Case Study: Camayak for B2B newsroom (under NDA)

A B2B newsroom with an international audience was struggling to centralize its knowledge of which freelancers were available for new assignments. They had an established CMS with some workflow features but hadn’t succeeded in getting any team within the organization to adopt it for tracking the status of their assignments.

As well as publishing to their seven websites, the newsroom needed to be able to push approved media to their digital asset manager, without introducing any manual work. Time management was a big concern since staff were already so busy that even entering deadlines for assignments wasn’t a reliable process. This made it difficult for colleagues to track one another’s workloads.

Each subject vertical wanted its own workflow and assignment templates. While editors on each section wanted to focus on their own staff and deadlines, they needed visibility into other sections to help avoid duplicate effort and spot potential collaborations.

Once they’d set up desks in Camayak for each of their verticals, the teams found that the combination of smart deadlines with the filter-driven calendar views gave them insights into their contributor availability that they’d never had before. They no longer overloaded their best writers and adapted their publishing schedule to fit how long it realistically took them to produce content.

With many of their freelancers simultaneously working on stories, Managers enjoyed being able to chat with their assignees through instant messages. Staff reported an increase in communication and for some teams the speed of assignment production more than doubled.

“We adopted this because we needed help with allocating our resources efficiently. It’s cut down the time it takes us to turn stories around and we’re even using it for content audits, which is much more than what we’d hoped for.”

Pitching, assigning, approval and writer payments all happen through Camayak, as does direct publishing to all seven of the newsroom’s websites. Press wire stories are often forwarded as a prompt to generate new assignments and the selection process for archiving assets happens during content production, which is far more reliable than as an afterthought.