Role

News Associate/Reporter

• 50% time as a Reporter
  • Writes her original story
  • Interviews people in person or on phone
  • Writes that her editor assigned to her
• 50% time as a News Associate
  • Watches people on air, transcribes the comments, and turns it into a story
  • Takes a wire story and formats it into Toolbelt
  • Takes a story from partners (e.g. New York Times) and formats it into Toolbelt
  • Gathers from other resources

Goal

Make the story look good that person would click and read the story to the end

• Wants everything to show up correctly, of course
• Wants it to be interactive and engaging

Experience

A year and a half with CNBC

• Half a year as an intern
• About a year as full-time News Associate

Worked with USA Today before joining CNBC

Day-to-Day Work

• Catch up with news
  • Slack
  • Convo
  • CNBC Homepage
  • Email
  • Personal email: subscription to tech news
    • TechCrunch
    • Recode
    • Fortune
• Update pages (Market)
  • In charge of Market & Gold pages
  • Refer to FactSet or iNews, see how the market is doing at the moment, check any updates on Gold market
  • Take CNBC’s Gold story and update it with the latest information
    • Make sure all the tickers are there
    • Make sure all the videos are the most updated
    • e.g. switch out a day old video
• Talk to the editor (9~9:30 AM)
  • About the stories that she’ll work on for the day
• Check in with Hot Seat
  • Hot Seat: Breaking news coordinator
  • See if there’s anything to help
  • Get ideas from them, e.g. if they have any tech-related coverage planned
• Write something from on-air, something stock-related
  • e.g. Activision and Blizzard gaming company stock is moving a lot (8/16)
• Write something in longer term
  • e.g. how Amazon put pilot episodes on YouTube and how that will affect their overall business strategy
  • Go through the past stories she has written and see if she called about the topic before
  • See what other people are saying about the topic
• Grab wires or Partner stories
  • From USA Today or New York Times
  • Knows there’s a way to pull in the ingested stories, but she usually just starts with the blank template and completely recreate it in Toolbelt
  • Usually takes about 10 minutes to template a Partner story if there aren’t charts
• Create Templates for upper-level people
  • e.g. templates Patti Domm stories

Communications

• Direct supervisor & editor: 10 times a day, online & in person
  • Asks if the chart in the Partner Story needs to be recreated and included in the story
  • Gets the original story edits
• Other editors: someone who edits stock market news, and she writes for tech. Interacts sometimes
• Hot Seats: many times a day
• Photo Desk: Request photos
  • Usually takes about 10~15 minutes for them to get back
  • If it’s something specific, e.g. not a famous person, Apple Watch that’s running Windows, etc., 20~25 minutes
  • Might have to request to specific outlet or person
  • They are now more particular about wanting to match the image with headline, e.g. “soaring stock” -> airplane soaring
• No official meetings, mostly Slack channel interaction

Prioritization

• Flexible schedule, depends on the Breaking News
  • e.g. Microsoft bought LinkedIn, Brexit
• Refers to the Google Doc for News Assignment section, lists out everything that they are doing that day. Helps the editor to know people’s workload and who to assign the task to.

Often-used Content Type and Features

Content Type

• News Story Contemplates
  • Creates templates for verticals
  • Creates Partner Stories from the existing partner story contemplates
  • Technology Contemplates, generic Partner Story Contemplates, specific partner’s Partner Story Contemplates (e.g. USA Today)

Franchise

• Technology
• Gold

Features

• Primary Assets & Related Assets sections
  • Make appropriate associations
• Hyperlinks for Stock ticker information

