Role

Hot Seat: Assistant Managing Editor
In charge of Hot Seat/Breaking News team

• Drives traffic on the web, decides where to put the content, decides how important it is
  • When the news breaks:
    • Do we need to get on that?
    • If so, where do we want to put it on the homepage?
  • Story comes from all the different teams
    • staff
    • TV writeups
    • Wires, Partner stories

Goal

• Get the news out
• Present the site to get as many viewers as possible
• Inform the readers about the things they care about

Experience

Worked as Hot Seat Editor for 2 and a half years

Day-to-Day Work

• Writes the headline for breaking news banner
• Sends push notification
• Manages Homepage queue
  • Decides which ones go up, and which to take out
  • Assigns the story that got taken out to a different franchise, e.g. U.S. News page, I-box, Best of
• Manages Breaking News queue
• Manages a couple of key boxes
  • e.g. Investing, a.k.a. I-box
  • Best Of: Re-promote the stories that performed well in the past few days
• Display Watch Live orange banner
• Update homepage’s upper right corner to promote big guests coming on TV
• Manages International franchise during International team’s off-hours
  • Noon – 7pm
  • Flip lead stories
  • Add international news that U.S. team covered
• Goes through 200~300 stories a day
  • Aiming for more volume – double
• Busy on Earnings days & when big news breaks
  • e.g. Lochte

Team shift

• 4 Hot Seats, 2~4 hours a day
  • 5:30 AM~9:30 AM, a.k.a. Zero Dark Thirty
  • 9:30 AM~1:30PM
  • 3:30 PM~7:30PM, starts before the market closes
• Recently changed to 4-people shift, will shift to 3-people shift when someone is on vacation

Task by shift

• Zero Dark Thirty
  • Redress the page to take out irrelevant international articles
  • Looks for important U.S. News to pull in that international team didn’t
  • Grab big stories from public newspapers, which finish their publication at 6AM
  • Grab important stories on Earnings, which comes out as early as 5:30AM before the bell
  • Any other big stories before the bell
  • Writes up stories herself
  • Cleans up Wire stories
    • Clean up templating
    • Change the main franchise from Wires to relevant topic
    • Hyperlink Person and Place assets, delete the irrelevant links
    • Un-bullhorn the story – all comes in as bullhorned
    • Add art
    • Write better headline
  • Pull in important videos
  • Make sure 2 PRO stories and 2 videos are available on the homepage
  • Work with embeds in each TV shows, and put up Breaking News for big guests, set up artwork, etc.
  • Work with interns and News Associates
    • They help with Partner story grabs and writeups

Communication

• Production team
  • Asks for Breaking News templates when running low
• TV embeds
• Interns & News Associates
• Copy Desk
  • Asks to prioritize the breaking stories

Prioritization

• Breaking News, scoop, and exclusives get moved quicker

Often-used Content Type and Features in Toolbelt

Franchise

• US Top News and Analysis (Homepage) Queue/Franchise
  • 1st story: lead, biggest on the page
  • 2nd~7th stories: on the right side
  • 8th story: almost a second lead
  • Featured: Top stories
  • Secondary: Bigger photos and presentation
• Breaking News Queue/Franchise
  • Both red banner and push notification on mobile
  • Uses the templates the production teams create in advance
• Highlights Franchise
  • Don’t Miss film strip on the right rail of the old homepage
  • Lighter, photo-heavier stories
• International Franchise

Feature

• Queue tab
  • Gets Breaking News Draft Saved Search
• Favorites: Saves the frequently used queues
•  Search
  • Search for Person and Place assets to hyperlink

