The pace and rush of entering a newsroom set it apart from almost all other work environments.
In the modern era, as communication methods evolved and barriers fell away, newsrooms added departments and conglomerates, integrated newsrooms. As a result, these nerve centers receive reams of material, reports, and raw data from all over the world. Real-time judgments based on this information flow then drive the production process, enabling the dissemination of news to millions of people from one centralized location.
This digital revolution presents a unique opportunity for SMEs to harness the brilliance of newsrooms, and become trusted news sources for their target audience. Informational value is exchanged for audience trust, building a priceless reputation over time.
The relationship between newsrooms and audiences is among the most trusted of all such exchanges, but the advantages start before anything gets published.
In the internet age, reputable information sources are spread all over the spectrum: and there is a huge opportunity for SMEs to not only build trust but become trusted news sources themselves. The upside to this has never been greater.
Newsroom Attitudes Can Reinforce Motivation and Pride
With a newsroom mindset, a motivated, professional content team can lift an entire company.
Newsrooms are machines; they’re like high-speed turbines driving the information networks that allow human society to function – and your SME can be one, too.
There is great professional pride in adopting the qualities detailed below: one that comes from delivery under pressure and the confidence that engenders; representing the brand name honorably through the expression of its values and promise to the audience; delivering high-end product time and time again to the point you are a standard source of wisdom; and allowing your colleagues to share in the fruits of that labor.
Bringing Newsroom Speed and Agility to Your SME
In a newsroom, the ability to produce and distribute content quickly is critical. Newsrooms can only function at pace and with the tacit agreement that whatever happens, deadlines have to be met, and content must go out, on time, at a quality standard, and in a certain style.
The great advantage of this is that the velocity of the newsroom workflow underpins the firmity of its duties – when pace slips, so do editorial judgment, quality, style, and exhilaration.
Similarly, SMEs need to be agile and respond quickly to changes in the market, industry trends, and customer feedback. You want your SME’s content teams to be good when things are hard – anybody can be good when things are easy. Maintaining that mentality puts you in a safer place to consistently deliver everything any content team needs to. Pressure makes diamonds.
Newsroom Storytelling Power
Telling stories that engage and inform an audience sits at the heart of newsrooms – and it should be no different for SMEs, who are similarly tasked with creating compelling stories that resonate with their target audience.
The magic of a newsroom is in the formation of stories from discrete information sources; pulling together a story yet to be told.
You can call that magic “editorial judgment” and it comes about through good practice, ethical reporting, editors’ decision-making, evaluating source biases, checking facts, and ultimately, making a decision and going with it.
Experience is a big factor in this, but nothing is a bigger factor than pressure. A story has to be completed, no matter what. Essentially, you must force your SME content team to meet content deadlines consistently over time. Without deadlines, editing never truly ends, so newsrooms have style guides and requirements they adhere to that help decipher when a story is ready to go to press. Your SME will develop its own through experience working under pressure.
Just as a reporter-editor team working an investigation amidst the clamor of daily news coverage identifies a patina of data points and patterns they can corroborate, chase down, and verify, so too can your own SME fall into its own style of content work. Work that is true to your brand, establishes credibility and reputation and builds trust over time. Content that does all this and connects with an audience emotionally, can lead to better engagement and loyalty.
Why Quality Leads the Way for Both SMEs and Newsrooms
The speed, the editorial “magic”, the pressured decision-making, and the gutsy calls we refer to above, all come down to one thing: quality.
If the quality of the information a newsroom delivers to society is poor, it has failed its primary function to deliver the truth. It does not matter if the failure comes through an inaccuracy, a boiling over of personal biases in reporting, lax editing or some other breakdown in the editorial machine. When the quality of stories suffers, the newsroom’s reputation falls apart.
And quality work must still be produced, even when time is short, verified facts are in short supply or the wider meaning remains unclear.
Facts are always in short supply – there is no upper limit on how many you need to illustrate a point or evidence a finding. Time is also always short – or you’ll be passing around the same content for rounds of editing through your entire organization forever.
Newsroom content is built on being accurate, informative, and engaging. If SMEs focus on these foundations in the same way, they can have an impact on the business’s bottom line – by building trust and credibility with their target audience.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Blaise Hope, CEO and Founder of Origin Hope
Blaise Hope is the CEO and Founder of Origin Hope, the leading global content outsourcer. He is also a former managing editor, with experience producing and presenting a live evening news bulletin based on international data feeds and news wires as well as local equivalents, multilingual sources, partial information, insurgency reports, and geospatial analysis.
Origin Hope helps marketers, owners/creators, and even publishers overcome the barriers to creation by making newsroom-style content production accessible to any size of content operation. Through its proprietary training, certification, Generative AI, ML, and other evolving technologies, it is the first company in the world to offer: any content in any format, at any speed, and in any language, 40-95% cheaper than anything else on the market.