Org Strategy help

Jul 10, 2013

tin C
By tin C

Hi all,

I work in the education dept and have been here only a few months. Our company is a  print publishing company which produces articles for doc, nurses and risk managers.

Now we are trying to shift away from the old 25-30 page articles which have almost no images/graphs etc and is very text heavy.

We are trying to get our writers to write for the web, short with lot of visuals, images, videos and graphs etc. The idea is that the content will be developed once and can be used both on our public website and also can be made into a course with some minor edits.

Has any of you or your organization have gone through this process. How do you get the organization to accept and lean this new process of doing things. How can we help others to move away from writing and becoming more into web writers.

2 Replies
Bob S
almost 11 years ago07/11/13 at 7:29 am (UTC)

Hi Sid,

One word for you.... templates, templates, templates.

Our best practices for making this kind of conversion was to have a kick-off meeting explaining the change, the whys, hows, etc. Then provide the content creaters with clear templates that have things like word/character limits on them as well as other guidelines.

For example, for a magazine we moved to online, we created around 5 article "styles" and templates for each type. Some were longer articles, some very short news items, mulit-pics vs 1 pic, etc. You get the idea. Now any given issue can only have so many of each type of article or course, and we established that as well.

This allowed us to frame the conversations in these terms.... "currently you are slotted for this style/length article. Do you need us to see if someone else can move to a smaller article style so we can give you a half-pager instead?"    But we never had to debate the length article by article, it was in spec or it wasn't for the template they were assigned. If it wasn't in spec, they knew it couldn't get published.

Hope this helps,

Bob

tin C
almost 11 years ago07/12/13 at 7:25 am (UTC)

Bob S said:

Hi Sid,

One word for you.... templates, templates, templates.

Our best practices for making this kind of conversion was to have a kick-off meeting explaining the change, the whys, hows, etc. Then provide the content creaters with clear templates that have things like word/character limits on them as well as other guidelines.

For example, for a magazine we moved to online, we created around 5 article "styles" and templates for each type. Some were longer articles, some very short news items, mulit-pics vs 1 pic, etc. You get the idea. Now any given issue can only have so many of each type of article or course, and we established that as well.

This allowed us to frame the conversations in these terms.... "currently you are slotted for this style/length article. Do you need us to see if someone else can move to a smaller article style so we can give you a half-pager instead?"    But we never had to debate the length article by article, it was in spec or it wasn't for the template they were assigned. If it wasn't in spec, they knew it couldn't get published.

Hope this helps,

Bob


Thanks Bob for the suggestion. Is there any free resource which have "Templates" that I can look as an example.

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