Case Study

Salt Lake Tribune sees robust audience growth after adoption of new editorial tools and workflow

Adoption of new editorial planning tool and audience-centric process drives digital transformation.

By Adam Schweigert

August 29, 2024

This case study is part of the Beyond Print Toolkit, a guide created by The Lenfest Institute for Journalism and the American Press Institute to help guide publishers away from print-centric revenue models toward a sustainable digital future. 

After becoming an independent nonprofit and dissolving a joint operating agreement with cross-town paper Deseret News in 2020, The Salt Lake Tribune had an editorial process that was still heavily focused on print. The Tribune knew it had to rethink everything to prioritize digital, but its tools and workflow still had to also support what would become a twice-weekly print product.

Starting in mid-2021, Chief of Content Danyelle White led an effort to migrate the newsroom’s workflow and planning process to focus on digital production first. Earlier this year, the process accelerated as they changed their primary workflow tool from Airtable to Arcfully, a tool designed for newsrooms publishing on the Arc XP CMS. The change in tooling has enabled The Tribune to reduce duplication of effort, allowed editors to plan more effectively, and helped the newsroom focus on how best to tell any given story to have the largest impact on its audience.

Why this matters: 

The previous tech stack hindered efforts to plan and prioritize effectively because it required entering data into multiple systems and there was no single source of truth.

By changing the tool it uses for editorial planning and workflow, the newsroom has been able to work more efficiently because Arcfully integrates seamlessly with its Arc XP CMS.

Additionally, Arcfully has become a useful tool for meetings because all of the planning details live in one place.

Strategy:

Before the change, The Tribune’s entire editorial process was focused on print – specifically the need to fill a physical product on a daily basis vs. the “always on” internet. The organization undertook a long-overdue overhaul to prioritize digital, working in stages to identify obstacles, select an appropriate tool, and then roll out a new workflow that better addressed the needs of its digital platforms and audiences.

Some of the major obstacles it faced were the lack of buy-in from editors because the previous workflow and tooling included a lot of redundancy and duplication of effort. Its primary planning tool was Airtable, but editors also had to enter often duplicative information in various Google Docs and Arc’s WebSked tool. Story planning was done on a short-term basis, often done only two weeks out for the next print issue. The process failed to take into account the needs of digital audiences, and the editorial process and publishing cadence for digital had been chaotic, with sometimes 20 stories published one day and three the next.

The Tribune decided to make a change from Airtable to Arcfully because Arcfully integrates directly with its web CMS and serves as a single source of truth, eliminating the need for editors to enter data in multiple places.

The newsroom also adjusted the planning process to better serve digital audiences but still work for print by developing a tier system that has allowed editors to plan further out, prioritize more effectively, and decide which stories to invest the most effort in early on in the editorial process. The system has four tiers:

• T1: once a quarter enterprise stories where they pull out all the stops, often including other storytelling elements like visuals, data, and more. 
• T2: once a month enterprise stories that still have many elements, but are maybe less involved
• T3: one to two week turn enterprise stories
• Daily news/quick turn: day-to-day news stories

Having a single newsrooom-wide planning tool has helped avoid confusion, miscommunication, and “tunnel vision” where teams were previously only focused on the work happening on their immediate team. Where weekly editorial meetings used to focus on what needed to be filled in the print edition two to three weeks out, editors are now looking one to two months out and hope to eventually plan as far as four to six months out, and having conversations about what the T1 stories should be, the audiences they want to reach, and forming a consensus around priorities and how to fit stories into the editorial calendar.

Another critical piece of the revised workflow is a focus on having audience-centric discussions early in the story-planning process. Before reporters and editors can enter a story in Arcfully, they have to answer some audience-centric questions, such as who the intended audience(s) are for the story, where they plan to reach them, and how to best tell the story for those audiences. Visuals and graphics requests are also made through Arcfully. These additional pieces of the workflow have helped the newsroom to think beyond print and focus more on its digital audiences.

Team involved:

As Chief of Content, White has been the owner and main driver of the project in close collaboration with Kyle Hansen, The Tribune’s managing editor for audience and multimedia, and the two senior managing editors, for daily news and for enterprise. As they rolled out the changes, the core team also brought in a small group of editors for feedback, addressed their questions and concerns, and then took the changes to a broader group of editors before sharing them with the full staff.

Results:

After the rollout of the new workflow, The Tribune found that story median pageviews increased and it saw a steep decline in sub-1,000 pageview stories. The Tribune attributed this positive momentum not only to the new tool and improved workflow but also to its new forced intentionality around audience.

Additionally, The Tribune has seen robust growth in its video channels, particularly Instagram where it grew from 60,000 to 70,000 followers much faster than expected. Tribune leadership attributes this growth to intentionality around video and advance planning to make sure video assets are completed by the time  a story is published.

What they learned:

Whatever tools and process you choose, people need to actually buy-in to the process and follow the workflow for the effort to be successful. As they executed the rollout of their new editorial planning tool and workflow, The Tribune leadership found that getting buy-in at various stages of the process was important and working incrementally has led to a more successful implementation. The leadership’s willingness to incorporate feedback and iterate also helped with adoption. Throughout the process, they involved newsroom staff in various roles to ensure the new tool and workflow addressed pain points and truly worked for them rather than being a top-down change that didn’t account for the newsroom’s actual needs.

They also found that their new audience-centric approach works, but that audience planning needs to be intentional and incorporated into the planning process. Audience work isn’t something that can only happen after the story is done.

Next steps:

The rollout of the new workflow is nearly complete with the last stage being to give digital “teeth” by making editors responsible for filling scheduled featured slots on the website. They also plan to track the number of T1 stories assigned per team per quarter and hold teams accountable for delivering regular value to readers while upholding high journalistic standards.

The Tribune is also hoping to maintain progress over time as circumstances change. The newsroom has recently voted to unionize and leadership expects that workload and workflow will be part of the bargaining process. The newsroom leadership feels optimistic that the recent changes put them in a better position to set realistic goals around productivity and publishing cadence to effectively serve their audience while reducing stress on staff by eliminating much of the previous chaos.

How to implement this strategy:

While the specific choice of Arcfully might not make sense if your newsroom isn’t using ArcXP, there are several elements of the Salt Lake Tribune’s digital transformation that are widely applicable to other newsrooms:

• Select an editorial workflow tool that provides a single source of truth and reduces duplication of effort to ensure compliance and buy-in among editors
• Adopt a tier system to improve long-term planning and help with prioritization
• Be intentional about audience at the front-end of the story creation process
• Be open to feedback and move incrementally to help with the rollout of new tools and processes

Added resources

• Arcfully 
• Project Management in Newsrooms (Guide)

Organization overview

• Organization: The Salt Lake Tribune
• Owner: independent nonprofit
• Target audience:  Salt Lake City metro area but with a statewide focus; actively trying to grow audience in northern and southern portions of the state
• Digital Subscribers: 30,000
• Print Subscribers:  9,000
• Print status: publishing two days a week (Sunday and Wednesday), delivered via mail