Role

Site Producer

• Onboard people and have one-on-one session on how to use Toolbelt
  • Mainly News Story, and other parts depending on their job
• Acts as a resource
  • Offer his extension and how-to documentations
  • Checks the formatting of the article, e.g. spacing between two images, video autoplay, photo credits, etc.

Goal

Help others use Toolbelt

Day-to-day Work

• Looks at two different versions of the homepage
  • They have different popular stories
  • Still more people on the old homepage
• Moderates the comments and shapes dialogs
• Helps others with Toolbelt when they forget
  • Embedding video, chart, or PDF
• Works with Editorial team
  • Create custom things like Charts
  • Copy Editors to make corrections work right
• Moderates between developers & Soft-ops and Editorial
  • Reports to the former when new features don’t meet the expectation
  • Manage Editorial’s expectation
  • Connects them to the right quarters when there are problems
• Make the homepage format look good
  • Tell the right people when there are problems, e.g. typos, hanging words, etc.
  • Help Hot Seat to alleviate breaking news situation
• Catch if the good stories aren’t getting exposures on curated sections

Communication

• Technology & Product
  • When there are new ideas

Often-used Content Type and Features in Toolbelt

Franchise

• Market
  • Make updates 2~3 times a week
• Technology

Pain Points

• Have to tell the problems to other people instead of fixing them himself
  • Kicking people out is disruptive to the workflow
• Content isn’t always compatible on mobile
  • Most producers preview the content on Desktop
  • e.g. Mobile version doesn’t have bullet points
  • Fixed the problem by talking to the development and multiple groups, which was an organic process
• 3rd-party charting tools aren’t well integrated with Toolbelt
• Powerful franchises aren’t updated as often as they should be
  • e.g. It takes only 30 seconds ~ 2 minutes to update the franchise, but the articles from 3 hours ago is still promoted as recent when there are good stories published half an hour ago
  • Worries that people are struggling with the learning curve and are just not doing the quick things that would make the story better

Wants

• Drag in to create links
• Ability to embed assets in their optimal state
• Integrated environment in CMS to create visualized data assets
  • Without going through another service
• Powerful, search-driven feeds for the best franchises – configure franchises optimally with minimal editorial effort
  • Thinks it’ll slow the system down if they did it for all franchises

Tools & Software

Communication

• Slack
• Phone
• E-mail
• In-person
  • Sits on the ground floor

Work Behavior & Rules

• Formatting of the article
  • Separate out images so that they don’t appear on the same screen
  • Videos on the top will almost always autoplay
  • Don’t autoplay the videos in the body
• Be proactive on catching things that could be better on the site
• Refine the onboarding process to shorten it
• Make the new users to send the ID to their first story so he can give feedback

Miscellaneous

• Have been looking at ways to host and display PDF in a story. Uploading to Scribd right now and embed it in the story
• The team used to be under technology & product group
• Sometimes there is redundancy in communication, but that’s a blessing
• Some of the technology sections are manually curated by a technology editor. Need to let that person know when a story that’s worthy of being exposed
• Thinks Information Journalism is very important for CNBC
• Used to have free-form slugging which was prone to errors – now it copies from the headline