In an excerpt from his forthcoming book Journalism Next, Mark Briggs has this about the News Sentinel’s Tom Chester:
Tom Chester, news operations manager at the News-Sentinel, begins each weekday with a stand-up meeting in the newsroom. The first item on the agenda is a detailed report of content published and traffic generated the previous day. “We track updates on all platforms: web, mobile, email,” Chester said. “We started with almost nothing and now we’re up to about 500 updates per week.”
If newsroom leaders had simply announced at a staff meeting the need to learn new skills and publish more frequently to more platforms, little progress would have been made. Instead, the formerly print-centric newsroom – which has also published 3,000 videos since 2006 – has the structure in place to measure and manage the new content, the newsroom was able to show significant progress and build upon its successes.
Briggs succinctly calls this: “Track. Measure. Adapt.”
Measuring has become both a significant part of our newsroom culture and a significant driver for effecting change.
(News Sentinel photo by J. Miles Cary of Tom Chester putting up stats on our Visual Communication Center.)