The proper planning tools are essential for newsrooms to operate efficiently. During this week’s Webinar, presented by INMA’s Newsroom Transformation Initiative, members heard how The Philadelphia Inquirer reimagined its newsroom workflow by developing a new tool.

“Workflow might not be the sexiest aspect of newsroom transformation, but having our operations work efficiently is super, super important,” emphasised Amalie Nash, lead of the Newsroom Transformation Initiative. She noted it’s hard to have a culture where “everyone is operating effectively together” if the workflows aren’t streamlined.

It’s a challenge that The Philadelphia Inquirer grappled with for years but addressed in recent years with the rollout of a planning tool named Squid. T.J. Furman, director of newsroom workflow and on-platform publishing, and Julie Westfall, lead product manager for storytelling and tools, shared their journey to streamline workflows at The Inquirer.

When the company rolled out a new content strategy a few years ago, leadership discovered that it needed to prioritise planning:

“Anyone from a newsroom knows that workflow and communication are always an issue,” Westfall said. “So planning for the content strategy became our No. 1 priority. We realised we could not execute our new content strategies without also fixing the workflow.”  

Workshops led to valuable feedback on what was needed and helped shape the road map for addressing key issues. The newsroom needed a planning tool that could serve as a central nervous system, connecting editorial vision with operational execution, and enabling cross-functional collaboration.

Embracing complexity to achieve simplicity

Before Squid, The Inquirer relied on a rather rudimentary system: Stories were started in a story editing tool, then sent to the print CMS. Photo requests lived in a separate Airtable and weren’t connected to the articles.

“And then we had Google Docs and Slack and Google Sheets not connected to anything, just kind of people’s own personal — sometimes desk-wide, sometimes team-specific — planning documents that lived everywhere,” Westfall said.

To address this, the team designed a new architecture that was intentionally more intricate. A detailed diagram mapped out how Squid would centralise planning records, link them to CMS files, and connect previously isolated components like photo requests, graphics, and publishing metadata.

“A big carrot here was connecting the photo requests to the stories, which cut out a huge amount of miscommunication and made things a lot easier for our photo editors and for reporters and editors.”

The goal was not just to streamline operations but to make the newsroom’s publishing plans visible across the entire organisation.

The platform of choice was Airtable, selected for its flexibility and ease of customisation. Although the initial setup required a lot of work from the Inquirer’s software engineers, once it was in place, Furman said it was easy to go in and make changes.

Working with Squid

Furman walked the INMA audience through how Squid works, saying it’s more than just a planning tool; it’s a newsroom command centre.

Every story begins in Squid, not the CMS. Reporters and editors fill out a form that captures essential metadata: slug, draft headline, budget line, platforms (print, digital, or both), expected publication date, commissioning team, and primary site section. This form simultaneously creates a planning record in Airtable and a story file in the CMS (Arc), linking the two together.

The tool supports dynamic dashboards tailored to newsroom roles. Editors can filter by team, view calendars, track editing deadlines, and monitor publishing status. Programming editors use Squid to manage homepage placements, push alerts, and newsletter scheduling. Marketing and audience teams access dashboards that surface long-term story plans, enabling them to prepare promotional strategies in advance.

Squid also integrates photo and graphic requests directly into the story record, eliminating the need for separate forms and reducing miscommunication. Editors can assign authors, track source demographics, and even preview stories or access live URLs — all from within Squid.

One of its most valuable features is the ability to write and manage push alerts. Squid provides character counts, formatting guidance, and Slack-ready text blocks, streamlining the alert-writing process and ensuring consistency across platforms.

“This is good for situations where we’re writing an alert a day or two ahead of time for something that’s going to publish on the weekend,” Furman said. “The people who are working on the weekend can just come to the story record and find the text for that push alert and not have to go into some other system to try to find it.”

The power of collaboration

The rollout of Squid two years ago marked a cultural shift in the Inquirer’s newsroom. Adoption was swift and enthusiastic, in part because the tool was made mandatory — stories could no longer be created directly in the CMS.

But the real success lay in how Squid improved collaboration and reduced friction.

Four months after its launch, The Inquirer conducted a follow-up survey to measure the impact. “We didn’t want to just accept ad hoc praise; we wanted to do some real measuring of how effective Squid was at achieving its goals,” Westfall said.

The results were impressive:

• The percentage of newsroom respondents who disagreed with the statement “It’s easy for me to find information about what the newsroom is publishing” was cut in half.
• Agreement with the statement “There are many pain points in my current process” dropped significantly.
• Most notably, the number of respondents who felt it was difficult to collaborate with other departments fell from 70% to 35%, while 55% agreed that collaboration had become easier.

Teams that previously relied on complex spreadsheets — like the sports desk — were able to eliminate them entirely. Squid automated 70% of their planning process. Morning editorial meetings, once bogged down by lengthy rundowns, were streamlined using Squid-generated menus and dashboards.

And, importantly, marketing teams gained visibility into upcoming stories, allowing them to plan paid promotions more effectively:

“Because we’re making it easier for people to create stories in advance, they have a better chance of seeing in advance, oh, this story is coming. That’s something that we might want to have paid social against, and they can have a better idea of when it’s going to be published,” Westfall said.

Audience teams used Squid to identify “story of the day” candidates: “We try to see what our best content is that’s coming in and make sure we’re not publishing it all on the same day,” Furman said, noting the tool allows them to “space it out so we’re not throwing all of our best stuff up at once and cannibalising our own audience.”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .