How do you measure growth?

A reporter who wants to grow in her work asked how she can measure that growth.

Growth starts with goals. If your editors have not given you clear goals, take the initiative yourself. Honestly assess your current skill level and how you would like your skills to expand and/or improve. Then discuss those goals with your editor, so you both understand how you want to grow.

Measuring growth is tough not impossible. Some ways of measuring reporting work, such as counting bylines, are counter-productive. You can write more stories by lowering your standards and be measured as a better reporter by that measure. Other ways of quantifying reporting work are purely subjective. Two editors can agree that a particular reporter is a strong reporter, but one might give her an 8 on a scale of 1 to 10 and the other gives a 9. How can you say who's right?

You can measure a reporter's improvement by setting goals for development of new skills, improvement of existing skills, changes in work performed or by quantifying what you can. We'll go through these in order:

New skills. Let's say that you are a reporter with strong writing skills who can write news and feature stories adeptly. But you really don't do any investigative reporting. Developing investigative skills would be a way to demonstrate improvement. Many reporters should set a goal of developing data analysis skills. In this age of rapidly expanding use of multi-media, perhaps you need to set goals of developing skills of collecting and using audio and video with your stories. Or planning and executing the full online presentation of your stories. Perhaps you need to develop your skills at using alternative story forms or narrative writing. Inventory your own skills, then look at the full skill set that a 21st Century reporter needs and identify areas where you need to develop new skills. This doesn't involve a lot of subjective judgment. If you go from zero to something in use of multi-media or databases, that's a clear improvement.

Improvement of existing skills. This is more subtle and subjective, but you still can make distinctions. Take that inventory of your skills and in each area decide what the next level would be. Maybe you have some data analysis skills and use some simple spreadsheets to supplement your reporting. You could set a goal of writing a major enterprise story based on data analysis. Or you do a good job on issue stories of laying out the issue and giving both sides their say. You could set a goal of digging into the issue more to find the facts and show where each side is right and wrong. Wherever you are in your skill development, describe how your work could improve and set out to achieve that. This is more concrete and measurable than committing to improve your writing or reporting. You don't quantify, but you describe what improvement would be, then assess in the future whether your work matches that description.

Changing the work performed. You can quantify your workload by counting stories and identifying what proportions of your work is routine news coverage, features and enterprise (or whatever are the appropriate categories). If you decide you need to work on more enterprise, you set that goal and you can measure again after six months or a year and see if you are in fact doing more enterprise. You might need to assign different values to different kinds of stories, to reflect the greater amount of time that some stories take. You could also quantify your work by counting how many of your stories are your own ideas, how many are routine coverage of events and how many are editors' assignments. Then you set a goal of coming up with more and better story ideas (this only works if your editor agrees to let you work on them).

Quantify what you can. While much of our work is subjective, you can measure some things. If your leads are too long, you can commit to writing shorter leads and measure the change by counting the words in leads. This doesn't mean you're writing better leads. Short leads can be bad and long leads can be good. But short leads tend to be better and concentrating on writing tighter, better-focused leads will make you a better writer. If you decide that you're relying too much on government and academic experts and not enough on the expertise of people with real-life immersion in the topic you cover (commuters if you cover transportation, students and parents if you cover education, etc.), you could commit to including at least one of these "real experts" in each story you write and more of them overall. And you could measure whether you met that goal. Each of these is only a small measure of good writing or reporting. But in combination with some of these other measures, they can be meaningful.