Like many newsrooms in recent years, The Philadelphia Inquirer has been taking a hard look at its content strategy and has started revamping it to better serve readers.

Cross-functional brainstorming sessions emphasised a consistent truth: It’s hard to innovate and sell your news product if people inside and outside of the newsroom don’t know whether, when, and how stories are being produced.

There could be no successful content strategy without a new way to plan and manage that journalism, as well as better enable departments across The Inquirer to support the newsroom’s work with their consumer marketing and sales skills.

A new system would need to be easy to use and accessible to newsroom partners. It would need to align with current workflows and smooth out existing pain points. But it would also need to add friction — a good kind of pain — to help reporters think about what kind of story they were trying to tell and how they were going to tell it.

Starting with the basics

We started with a shared language. Newsrooms tend to call their planning mechanisms “budgets” or “rundowns.” Marketing and sales teams didn’t know what we were talking about when we asked them how a new budget tool could help them with their work — was this about finance?

So the “budget” tool project became a “planning” tool project.

We interviewed more than 50 newsroom staffers and dozens more in other departments. What was their current workflow like? What did they want to keep? What prevented them from communicating their story plans to other departments? What did they need to know that they frequently didn’t?

Based on that, and copious platform and peer research, we:

• Switched the story creation workflow from starting with a story file to starting with a planning file, requiring much more information to be provided about a story from inception than had previously been possible.
• Built an Airtable-based platform connected to the newsroom’s content management system and accessible to non-newsroom colleagues in sales and marketing roles, so they can see what is being worked on by the newsroom and create a plan to support it.
• Automatically linked a story and its associated parts, such as photo and graphics requests, print positions, social promotions, and newsletter placements — an answer to huge pain points that made adoption more attractive to newsroom users.
• Built custom input forms that included delightful elements like loading gifs to make adoption and ongoing change management easier.

True collaboration

We named this new planning tool “Squid” to connect it with The Inquirer’s legacy ink-related products. We successfully rolled out this major change to the 200+ strong Inquirer newsroom, as well as onboarded the sales and marketing teams, in 2023, and have continued to update it with new features.

It’s no panacea; for example, we’re still figuring out how to account for big projects with multiple pieces and stakeholders. But initial adoption was fast and has significantly improved workflow as well as perceptions about collaboration across The Inquirer.

We know this because we sent a sentiment survey to hundreds of stakeholders before Squid’s launch and again six months after its launch. Ratings on statements like “it’s easy for me to find information about what the newsroom is publishing” and “there are many pain points in my current process” and “it’s easy for me to collaborate with other departments” saw huge improvements among respondents.

We also occasionally receive unsolicited feedback from Inquirer staffers that makes our hearts flutter:

“Dare I say it’s a dream? It’s at least a marked upgrade for our workflow.”

“The direct links for making photo and graphics requests are dynamite!”

“I’ve been working in Squid for the first time really ... and it is so good, so intuitive, so ... easy.”

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