Community newspapers: how to handle understaffing

Staffing is one of the biggest headaches for many community newspapers. While even the most understaffed regionals usually have somebody in the building during normal office hours and somebody to take messages over the phone, community newspapers don’t have that luxury. The usual scenario is to have just one or two part-time members of staff.

However, I believe you can overcome a lot of staffing issues by framing the problem in a different way. We talk about resourcing, but perhaps we should really be talking about delivery. The real problem with not having enough staff is that it makes it harder for your organisation to have a professional presence, harder for people to make contact with you.

I think that a strategy of managing expectations is a way of making your organisation seem much more professional and reliable without having to increase staffing levels at all. You build public trust by making certain (not very ambitious) promises and then consistently keeping those promises. For example:

• Set core office hours and stick to them, even if you don’t have many paid hours to spare. Three hours on a Tuesday morning is better than ten or fifteen hours spread unpredictably over the week. Advertise the hours in the newspaper, on your website and in the building where you’re based.
• Personalise your outgoing answering machine message. Callers are more likely to leave a message if they hear a human voice and know they’ve definitely got through to the right organisation.
• Keep updating that personalised message, using it to manage expectations. If you’re not going to be picking up messages over the weekend, say so: “Please leave a message and we’ll ring you back on Monday.”
• Don't share an email account with colleagues. This sets up a Somebody Else's Problem field around the shared inbox and means that nobody takes responsibility for dealing with messages. Set up separate email addresses for each person or role, ideally at the website domain so that email addresses form part of your brand: steve@communitynewspaper.. or design@communitynewspaper... rather than communitynewspaper@hotmail...
• Be consistent and predictable in your email use. Setting aside regular time (preferably daily) to go through your inbox and respond to new messages is the ideal way of managing email, but that’s not always possible. The next best thing is to plan when you’re going to be accessing email and make this clear in an out-of-office autoreply: "Thank you for your message. I will next be checking my inbox on [date] and will respond to your message then."

Of course, even the best strategy can fail sometimes, because there’s simply no slack built into the system for illness or holidays. A case in point: I recently arranged to visit someone who had decided to advertise his business in the pilot issue of the East Oxford paper. He definitely wanted the ad; I just had to turn up with the paperwork. But I woke up shivering and sick and spent the day at home in bed. Luckily the business owner was sympathetic when I explained the situation, and the advert is now booked.

I've been discussing the issue of professionalism with some of my colleagues in community journalism, and I keep hearing worries about looking "too corporate" or "too slick". But I don't believe that managing expectations in a professional manner automatically makes people think you're a big corporate behemoth.

Most of the suggestions I've made in this blog post are to do with giving a human face to your organisation so that people feel they're dealing with human beings instead of an empty office or the T-Mobile answering service.  For me, setting standards and sticking to them is about strengthening ties between the newspaper and the community.