Put together a publishing plan by platform
Douglas K. Smith, Quentin Hope, Tim Griggs, Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative,This is an excerpt from “Table Stakes: A Manual for Getting in the Game of News,” published Nov. 14, 2017. Read more excerpts here.
You should be as intentional about your plan for how best to publish across your chosen platforms as you are about the selection, experimentation and management of any given platform. Publishing plans for each platform begin with the audience in mind, not the platform per se. The difference is subtle but important. Avoid defining your audience by the platform you use (“Our audience is Twitter users.”). Instead, define how you use a platform to better serve an audience (“We use Twitter to reach an audience that’s hungry for breaking news and the doings of prominent local personalities.”).
A plan for publishing across platforms includes the following elements:
- Target audiences
- Content types
- Story forms
- Voice
- Frequency of posting: weekdays, weekends, special events, seasons of the year
- Timing of posting
- Forms of promotion and “boosting”
- Relative priority and resource commitment
- Responsibilities for producing and publishing
- Traffic/engagement/brand/economic/financial/other objectives
Audience teams should take the lead on these plans in collaboration with the “continuous news desk” (or equivalent) and the platform owner (see the next section, “designate platform owners.”).