Now I read that at The Miami Herald, job descriptions have been rewritten for “online producers” turning them into “growth editors”. Regardless of the title—-The Washington Post calls them “assignment editor”, while in many of my European projects, the preferred term is “pilot”—-these content managers are the new fish in the tank, and a necessary one too. They are traffic cops for stories. They are empowered to deal with stories, NOT with editions. They decide about the life of a story, some with long legs, others with extra long ones. The content manager decides with the team how the story will be first reported (push notification, alerts?), the social media component, and , of course, those important updates. If print will play a role, this is also part of the content manager’s job, to discuss what that role will be with the designated editor.
The Herald’s “growth editors”
But, back to The Miami Herald, a newspaper dear to me, not just because it is where I cut my teeth as an aspiring journalist, but also because I have worked with The Herald as a consultant over the years.
According to a piece from betternews.org , The Miami Herald has empowered these “growth editors” to work with editors and reporters to focus on audience in assigning, reporting and producing stories.
That is exactly what content managers do.
A highlight from the article:
“In reviewing the readership of our stories, we realized we were writing many from muscle memory — go to a meeting, write a story — with little thought to how it served an audience, what that audience was or could be, or whether there was an audience at all,” wrote Mindy Marquez and Rick Hirsch.
The growth editors have been put in charge of daily story meetings, which are focused on what’s publishing to the digital platforms, which audience they target, when they should publish and which elements are (or should be) part of the storytelling experience.
Amen for The Miami Herald. This is a story I will definitely keep an eye on.
TheMarioBlog post #2961