Pain Points

•  Search
  • Toolbelt is so big that the search result includes so many things
    • e.g. “Ledecky” will give all of her pictures, assets, wire stories, etc.
  • It’s difficult to find things without the Toolbelt ID.
  • Workaround: For published content, will just Google search “cnbc.com: “. For unpublished content, goes to In Progress section in Google Doc and get the IDs from there.
  • Even “Stock” and “Stocks” give different results
• Multiple communication channels & prioritizing
  • Monitoring a lot of different things now, and sometimes feels like missing important things
  • There is no difference in the notification from important ones vs. non-important
    • e.g. bosses message vs. random gossip
    • e.g. Notification on Convo about her own beat
  • Thinks it’s the way Slack is set up and she doesn’t have control over it
• Copy and paste long articles
  • There are empty paragraph boxes create in between all the paragraphs when copy+pasting from other sources
  • Have to manually remove them, even for breaking news
• Scroll back and forth for Franchises
  • e.g. Have a word “Venture Capital” in the story, wants to hyperlink within the story. Then she has to scroll all the way down to Assets section, take the ID, scroll all the way up to find the word Venture Capital, then paste it in the hyperlink dialog box, or use the search with ID and drag and drop it in the hyperlink dialog box.
  • Especially hard for longer stories
• Can’t prioritize the Primary and Related assets
  • Hard to find which asset needs the image changed
• Difficult to request photos when she is writing her story
  • Writes the headline the last, and the Photo Desk tries to match the photo with the headline. Sometimes have to wait for the photos to come when the article is ready to go
  • Sometimes the editor would change the headline and would have to request photos again
• No easy way to insert new body group in the middle of the article
  • e.g. Need to insert a chart asset in the body, then she would have to collapse the body groups, create a new body, drag it into the right place, copy the text from the other body group, reassign the image, etc.
  • Sometimes it’s easier to start over the article
• Can’t simply drag to rearrange/swap the assets
  • Have to get the ID of the asset, delete the asset, search with ID again, and drop it in the right place
• Mobile preview isn’t really accurate on Desktop, and she can’t use Toolbelt on mobile
• Sometimes takes a while for an article to save
  • Need to save once every couple sentences
• Filter screen doesn’t show up when the window is small
• Filter is not that helpful
  • e.g. if she doesn’t remember what Content Type she brought the chart in as: Chart, Image, or Wild Card
  • Keeps a separate Google Sheet to track all the charts’ IDs
•  Bugs
  • Sometimes the changed categorization of assets in the Primary/Related Assets section doesn’t save.
  • Franchise would be floating in the middle sometimes when dragging and dropping it in the story

Wants

• Prioritize Primary and Related Assets
  • Wants to prioritize by importance
  • Wants to put all the Franchises first, then images, then links to other stories, to see which assets are already in
• Simple way to rearrange and swap assets
• Autosave
• Predictive Search, smarter search
  • Wants result to show up if there’s a typo in the name
• Popular search result to appear first in the list
  • e.g. Investing franchise is used often, but it’s on page 4

 Tools & Software

News sources

• FactSet
  • Graphs and stock information, analyst notes. In-depth, real-time market information
• iNews
  • Wires
• They take up a lot of memory

Management

• Google Docs: list of everyone’s assignments and all of the stories that are published with Toolbelt IDs
  • Sections
    • In Progress
    • Published
    • Ranked to US Homepage
  • Sometimes stories are written prior, and someone will tell her to update the story
• Google Sheet: list of all the IDs of the charts
• Emails herself, use RSS feed to keep track

Communication

• Slack
  • Quick communication
  • Now used to post the link to the article instead of Toolbelt
• Convo
• Email
  • To ask for photos

Videos

• Volicon
  • Cloud for videos within IE. internal feeds when she needs to listen to someone on TV
• Stratus
  • Has raw files
  • Uses to listen to conference calls

Chart

• Highcharts
• Datawrapper
• Can customize more / theme with CNBC blue with these tool compared to the Chart asset in Toolbelt

Other

• Google Docs to take interview notes – to be able to access from home

Work Behaviors & Rules

• Pre-prepares the template for herself with the most common assets that she uses for an article
• For SEO purposes, have to put in 5 Primary Assets
• Switches out bullhorned image of an asset based on the content
  • e.g. Happy Jack Dorsey for Twitter stock going up, Sad Jack Dorsey for stock going down because of his saying negative things on conference call
• Google Doc format: Last Name: Title (source)
  • e.g. Balakrishnan: These big tech stocks can still make you rich (USA Today)
• Request image to Photo Desk with title and URL of the article
  • If it’s a technology story, give more specific requests
• Slug format: 2~3-words-description SOURCE yymmdd LOCATION
  • e.g. Tech Stocks USAT 160816 EC
  • If the article is written by herself, writes her last name in the place of source
• Partner Stories expire in 3 months
• Original story needs to get the higher SEO ranking
• Set almost all the links to open in the new tab
• Character limits: 80 for Headline, 40 for Shorter Headline, 30 for Shortest Headline, 60 for Title
• Write the longer original story in Google Doc, but write short and urgent stories directly in Toolbelt
• Tries to include many assets and engage audience
• Will save once after every couple sentences

Miscellaneous

• Thinks it’s nice to have a lot of ways to customize the look of the article
  • e.g. blockquote, pull quote
• USA Today didn’t have automatically updating ticker assets in the CMS
  • Would have to go to the live URL and copy and paste
• Good that the character limits are displayed and gives you the warning
• Franchise and Primary Asset sections’ quick buttons are cool, but it’s rare that she actually adds a ticker in the Primary Asset bucket
  • Adding ticker within the story would automatically add it in the Primary Asset bucket
  • It’s rare to add a ticker that’s not in the story already