Oversees all creation and multi-channel publication of the organization's content, including text, video, audio, animation, and more. The CCO is also responsible for overall strategy and working with the company’s other business units.
Manages content and publishing operations, including day-to-day management of staff, assignments and editorial strategy.
Analyzes and tracks content performance against business goals, uses data to provide actionable recommendations on new and existing content campaigns.
Creates creative materials for editorial branding and marketing purposes. This can include a company’s external web presence, landing pages, sales collateral, and editorial publications.
Creates, monitors, filters and otherwise guides the outward facing social media presence of the company.
Manages content creation for specific business lines, content verticals or divisions of a company.
Editors who are specifically responsible for the formatting, style and accuracy of the content produced by the newsroom.
Research, write and report information. This could include interviews, opinion pieces, research papers, blog posts and more.
Shoots, edits and produces video and other multimedia content. This could include promotional videos, interviews, commercials and more.
Shoots and edits original photography for any content produced through the newsroom. Many organizations will also partner with a stock image provider to augment their visual assets.
Every brand newsroom will be staffed differently depending on a company’s size, resources and priorities. This slide shows just one of many options, but it’s one we think fits best with the needs of most organizations.
Publishing effectively in a digital world requires doubling down on what’s working—and moving away quickly from what’s not. In a large organization, it’s imperative to empower the newsroom team to make as many decisions as possible on its own.
News moves fast, and typical newsrooms need to work on a much faster timeline than most brands are accustomed to. A piece of content that’s not timely can quickly become irrelevant.
Newsrooms are marathons, not sprints. It takes months and years for a publisher to get noticed and build trust; brands are no different. Building a newsroom and becoming a publisher isn’t like a campaign or some other short-term initiative—it’s a cultural change within an organization.
Using other people’s content, or “news jacking,” is tempting but dangerous in the long run. Gaining an audience’s attention and trust requires creativity, consistency and, most of all, originality.
Get out of your own head
“The biggest things that brands need to think about are the topics and themes that matter to their customers and how can they be a valuable member of that conversation—not just the conversation that is trending at any given moment in time on social media.”
Make sure you have things you can talk about without involving the lawyers
“Brands need to create a road map that lets them talk about some things without legal approval, which allows them keep a consistent stream of stories flowing to readers. For content that still needs sign-off, there has to be a clear approval process.”
Have a strong relationship with the business side of the house
“Everyone is by design expected to understand every layer of the business. Nothing gets created in a vacuum. There’s always a consideration of all three of our stakeholders: the customer, the brand and the brand's partners.”
Produce high-quality original content
“With content increasingly spreading—or not spreading—because of what people do on social media, the quality of storytelling has to improve. A story must inform, surprise, inspire and delight the reader—and make him or her look good to friends.”
The members of a brand newsroom can’t just be given a badge and told to work things out – they need to be thoughtfully introduced into every corner of the company, one division at a time, with a clear explanation of their mission, goals and benefits.
Big companies have rules and processes in place for a reason, and these can get in the way of an effective newsroom. They can’t be ignored or steamrolled—they have to be addressed in a smart, creative, consultative way.
Many long-time employees can be resistant to change, and a brand newsroom is a huge shift away from traditional communications. Understanding people’s concerns – and making sure they buy in – is crucial.
If a division expects support from corporate for its own dedicated brand newsroom but instead senses that the effort is more company-wide, it can be less likely to participate. So dedicate resources to helping that division make its newsroom work, then find the synergies that bring the efforts together.
One well-known CPG brand needed a 13-person social media team to send a tweet during the Super Bowl.
One unnamed investment firm takes up to a year to approve a single piece of content… and the legal team will send edits via fax.
At one financial services company, a single Facebook post requires 53 approvals.
Traditional media have known for a long time that good publishing requires not just talent, but also smart organization. An effective newsroom needs to be agile, empowered, intelligent and on-message—no matter whether your company’s core business is breaking news, selling credit cards, or making the world’s most-dunkable cookie.
Measuring the effectiveness of a brand newsroom is a complicated task, and could probably take up its very own (very long) eBook. But here’s a very brief look at a few common goals of brands newsrooms, and a couple of ways each can be measured.
Brand lift, reposts and referrals
Shares, return visits and time spent
Pageviews, reach and share of voice
Email open rate and renewal rate
Close rate and cost per acquisition