep Poynter true to its mission: A leader in journalism training.
Information from jimromenesko.com, the Tampa Bay Times and the Tampa Tribune was used in this report.