How to Add 100 Writers to Your Staff
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
1 like•243 views
Transforming a Classroom into a Newsroom
Recommended
More Related Content
Viewers also liked
Viewers also liked (16)
Similar to How to Add 100 Writers to Your Staff
Similar to How to Add 100 Writers to Your Staff (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
How to Add 100 Writers to Your Staff
- 1. How to Add 100 Writers to Your News Staff
- 2. How to Add 100 Writers to Your News Staff Transforming a Classroom into a Newsroom
- 4. 2013 Staffing • 3 full time news staff members • 1 temporary staff member working 20 hours per week • 1 student employee Output • 165 stories for state release • 51 stories for local release • 50 garden radio programs
- 5. 2014 Staffing Changes • Lost 1 temporary employee • Lost 1 full-time employee to retirement News Unit 2014 • 2 full time news staff members • 1 student employee
- 6. New Game Plan for 2014 • Drop 10 year old radio show airing only on single public radio station. • Focus on crafting stories of state and national interest • Increase story production • Develop stand alone news site for Alabama Extension
- 7. The vision—a new story from Alabama Extension Monday through Friday Tailored for state, regional and national release
- 8. The vision—a new story from Alabama Extension Monday through Friday Tailored for state, regional and national release
- 9. How are we going to manage this? What were we thinking?
- 12. Partnership with Auburn University School of Communication & Journalism • All Public Relations majors must take Style & Design in PR Messages • Usually two sections per semester with 15-18 students per section • Style & Design in PR Messages faculty need outlets for which students can write • Style & Design students need content for final class projects • Extension Communications and Marketing became a client for Style & Design students
- 13. How It Works • Develop story idea list • Visit each section • Guide students • Make final edit • Schedule stories for publication
- 15. 2015 ExtensionDaily.com Staffing • 2 Full-time Staff Members • 1 Temporary Staff Member • 4 Student Employee Writers • 93 Student Writers
- 16. 2015 ExtensionDaily.com Staffing • 2 Full-time Staff Members • 1 Temporary Staff Member • 4 Student Employee Writers • 93 Student Writers Production 323 Stories Published
- 17. 2015 ExtensionDaily.com Staffing • 2 Full-time Staff Members • 1 Temporary Staff Member • 4 Student Employee Writers • 93 Student Writers Production 323 Stories Published So What? Is Anybody Reading the Stories?
- 18. Visitors To ExtensionDaily.com • 92.9K visits • 133K page views • Average visit lasted 5m 33s per visit & viewed 1.43 pages
- 21. Where are Visitors Coming From?
- 22. Where are Visitors Coming From?
- 23. Other Ways Stories Are Used • 1 to 2 stories per week sent out to media • Meltwater • Auburn University • Some outlets now regularly scraping site for content • AgFax.com • Growing America sites • Farms.com • Small dailies and weeklies across Alabama
- 24. Other Ways Stories Are Used • 3 to 5 stories featured on Alabama Extension main page • Rotating banner • Agents are submitting to their local papers • As is • Scraping for column material • Alabama county Extension offices • Websites • E-newsletters • Content for Social Media Accounts
- 25. Questions? Maggie Lawrence, News Unit Manager Communications and Marketing Department lawremc@auburn.edu 334.844.5687
Editor's Notes
- FACT: Every Extension Communications and Marketing Unit could use more staff. There always seems to be more work than hands to get it done. Challenge for news units is how to cover timely, breaking news, write strong features and write the daily grind of announcement and post event stories that need to be done. FACT: Gone are the days of feeling good if we got one or two releases published in a week. Thanks to mobile technology—people want their news sources providing them with new content on an hourly or at worst a daily basis. Communications and Marketing knew that we needed help to fill the demand for news and fresh feature content.
- The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results. That is essentially what we had been doing for the last few years in C&M. We were pushing news out via our main Alabama Extension web page. We were not effectively reaching a large amount of media within the state. A consultant some years before had convinced leadership that we should only focus on major dailies and let field staff work with small dailies and weeklies. So as a result—we were sending releases to field staff/county coordinators in hopes that they would reach out to their local media. Success with major outlets was spotty at best---we are an Extension only shop and unless we had a strong news hook—we were more likely to be squeezed out by research stories or something sexier. But mobile technology was changing the media and news consumption habits of our clients. Whopping 86% of people aged 18 to 29 have a smart phone, the survey by the Pew Research Center found. That compares with 83% of those ages 30 to 49. All told, 68% of adults have a smartphone.
- Let’s take a look at what our unit accomplished in 2013. Did not include in this blog posts in support of the garden show, 4-H event releases where we sent essentially the same release to every county with just the county’s winners/participants changing, op-eds that were ghost written, and various writing projects for publications such as annual reports/fact sheets and the like. Temporary staff member wrote stories but also created mini-annual reports for each of Alabama Extension’s primary program teams. Our new department head Emery Tschetter came on board in October 2013.
