RTDNA: New Name, Expanded Mission

Last month, with the flip of two letters, the Radio-Television News Directors Association -- better known as the RTNDA -- became the RTDNA, the Radio Television Digital News Association. It marked the second name change in the organization's history, which was founded in 1946 as the National Association of Radio News Directors. It embraced television and became RTNDA in 1952.

By whatever combination of those five letters, RTDNA is the world's largest organization for TV and radio journalists representing professionals in the United States and in more than 20 other countries.

The new economic realities have impacted the organization. Attendance at the annual convention has declined over the years. Exhibitors have slowly faded away. The financial burden for convention support, awards and organization membership has shifted from companies to individual managers and newsroom staffers.

And with the departure of longtime president Barbara Cochran earlier this year, an executive director now runs the association on a day-to-day basis and the onus of leadership has fallen to the elected chairman.

The current chairman is Stacey Woelfel, an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism and news director of KOMU, the Mizzou-owned NBC affiliate in Columbia.

In this interview with TVNewsCheck Contributing Editor Tom Petner, Woelfel says he wants to reach out to "all electronic journalists, including the newest members of our newsrooms working on the digital platforms." Along those lines, he also talks about the RTDNA's efforts to break down the traditional barriers that have separated broadcast and print journalism and efforts to stage a joint national convention with the Society of Professional Journalists in 2011.

And he offers up his thoughts on the prospects of a federal shield law and the return of the fairness doctrine and his visions for the two-tiered newsrooms and two-tiered local news markets.

An edited transcript:

You did some alphabet magic with the organization's name. What's that all about? 

News directors and news managers have always been an important part of our membership. But we saw an increasing number of reporters and other people who weren't news managers, but we're still interested in our training, our code of ethics and things like that. So we were having trouble saying we were a news director's association, when we really felt we were a news organization overall.

We were also seeing other people in newsrooms who weren't radio or television journalists, who were online, digital or multimedia journalists. They also were using our resources and benefiting from what we had to offer. So we were looking for a way to include them. 

We spent quite a bit of time in board meetings over the last few years and we ran names up and down the flagpole. Ultimately, we ended up with this letter swap in the middle of the name, which I thought was brilliant when I heard it, because it still allowed us to keep that RTNDA brand. It was an instant hit.

You mentioned the RTDNA goes beyond news directors and managers. What do you think is the new face of the organization? Is there a generational difference? Is it cross-platform?

Generational is always a pet topic of mine. I have written a few things for the association and other places about millennials. I work almost exclusively with millennials in my newsroom, so I have a great laboratory here to watch. One of the things I have noticed about them is that they are joiners, certainly more than the gen-x folks or baby boomers. They like memberships, clubs, cliques and groups and so I saw an opportunity there to take a meaningful, professional organization and say to a whole fresh group of recruits that the RTDNA is worth joining. A lot of our training and communications efforts have been aimed at that group.

We have jumped in with both feet to be on Facebook and Twitter and reach people that way. So we're trying to reach them in the places where they already are.

On the cross-platform side, one of our goals in the name change was to go beyond just radio and television. Our own newsrooms have changed to become 24-hour-a-day publishing centers that aren't just driven by those broadcasting deadlines. We're trying to reach out and serve those people who are manning the guns all night long to put those things together.

As we get ready to have a partnership with SPJ and try to put together a convention with them in a couple of years, we can see people at newspapers, bloggers and people who do things with video, audio and digital publishing who could benefit from what we do.

That's a perfect segue. Will the organization be combining the conventions with the SPJ?

We are working to make that happen. There are still a lot of details to work out. We're working on a location and the finances. I know that the SPJ board and our board are very eager to make this happen. I hope we can announce the location and some other things before too very long.