A bigger vision for journalism training

I’m no prophet or economist, so I won’t try to predict how the new tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico will shake out. At the time we’re going to press with this, it’s not clear they will even happen. One thing seems certain: If they happen, the paper we use in WORLD Magazine will get more expensive, at least in the short term.

WORLD Magazine’s biggest production costs fall into three buckets: postage, printing, and paper. Of those three, historically, postage has been the highest. Next highest is printing, which includes all of the processes from the moment we send finished files to the printer to the time the completed magazines are put into the postal system. Paper costs, while significant, have been the lowest of the three.

That may be about to change. One problem—and this may be one of the problems the tariffs are expected to address—is that only one American mill produces the sort of paper used in WORLD and most other magazines. A few mills in Europe do, and we’ve checked into those—but the shipping costs appear prohibitive. So the realistic option for most periodical publishers is Canadian paper.

For now, this is a wait-and-see situation. All three of the major publishing costs are subject to frequent changes, even within a single year, so we try to leave room in our budget for unexpected price increases. That means we shouldn’t have to make dramatic changes to the way we deliver the magazine. Still, a sudden, sharp increase will make things harder down the road. We’ll keep you posted.

A paper mill that once operated in Groveton, N.H. Associated Press / Photo by Jim Cole

At WORLD, professional development has always mattered—but until now, it hasn’t been as structured as we’d like. Our editorial staff members do receive real-time feedback on stories they work on, addressing their writing, the way they pursued sources, the questions they asked, the efficiency of their process, and Biblical principles that should inform the story. That feedback is its own sort of training, and every reporter gets some of it on almost every story. But we describe this as “organic” training, not “formal” training.

The World Journalism Institute has long been home to WORLD’s formal training, but it never fully became what Joel Belz envisioned—a place of lifelong learning for Christian journalists.

What WJI does very well is identify good journalists and give them a solid foundation for pursuing journalism as a calling. We have been working on that aspect of Joel’s plan for the past 25 years, and in the process WJI has graduated nearly 1,000 students. Many of them have provided—and continue to provide—a strong Christian witness as solid reporters in newsrooms around the world. We’ll be saying more about this in next month’s WORLD, as at that time we will be preparing for the central course of the WJI program.

But we never quite tackled the second part of Joel’s vision—turning WJI into a hub for ongoing training and professional development, not just for WORLD staff but for Christian journalists everywhere. This is the plan we are working on now.

It’s a long-term vision, and we’re just getting started. The hiring of Les Sillars as WORLD’s editor-in-chief is part of that start. Not only does Les himself bring a professional-development mindset to the organization, but his work allows Lynn Vincent to devote more (and eventually, most) of her time to training.

But all of those big plans are down the road. For now, both Lynn and Les, and our Editorial Council, are putting some basic things in place to go beyond the organic training we’ve always done and to introduce formal training into our organization.

At its core, this is about strengthening WORLD’s mission—delivering sound journalism, grounded in facts and Biblical truth.