Almost all of the levers we can pull to improve newsroom performance revolve around the daily work of the staff, which is a newsroom’s greatest resource.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Seattle Times’ successful newsroom mentorship program boosts staff engagement and contributes to professional development.
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.
Here’s an idea to steal and adapt: The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel created — and continually updates — a list of newsroom activities that don’t contribute to its audience-centric strategy in an effort to find time and resources to devote to more meaningful tasks.
A crowdsourced list of the most important skills journalists can teach themselves