- Entire department was evolving under new leadership. Tackling new projects and technologies. That kind of change almost always brings changes in staffing. Even with reduced staffing—news unit was excited about possibilities of what we could do. But most importantly we knew that we had to change what we were doing and set some priorities.
- --Radio program—while fun for me—consumed too much of my time for too little return --Battling to have our name and our programs better recognized by younger generations—clear we need to focus more on stories we were crafting and sending out --Needed more stories to feed the beast---mobile phones --felt our content was buried in existing ACES website. Also wanted to make it easy for news outlets, bloggers and other online content folks to find our stories.
- Built on Wordpress platform, but housed on our ACES servers. Modified a ThemeForest theme to suit our needs Vanity Url that redirects to news.aces.edu Much friendlier platform to upload videos and photo galleries too. Offered much better SEO than the old Sharepoint site we were using. But how to feed the beast? A new story—five days a week for 52 weeks a year is a lot of stories.
- 260 stories a year to be precise. More than 100 more than we had produced in 2013.
- Yeah---we had some panicky moments. I took over as news unit manager on August 1, 2014. My one full-time unit colleague was openly worried that we had gotten ourselves in over our heads. I kept telling her that it all would work out but I too worried about the whole project.
- We turned to the Auburn University School of Communication and Journalism. Now you are probably thinking that it’s a news site so we went straight to the Journalism Department, right? Wrong. We went to the department with the most students.
- We turned to the Auburn University School of Communication and Journalism. Now you are probably thinking that it’s a news site so we went straight to the Journalism Department, right? Wrong. We went to the department with the most students. And very specifically to one class.
- --Style and Design students have to turn out a lot of content for their class. --They write for multiple clients during the semester. When we came onboard, students wrote for the AuburnFamily blog, a university sponsored site. Also write for The Corner News—a lifestyle weekly. Professor wanted students to learn how to write news releases that were actually news rather than public relations smoke and mirrors. Understood that this valuable skill for them to have. Also understood that this provided opportunities to clips for student’s portfolios from truly commercial outlets.
- --Story idea list of 90 to 100 stories. Most are evergreen or have a wide range of when they can be published. We keep them more time sensitive ones within the department. --Visit with each section. Give them the guidelines and style we require. Pitch story—we approve and suggest sources—students write stories. Stories must be approved by sources and at least one must be an Extension source. Then Donna makes the final edit and schedules the story for publication. Only we can publish the stories and not all stories make it to publication.
- Let’s look at Extension Daily for the first full year of operation. Full time staff includes me and I seem to spend way more time doing admin stuff and other projects than writing. Other full time staff member oversees most of the editing of student writer stories and scheduling. I do edit most of the garden/hort/wildlife/ag stories Temporary staffer works ~25 hours a week and handles virtually all the Ag stories we write. She’s based in heart of one of state’s major production areas. Averaged 2 student employee writers a semester working about 8 to 10 hours per week 93 student writers actually published work on Extension Daily. Student writers were assigned to write three stories for Extension Daily. Some wrote three, some wrote 2, some wrote 1 and a few didn’t write a single thing. That really didn’t worry me. Completing a required number impacted their grade. We just wanted the stories.
- We published 323 stories on Extension Daily About 25% more than we had hoped for. At some points during the year, we had a new story for every day of the week. Some days we had two stories. As we have grown and better learned the process, we try to avoid publishing on weekends. Trying to spread it out more. This number only includes stories published on Extension Daily. Unit also crafted about 30 stories for Grassroots—a blog on the ACES site for county specific news. Also does not include any releases for 4-H that went to multiple counties. Also does not include the monthly story submissions to Alabama Farmer’s Coop News or Buckmasters. All told the Unit probably produced 400 stories in 2015.
- Let’s take a look at the numbers.
- We started using Webtrends Analytics in April 2015 for all of Alabama Extension’s sites. So far in less than 6 months of 2016 we have almost reached same number of visitors in 9 months in 2015
- Steady trends of both increasing new visitors to the sites as well as returning visitors. What we are finding out if we can get return visitors, our bounce rate goes down to just over 72%. That may be high to some folks, but if you consider we are driving someone to a single story that they want to read, I think this is pretty good. They are viewing more than one page and all our stories are only one page. We are seeing an increase in people subscribing to the blog.
- In last year more than 44,000 views have come from Facebook and more than 25,000 from Google Search
- In last year more than 44,000 views have come from Facebook and more than 25,000 from Google Search
- More than 875 Clips documented through Meltwater, our media monitoring service. We have had placements al.com, all the state’s major dailies as well as the small dailies. Weekly newspapers are using the stories. Some weeklies and small dailies now follow us on Facebook and share our posts of Extension Daily stories on their Facebook pages. We have stories scraped for content and used by Associated Press as well as a number of major national dailies including Seattle Post Intelligencer, Houston Chronicle, Lexington Herald Leader and San Francisco Chronicle. Most of the stories that got picked up nationally were not written by students, but having the students allowed our staff time to write those stories with breaking news angles. Having student writers has given us flexibility that we never really had before.