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Boston Globe’s plan for digital reinvention: Be ready for constant change
The Boston Globe’s much-awaited plan for digital reinvention came out Monday in a 3,000-plus word memo from Editor Brian McGrory. The changes, which result from a year of rethinking what they…An Audience Engagement Team. This is a group of creative-minded editors, producers, and reporters who are particularly skilled at getting the right journalism in front of the right audience at, again, the right time. They are able to spot what’s trending, or what might trend before it does, quickly work across the enterprise to deploy resources, and will be expert in eeping our subscriber base deeply engaged – i.e., retained. They will oversee our alerts and newsletters, be the rigorous stewards of provocative and delightful headlines, push training opportunities to the broader room, and know the ins and outs of the major social platforms where huge readership – and revenue opportunities – await. This, too, will be overseen by Jason. We’ve also asked Jason to run the lobby juice bar at 53 State, be the Globe CFO, and manage the company softball team.Neiman: The changes are the latest indication that American metro newspapers are coalescing around a relatively unified vision for the future.
A Boston Globe memo puts the spotlight on an emerging consensus on how to transform metro papers
The Globe is the latest paper trying to “once and for all break the stubborn rhythms of a print operation, allowing us to unabashedly pursue digital subscriptions.”Express desk: Breaking news and social media. The common thread in all these stories is an urgency to get them published.A digital Story-Telling Team, comprised of staff from product, development, and design. This is utterly central to what we do, how we attract digital subscribers, and how we keep them. We have such a team already, but it’s been hammered by attrition. We need to rebuild it, fast, and in the reconstruction, we need to devote ever more of our design and graphics firepower to the digital side, a goal that is being embraced by Tonia Cowan and Heather Hopp-Bruce.VIDEO: We’ll work double-time with other departments around the building to seek a more coherent video strategy. Right now, there’s a disconnect between what our advertisers want and what our readers are clicking, and a stark, perhaps unchangeable disparity between the huge success of our videos on social channels and the far more modest viewership on site.
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Continue reading “Big changes at Globe reflect industry trends”