It’s been 10 years since I last had the title “editor” attached to my name in any newspaper. But I still look back at that part of my newspaper career with great fondness. Technology has changed substantially in the past decade – in 1998, cell phones were only slightly smaller than containers of oatmeal and high-end digital cameras cost as much or more than midsized cars.

But one thing hasn’t changed in newsrooms across Kentucky and the nation and that’s the need for editorial staff training. Nearly all journalists I’ve worked with want to get better and improve their skills and that often means training. But it seemed, at least in my experience, that the training budget was always small and the time to spend on training was even smaller. Getting that darned paper out every week or every day or every other day always got in the way.

But here are some training regimens that I tried at little cost and without too much time taken from newsgathering:

• Improving grammar skills. Time spent on subject-verb agreement and the differences between its and it’s and their, there and they’re isn’t very exciting but getting it right is paramount if a paper is to maintain its credibility. Older readers may not know how to design web pages or get too excited about the latest iPhone but they know grammar! They spent a huge amount of time studying it in school.

Twice, I managed to find retired English teachers who were willing to come to my newspapers and tutor staffers for free. The teachers - even though retired - were on a mission to right the grammar wrongs of the world. I organized staff brown bag lunches and we munched on sandwiches and chips while going over the finer tips of using s or es to make a word plural. This could be duplicated elsewhere at little or no cost in money or time.

• I’ve never been a fan of gathering news by telephone. I always preferred to have reporters on the scene of the story. But sometimes reality sets in and using the phone is the only way to meet deadline. And in this time of rising energy costs, using the phone is more affordable than driving all over the county to gather news in person.

We faced this same issue at one of my papers. Gas wasn’t all that expensive at the time but we covered a very big county. Sending a reporter to some outlying communities meant a 50-mile round trip or more. Instead, relying on the phone made sense. But it’s hard for reporters to establish a good rapport with sheriff’s deputies, firefighters, police, small town mayors and council members and others by using only the phone.

These folks want to know the reporter behind the phone and feel more comfortable working with a reporter if they know that person. I started gathering up my staff in my minivan and driving to the outlying communities on slower afternoons and giving a tour. “There’s the such-and-such factory and over there is the volunteer fire department and let’s stop in at city hall and meet the mayor” and so on.

Putting a face to a name and seeing the smaller towns in our coverage area in person helped us better understand the communities we were covering. In the big picture, the editorial road trips were time well spent and cost very little.

• My staff wanted to know more about computer-assisted reporting and online resources that were available. I contacted the AP and since we were a member paper, AP sent us a reporter from their Evansville bureau that was an expert on the above topics. The cost? Nothing other than 90-minutes of staff time.

• Whenever a new reporter started with us, I spent the whole first day with them going over the finer points of their new job, their responsibilities and company policies. We wandered through the paper and I introduced them to people in every department. Then we hit the car and I drove them all over the community to point out the landmarks and other places of interest. I treated them to lunch and asked about their family and their personal interests.

Then I had another reporter show them how to use the newsroom computer system. Making a good impression on a new employee was time well spent.

• Pointing out errors in the paper is a necessary part of an editor’s job but one that should be handled with thoughtfulness. Stomping into the newsroom and screaming something about morons and stupid mistakes in the same sentence is not part of the best practices for editors manual. I can assure you that.

• Instead, I made a playful game of it which got the point across without hurting feelings needlessly. If I found a mistake in the paper – whether factual or grammatical – I’d walk into the newsroom and tell everyone, for example, “There’s a factual error on page 3. The first one to find it wins a door prize.”

My door prize collection was comprised of promotional goodies that came in the mail and I tossed into a box. They ranged from CDs of country music wannabe groups to movie posters to a bottle of prenatal vitamins and so on.

Those looking for the mistake had to right it down and give me the paper. First one to identify the error won a door prize of their choosing. Of course, we identified the error and why it was incorrect. This worked fine for relatively minor errors. If something was a major error, then I talked with the reporter privately about it. But the point is that much of this can be made into an entertaining game that gets the point across at the same time.

I’m sure these ideas are not unique and that other editors around Kentucky are doing similar things today. If you have a best practice you’d like to share, just drop me an e-mail at dgreer@kypress.com and I will share it with others statewide.