Fellowship Folley   

News organizations too often mishandle staffers returning from med-career sabbaticals, says the director of Stanford's Knight Fellowships.

The number and variety of mid-career fellowships are a true treasure of the journalism business, but you wouldn't know it from the attitude of some employers.

News executives say that they want to staff their organizations with more intelligent and sophisticated journalists, equipped to better cover a complex world. But when it comes to taking steps to help bring that about, some of them balk.

Sometimes they consider fellowships a nuisance and are reluctant to let their good people apply. But worst of all, they too often misuse a returning employee and end up squandering the knowledge and enthusiasm acquired during the fellowship. Then they wonder why the employee seems disgruntled or leaves for a job elsewhere.

For example: A foreign correspondent who had reported with distinction from Europe and served as a bureau chief in Asia is about to return from a nine-month fellowship, and he's eager for a new assignment.

He's ready to go abroad again, but he's open to other possibilities, including reporting from Washington, or even developing his abundant knowledge of arts and culture into an imaginative new beat. The boss, unable to make a decision, orders him back to headquarters to work on the desk as a copy editor and says they'll try to figure out later what to do with him.

At the same time, a major newspaper is courting him, urging him to take on the newly created job of arts and entertainment editor, supervising staff and traveling on major stories himself. He feels a strong sense of loyalty toward his longtime employer, but under the circumstances what decision do you suppose he makes?

This kind of incident is all too common.

Sometimes it's a city or county editor whose job is given to someone else while he's away, and he's offered a less prestigious editing job with fewer reporters and diminished responsibilities. Or it's a local television reporter whose station won't guarantee her a job of comparable stature when she returns.

With some 100 U.S. journalists returning to work each year from full academic-year fellowships, and many others coming back from short-term programs, this is not a trivial problem. Any fellowship program director could cite dozens of examples.

Why does this happen? It's due mainly to three things:

• News managers fail to understand that for most participants, a journalism fellowship is a transforming experience, personally and professionally. New things are learned, new insights are gained. The person is forever changed.

• Supervisors aren't creative enough to see that they and their news organizations could benefit tremendously from the new knowledge and new ideas of the returning staffer, if they would just work with the returnee to come up with a challenging assignment.

• Mid-level supervisors jealously view the employee's fellowship as nothing more than an undeserved vacation and are anxious to demonstrate who's boss. "Glad you had such a good time; now get busy and write this obit."

It's true, of course, that some journalists who win fellowships abuse the privilege – by using the time to job-hunt and not fulfilling their commitment to return to the news organization that allowed them to take leave. Others think the fellowship experience gives them license to make demands on the employer that are simply unrealistic. But these cases are rare, compared with employers' unimaginative underutilization of a returning staffer.

Nothing is more certain to sour the fellowship graduate than to perceive the experience not only as unvalued but resented. Some leave; others swallow their disappointment and turn into a disgruntled employee. Neither course is a good one, as much for the employer as for the employee.

Fortunately, there are other examples:

• The prize-winning investigative reporter who broadens his interests and sharpens his writing on a fellowship and then wins a coveted three-year, West Coast writing assignment.

• The editorial writer who returns to her job fired up, a deeper thinker and a better writer, and quickly becomes editorial page editor.

• The Washington reporter whose boss promotes her to bureau chief at the end of her fellowship.

• GThe copy desk chief who nurtures a budding interest in technology during her fellowship year and returns to supervise high-tech business coverage at her newspaper.

For them, the fellowship experience is a positive and enduring one. And the employer wins as well, having given some real thought to how best to channel the staffer's fellowship experience into productive paths.

These are the kinds of journalists who return from a fellowship and go on to win prizes and promotions, honoring both themselves and their news organizations.

For the print editor or the broadcast news director who wonders what journalists really get out of a fellowship, the case of reporter Eileen Welsome is instructive.

Welsome, who won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for her stunning series in the Albuquerque Tribune on secret 1940s government experiments in which doctors injected unwitting patients with plutonium (see "Radiation Redux," March 1994), was a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University in 1991-92.

She'd discovered the existence of the experiments before going to Stanford but had never been able to crack the secrecy surrounding the patients' identities. After her fellowship, she returned to work and resumed her long-stymied efforts. Her bosses went along with her, somewhat reluctantly and sometimes diverting her with other assignments.

But at least they didn't stop her, and she persisted, driven by the inspiration of her fellowship. While at Stanford she thought about new ways to attack the story. After she returned she consulted with a history professor who had expertise in circumventing government secrecy.

Welsome enrolled in several creative writing and poetry classes that turned out to be immensely valuable back at work when she sat down to write the wrenching stories of the patients. The class, she said, "helped me break the mold of writing strictly as an investigative reporter."

Most of all, she said, "the fellowship gave me the time and determination to figure out some things.

"What really helped me, too, was being around the other fellows. Some of them had accomplished great things in journalism, and I thought that if they [could] do that, so could I. I was exposed to a group of people I'd never been around at my own small newspaper."

To the boss who hates to let a staffer apply for a fellowship for fear he or she won't return, or simply because it's a headache to cope with the temporary absence, look at it this way: Someone who wants to apply for a fellowship has something in the mind and heart that's driving the search for a new experience. If you don't go along, all you'll do is wind up with a frustrated staffer who may start looking around.

Say yes; you may benefit enormously. And if the staffer eventually does leave you for a better job at another news organization, take it philosophically; you've at least gotten temporary benefits from the fellowship – a refreshed and recharged employee – that you would have missed if that staffer had left instead of applying.

Welsome's plutonium experiment story has earned her fame and a book contract, and she recently left the Albuquerque Tribune. Even so, that small newspaper had the services of a top reporter for two years after her fellowship, during which time she achieved her greatest success and brought reflected glory to the paper.

To the boss who has an employee on a fellowship: Start thinking from the day the fellowship year begins what you're going to do with that person at the end of the year. Let your staffer enjoy the fellowship, free from the pressures of the daily grind.

But get in touch occasionally. Find out what courses are being taken, what thoughts are percolating, what professional desires are emerging. Then do whatever you can to make the right opportunity available to that staffer when the year ends, even if you have to create a new beat or shake up your editing structure.

You may have an incipient Eileen Welsome on your staff. Don't blow it when she comes back from her fellowship. l