Pain Points

• Managing 2 different homepage designs
  • Knows it’s temporary
• The homepage queue doesn’t show all the assets that go up on the new homepage in a single page
  • Have to go through the queue to select which one to take out, but need to hit Save or Publish every time to go to a different page to not lose the changes
• Have to juggle with several IDs to replace stories in the homepage queue
  • ID of the story to remove from the queue and add to new franchise
  • ID of the story to add to the queue
  • Harder to do so with the longer homepage and pagination
• Slack communication is too much
  • Million channels
  • Deletes the app entirely when on break
• Getting fully templated story published takes too long
  • 15~30 seconds to get a headline up
  • 5 minutes minimum to get fully templated, fully with art, etc. all nice and ready to go
  • Too long to get SEO out
• Always opting in for ‘Open in the new tab’
  • All the links are being opened in the new tab
• Assigning Franchise is cumbersome
  • Takes several steps to search and assign
  • The screen has to be centered on Franchise section to drop the asset in
  • Needs to drop at a very specific spot

Wants

• Homepage queue to show all the assets in the Output List in a single page, not paginated
• Open links in the new tab by default
• Anything that would streamline the process of posting the story
• System recommending the Franchise, Person, Place assets
  • Wire story has these configured when it comes in
• Better workflow for assigning Franchise
  • There can be only one Franchise, so replace the one that’s already there if a new one is being dragged in – might cause problems for other people
  • Or allow multiple Franchises in there, but bullhorn the most important Franchise
• Photo workflow to accommodate the new homepage better
  • Currently, only the bullhorned photo shows up on the homepage
  • With the new photo-centric design, would be better to just promote any photo in the article by default
• First and second lead to consistently show up together on both homepage and mobile

Tools & Software

Documents

• Running list in Google Doc
  • Stories that are coming
  • Stories that are in editing process
• How-to guide
  • How to build a CNBC.com template
  • How to do Earnings

Wire story sources

•  iNews
  • Specific to business news
  • See things other editors mark as priorities
  • Can’t really search well, so use it as running bulletin
•  NewsEdge
  • All the wires from partners
  • Search for topics

Communication

• Slack
  • Has cut down emails
  • Currently mainly communicates with the developers of the new homepage
  • A lot to manage
• Convo: face all day
  • Slack that TV side uses
  • Gets comments from TV personnels on TV-related stories
• Everyone that works with Hot Seat sits within yelling distance
• Phone call
  • TV embeds

Social

• Dataminr
  • Software that uses algorithms to identify tweets that it thinks might go viral
  • e.g. Kanye, any tweets with the word “explosion” or “school evacuation” or “Did anybody else feel that earthquake?”
  • Just have to figure out when it’s time to tune in and get on a story
  • Found out about the flooding in Baton Rouge on Dataminr: redid our first story with the photos from Dataminr
• TweetDeck
  • Personally creates list to follow journalists and look out for breaking stories
  • e.g. Separate list for few hours when there was a shooter alert in Bethany College

Work Behaviors & Rules

• Try to give stories as much eyeballs as possible
• Don’t show the same stories in two different places on the homepage
• Homepage queues
  • Right now, there are two different homepage designs to manage, so consider both designs when configuring the homepage queue
  • Include a couple of PRO stories, as well as a couple of videos
  • Keep an eye on what’s the 8th story, as it gets great traffic
• Breaking News Criteria
  • News judgment is part of the Hot Seat’s job
    • Constantly tuning the news judgment with the new leadership
  • Anything affecting the market
  • 5 or more people dying
  • People dying tied to a bigger name
  • e.g. if a plane is landing and it can’t bring its landing gear down, assign someone to watch it and be ready, build template, etc.
• Have Breaking News Franchise open at all times during Hot Seat shift
• Package up similar stories or stories that have different take on the same issue together

Miscellaneous

• Old vs. New homepage
  • Old shows both headline and deck, new only shows the headline
• Viral stories get viral independent from the homepage configuration
• The old Breaking News items never get touched, and Breaking News queue just gets longer
• Embeds: people who are embedded in each television show to write up the big guests, and do the coverage on CNBC exclusives
• Likes the new homepage
  • Shows more content, and gives longer lives to stories
• Likes the drag and drop feature of Toolbeltfh