Role

Senior Editor, Data Journalism

• Presence on both TV and Web
• Interactive, data-driven assets, e.g. charts
• Manages The Big Crunch

Goal

Tell cool stories with various elements

Experience

2 years with CNBC

• Worked at Bloomberg before, used WordPress
  • Got emails of the status of the article
  • Could directly insert code
  • Franchises selected with checkboxes

Work function in the team

All three members write for the web

• Himself as Senior Editor
  • TV/Radio side
• Other two editors
  • Web only
  • Graphics and code

Day-to-day Work

• Typically work on multiple stories simultaneously
  • Have stories created in Toolbelt
• Work on stories
  • Interview people on phone
  • Analyze downloaded data
  • Write stories
• Talk on TV & radio
  • More data-driven than reporter interviews
• Write article related to the TV portion
  • More detailed
• Edit pre-recorded videos into packages

Communication

• Producer, video, photographer, camera, sound editor, etc.
  • For video package production
• News Editor
  • Emails the list of finished article to be edit with the summary and the title
  • The editor gets a Copy Editor to copy-edit the story
  • Once the edit is done, the editor emails back the live article URL
• Photo Desk
  • Get appropriate photos
• Social
  • Let them know the new article is ready to be shared on social
• Hot Seat
  • Let them know the new article is ready to be ranked on the homepage
• Video team

Often-used Content Type and Features in Toolbelt

Content Type

• Wild Card
  • Javascript and other code to create interactive charts/maps
  • Code from Highchart
  • Paste the code in “Wildcard Promo Text” field
• Chart
  • Upload image of charts
  • Doesn’t refocus the image depending on the size
• News Story
  • Embed assets, e.g. images, videos, audios, and social media
• Video
  • Insert the video in the stories with IDs
• WebService
  • YouTube Videos

Features

• Favorites
  • Often-used franchises and contemplates

Pain Points

• Using Wild Card asset is choppy sometimes
  • Putting a lot of code in a small box
  • Making sure that Toolbelt allows the code to work – can mess up on the server
• Sometimes Toolbelt can be slow to create a quick story
  • e.g. Quickly put a TV script to send off
  • Would need to create a template, fill out a number of fields and multiple steps
• Complicated, excessive, inflexible UI
  • Pull Quote takes up too much space when it doesn’t get used often
  • Too many pop-ups, e.g. hyperlinks
  • Checkboxes are tiny
  • Often use vertical monitor – Toolbelt doesn’t shrink accordingly and doesn’t show buttons, etc.
  • Thinks it discourages you from making the article as best as you can
• Can’t tab through the fields
• Can’t paste from Word, so pastes from plain text, but wants to preserve the formatting. At the same time, doesn’t want to write story from scratch in Toolbelt, as it is difficult to work with and afraid to lose all the work
• Doesn’t get notified what status the article is in
  • In Bloomberg, used to get email notification when status changed
  • Always need to notify the same group, but forgets to do so sometimes
• Had an external party complain about the video being published in video.cnbc.com without the accompanying article
  • For a video to be embedded in the news story, it needs to be published first, which goes live on the video landing
• Seems to take a long time to get the video out
• Folded Body group view doesn’t give much information on where the assets are
• No preview of the chart within the embedded body
• Prone to mistake with multiple steps
  • e.g. create chart in Excel and then in Illustrator, export to .png, upload as Chart, embed the Chart in the story, etc.
• Searching for different things in a single global search is annoying
  • e.g. Many things are called ‘Technology’, some old
• Uses Favorites to keep the often-used franchises, but it still runs over 4 pages
• No guideline on what the character limits are or what the ideal keyword is
  • No warning in the system
  • Until someone gives you feedback
• Sometimes don’t remember how to create different types of asset, and need to backtrack to the old articles to see how they did it before
• Preview doesn’t show the complete article
  • Deck doesn’t show up in Preview, only after publishing
  • Embedded tweet
• Seeing options and fields that they don’t need

Wants

• See and revert back to the old version of a News Story
• Know the status of the article better
• Way to prevent “naked” video floating around without the article
• Warning on story for publishing
  • Publishes other assets often, and can get lost and accidentally publish story
• Insert code directly rather than creating Wild Card
• Free-form editor in general
• Ability to choose image sizes, instead of spanning the entire column
• Some support for R & Python
• Contextual hyperlink option
  • e.g. Medium editor
• Overall layout to look similar to the page
• Sort the search result by popularity
• Update the system with new SEO/character limit guidelines

Tools & Software

Charts

• Highcharts
  • Create interactive charts
• Illustrator
  • Create .png of charts

Data

• Web Scraper
  • To collect and download data online
• R & Python
  • Analyze data

Communication

• Slack
  • Recently got on for instant messaging while editing
• Email

Documents

• Microsoft Word
• Microsoft Excel

TV

• iNews

Work Behavior & Rules

• Doesn’t touch the article that another team member is editing
• Opens preview with the ID and preceding cnbc.com/preview URL in the new tab
• Creates charts in advance
• Tries to create asset in Toolbelt as fast as possible so that he can share the link around
• Work off of previous charts’ code to create new chart

Miscellaneous

• Likes the Inline Chart option in the text editor
  • Any change in the Chart asset would be automatically updated
• Doesn’t think that a CMS can handle all their chart needs
• Majority of the traffic comes from Homepage, not social
• Can insert linebreak code in deck