Role

Managing Editor, CNBC Digital

• Oversee Make It and some new video projects
• Currently editing 8~12 stories per day
• Wouldn’t be doing much editing in the long term

Goal

To build a great site and build a new readership into CNBC

Make It Team

• Targets for broader, younger audience
• CNBC targets “hard-core investor, finance” people, whereas Make It goes for more of “average American”

Experience

3 months with CNBC

• Worked with Business Insider: Proprietary CMS
  • Similar to WordPress, easy to use
  • Easily embed things, embed tool at the top, move things around easily
• Forbes: on WordPress

Work function in the team

• 3 Reporters
  • One of which works on digital shows
• Part of digital video team – 6 people
• Hiring for Make It Editor

Day-to-day Work

• Answer emails
• Edit stories
  • Will change when there are full-time editors
  • Gets the story to be edited via Slack
• Go to meetings
  • Wednesdays: Visit EC once a week
  • Tuesdays: Team meeting
    • Discuss announcements
    • How they are pacing in sponsor projects
    • Story ideas

Communication

• Digital team
• Video team
• Special Projects team
• Little with TV producers and talent bookers
• Social team
  • Discuss strategy for Make It Social
  • Send the published stories to Social

Prioritization

• Newsworthiness
• How long it would take to edit

Often-used Content Type and Features in Toolbelt

Content Type

• News Stories
  • Edit the stories
• Images

Pain Points

• Clunky to open up the embedded image in a new tab to fix the caption
• Clunky and time-consuming to create and add images and assets inline
  • e.g. Story with 9 tweets – had to create assets for each, embed one by one
• There are a lot of steps in general
  • Need to remember which template to use, as well as the IDs
• Doing editing at home is difficult
  • VPN doesn’t work really well – cuts out when you are middle of editing
• Difficult to generate Newsletters based on the stories in Toolbelt
  • Long, complicated process
  • Generated based on the timestamp in Toolbelt – need to change the timestamp in the story to reorder the newsletter. Not ideal
• Sometimes forget to fill in fields in different tabs
  • e.g. Attribution – Source
  • Not sure of what all the fields do
• Need to remember a lot of things in a lot of steps
  • Have to move the video into Related Asset box in order to disable autoplay
  • Bullhorn the photo

Wants

• Just change the caption within the embedded screen
• Ability to embed a lot of visuals more easily
  • Helps targeting the younger audience
  • Just embed assets right into the story
  • Find the photos easily without Photo Desk’s help in off-hours
• More streamlined process
• Not needing a VPN to access Toolbelt
  • Would like typical login
• Easier way to create Newsletters
• Simplify the system
  • One page that has everything
    • Go down the page and make sure everything is checked off
  • Only include the fields that are absolutely necessary
  • Thinks it’s okay to learn things like autoplay rules and image bullhorning, etc., but worried for the new hires

Tools & Software

Communication

• Phone for meetings
• Slack
  • Receives the ID or preview of the article to be edited
• Email
• In-person

Schedule

• Make It Schedule Google Doc
  • Her own list of articles to edit and to-dos

Work Behaviors & Rules

• Make sure that the article isn’t too text-heavy
  • Break up with images and quotes
• Keeps a list of all the IDs of Make It & Partner Story templates

Miscellaneous

• All her team is in 1221 Avenue of America office, including the digital video team moving over
• Doesn’t work with Prime team that much, other than on certain sponsored series