Role

Site Production Director

• Work with all the different digital departments
  • Writers & Editors
  • Strategic Content
  • Product & Development
• Talk to Product Managers to improve web & video products and Toolbelt

Work function in the team

• small 3-people team
• One producer
  • Media creation, e.g. data visualization, charts, graphics
  • Long-form special reports, e.g. top states for business
• Another producer
  • Breaking News
  • Operate as editorial trainer – get new hires up to speed with Toolbelt, explain the workflow

Day-to-day Work

Depends on how the editorial teams flow

• When there is a problem, editorial teams tend to come to them first before going to the technical team
• Package stories together in a higher view
• Help the people when their knowledge is limited in creating certain things on the site

Communication

• TV operation teams
  • When there are special needs for the show franchises
  • e.g. wants to redesign the entire television section, had to rethink the web templates and processes to updating content – any meetings and back and forth, testing
  • Troubleshoot when the content isn’t updating
• Technology team
  • Agile meetings – planning for show times
  • Product Manager comes for editorial feedback on templates, new homepage design, etc.
  • Feedback on process: would the new design of the template affect the editorial resources?
  • Slack channel to give feedback on Toolbelt

Prioritization

• Breaking News or live issues, unless there are a group of people working on it already
• Publishing content first
• Other longer term projects in the downtime
  • e.g. Visualization producer works with Strategic Content team on their next few upcoming features

Often-used Content Type and Features in Toolbelt

Franchise

• Market
• Make It

Features

• Feed
  • Pull from content by tags and surface it on the sections and the landing pages
• Mark-ups like Company, Security, Chart
  • Solve other teams’ problems, e.g. can’t find the Company asset to link to, tag ticker, show charts
• Configuration
  • Ability to see all the inherited Templates and Skins from the parent
• Parent tab
  • Browse the structure from the root
• History tab
• Versioning
  • Restore the past version in case people lose their work
• Scheduling
  • Publish over the weekend
  • Can publish a lot of content at the same time, e.g. articles on 50 states
  • Unpublish Wire stories
• Virtual Output List configuration
  • Automatically fills with search results
  • No need to manually configure the output list for the Franchise

Content Type

• Skins
  • Responsible to set these up
  • Integrate Javascript code
• Wild Card
  • Useful for one-time code
  • Flexible – TV teams don’t know the structure of the templates
• Usage Rule
  • Use for premium contents – mostly on story level
  • Use for syndication contents – DO NOT SYNDICATE rule
• Templates
  • Sets brand-specific looks
• Promotional Package
  • Allows the creation of content placement that is not ad or in Toolbelt
  • Used more in the past to promote different franchises
  • e.g. Chartbeat asset with the most popular item on the homepage
  • Ability to set up search criteria, e.g. only show up in specific section or on article with specific tags
• Editorial Search
  • Used in Configuration – Feed section
  • Can set search criteria and filters, e.g. tags, date range, published state
• Webservice
  • Embed services like YouTube or Instagram
• WebResource
  • Instance of URL
  • Create a rankable asset on pages
  • Fill in Promotional Headlines and image

Pain Points

• Takes a long time to get information on how successful things are
  • Even with tools like Omnishare, it takes a long time to dig deep and wait for it
  • Can’t look back a day or a week easily
  • Currently getting high-level information from Research team
• Hear complaints about:
  • Performance, functionality, and things that are not working that day
  • Speed of creating a story or slideshow
  • Not an easy workflow for story creation
  • Difficult to create stories with a lot of media assets embedded
  • Interface isn’t modern
    • Feels like a programmer put it together, only thinking about a lot of functionalities
  • In comparison with other CMSs, e.g. WordPress
  • Image assets are not visual
• Emphasis on things that doesn’t make sense
  • e.g. Pull Quote per body takes up a lot of space
  • Project Management doesn’t serve any purpose
• Configuration tab isn’t necessary for the regular writers and causes confusion by existing
• Search is complicated and bloated
  • Difficult to find something that’s common
• Charting capabilities are limited
• Many fields are useless in the Skin asset
• Parent navigator is too slow
• Iconography is not that great, but knows which one is which
• It takes a while to create Webservice content type
  • Often times fall back to Wild Card

Wants

• Better metrics
• Some kind of reporting about the day’s performance
  • Wants the statistics information more transparent
  • Interested in engagement metrics:
    • Video plays
    • Unique visitor
    • Time spent
    • Page views, if ad campaigning
    • Reach and where they came from, for stories that have large social impact
• Integrate good charting engine into Toolbelt
• Better workflow for processing images quickly and creating variations of that on the fly, e.g. crops, full-size, etc.
• Strip out the things that are not relevant to the specific asset
• Archiving system
  • Doesn’t want to delete them, but doesn’t want the old items to show up in the search
  • Should be still searchable

Tools & Software

Communication

• Used to be on multiple channels – IMs, emails, iNews for TV teams
• Slack
  • For all digital teams
  • Huge lift – allows quick communication, share files & screens and push things around without worrying about distribution
  • Dedicated Slack channel to communicate about Toolbelt
    • Input for new ideas
    • Information about recent launches and things that would impact the editorial team

Charts

• Highcharts

Statistics

• Omnishare
• Chartbeat
  • Acts as a dashboard

Work Behavior & Rules

• Knows that Skin’s Primary Assets map to Desktop, and Related Assets to Mobile
• Usually creates a Franchise parent for representational things, e.g. Template, Skin
• Knows that the bullhorned item in the Output List of the Promo Package is being used as part of the package
• Typically set the Frequency of the Feed to Medium, sometimes Heavy depending on the importance

Miscellaneous

• Has been driving people to use Highcharts
• Eliminated a lot of meetings after new Executive Editor came
• Dropping in chart images and tagging became easier in Toolbelt
• Thinks most people probably feel that Toolbelt allows them to do the job pretty well
• New executive editor is very visual in how he likes to tell business news story
• Likes the flexibility of the ability to supplement or overwrite the existing style with Skin asset
• Usage Rules are mainly created by the tech team
• Prime Only Usage Rule is related to video syndication of the Prime team
• Likes the ability to target specific items in the Promo Package
• Can get Breaking News out quickly with Contemplates
• Important to have the flexibility to lock the stories being edited but also to have the ability to kick someone out in emergency