Assessing your newsroom’s workflow gaps
What are your organization’s gaps in producing and publishing continuously to meet audience needs? Take these assessments to find out.
Most of the important things we can do to improve audience, revenue, and mission performance revolve around the daily work of the staff, which is a newsroom’s greatest resource: What should we do? Who should do it? When should we do it? And how should we do it?
What are your organization’s gaps in producing and publishing continuously to meet audience needs? Take these assessments to find out.
Legacy newspaper enterprises have a significant number of already employed folks who must learn specific new skills, behaviors, attitudes and working relationships.
It’s critically important to define — with the right level of specificity — the roles and skills you need.
Compare where you are now versus what’s required. Here’s a sample questionnaire for your staff.
This section focuses on how you must hold already employed staffers accountable for specific results that arise from learning, practicing and excelling at required skills, behaviors, attitudes and working relationships.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Learn how these Table Stakes coaches are advising their teams and what tools they are using to move them toward progress.
Managing change is hard, especially in depleted news organizations serving communities often suspicious of their work. But it’s not impossible, as these Detroit business leaders explained to a room of local news publishers.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Learn how these Table Stakes coaches are advising their teams and what tools they are using to move them toward progress.
The New York Times has created training materials to help its journalists work better with data. You can use them in your newsroom too.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: As part of a newsroom reorganization, The Philadelphia Inquirer built an audience development team to support its transition to a digital subscription business. It’s a team anchored by versatility and diversification. We wanted to create a data-informed newsroom (not data-led, as solid news judgment is just as important as ever) to achieve responsible reach and loyalty at scale for its journalism.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Detroit Free Press found a better way to serve one of its key audience segments — people hungry for coverage of the auto industry — than running a standard serialized project.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Miami Herald rewrote job descriptions for online producers — turning their role into “growth editors” — and empowered them to work with editors and reporters to focus on audience in assigning, reporting and producing stories.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Bay Area News Group streamlined communication using Slack by creating three #bigstory channels — announcement, feeds, and logistics. The process simplified how editors and reporters communicate during big, breaking stories. It also created sub-channel threads to keep the conversations separate and easy to follow.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Dallas Morning News dramatically improved headlines — and their performance — by letting everyone in on the action
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: Use annual events to experiment with storytelling approaches, form audience/content teams, and stretch resources.
A crowdsourced list of the most important skills journalists can teach themselves
Hold already employed folks accountable for results; identify, attract, hire and onboard new folks – then hold them accountable for results; and partner and/or use independent contractors – and hold them accountable for results.
Performance is the primary objective of change, not change. Instead of asking folks to commit to attending headline or tweeting training, get them to commit to specific performance results that depend on excellent headline writing or tweeting.
The game of 21st century news and information is dynamic. Senior leaders must regularly step back to evaluate the shifts happening.