How advance content is helping free reporters up to focus on local stories

Behind Local News
Sep 2, 2018 · 3 min read

By Neil Pickford, head of Johnston Press South Advance Content Hub.

Neil Pickford

Back in 2015, Johnston Press introduced the Newsroom of the Future in 2015, a root and branch reorganisation of our news teams.

The vision was to create teams of specialists to produce and curate engaging content both online and in print.

Separating our teams of news and communities reporters enabled us to let the news teams focus on tackling breaking and hard news, along with the news backgrounders and local investigations which make our newspapers unique.

This left the communities team specialists free to focus on using their significant expertise and experience to create the best possible entertainment and lifestyle content, business news and community news pages. This includes everything from co-ordinating scores of village correspondents to liaising with schools and countless community groups.

This is the bread and butter content that has always been at the heart of our titles.

A year ago, we decided to go one step further and consolidate our community teams into two Advanced Content Hubs — one for the north of England and one for the south.

It is my privilege to lead the team in the south, with my colleague Kath Finlay leading the team in the north.

These ‘virtual hubs’ were created to identify and share best practice, create teams of experts which could work beyond traditional geographic boundaries and identify content which could be shared beyond the area where it was created.

Now, we have columnists whose weekly musings appear in titles from Chichester to North Yorkshire.

We have entertainments content — such as big star interviews with touring theatre shows — that is written once and published many times, right across the group.

And we have developed a weekly series of shared features which can be used by any Johnston Press title.

The concept of shared features was first mooted late last year, and since January the Advanced Content Team has provided at least one such feature every week.

The topics are universal and relevant everywhere, and targeted at our core audience.

For print, our excellent design team have provided features in both sans and serif formats (so they can be used in any paper) on topics such as the rise of park runs, the growing number of vegans, the popularity of allotments, coping with exam stress, the continuing vinyl music revival, the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day and funding for local parks.

Importantly, every feature comes with an editable element which enables local teams to drop in local information, making the features directly relevant to the people reading them.

These features, often created by former daily newspaper features writers, are of a high quality and are being used far and wide.

We are now regularly seeing individual features being used in more than 50 of our titles, both daily and weekly and they are being well received by readers.

They have become a prime example of how the Advanced Content Hubs are helping fill our newspapers with content people want to read, while freeing up other reporters to do what they do best — digging out those exclusives that drive casual sale and web audience figures.

Behind Local News UK

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Behind Local News UK

The stories behind the stories, from the regional press in the UK

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