Camayak for newsrooms

Cerritos College’s student journalism department had tried a few CMS options for their website before settling on WordPress. One of the things they missed was a robust way of managing twenty or thirty staff members that almost completely changed every two semesters.

WordPress worked okay with the help of some plugins, but it wasn’t foolproof. People would forget to update the assignment status or add an image to a post and the constantly changing staff made it impossible to scale training for everyone, in addition to doing the work.

Colleges care about accountability and with so much communication falling through the cracks, auditing submissions and overall effort was a completely manual process which took hours every week.

The first thing Camayak did was bring all communication around specific assignments into one place, with actionable comments paired with each one. Unlike their manual folder system in Google Drive, editors knew that the visibility of comments was automatically handled by the workflows they’d set up. Everyone could now see whose responsibility it was to work on every assignment at any given time.

“This was really the level of communication we’d been looking for: a purpose-built system for organizing contributors and making sure they keep improving.”

Because they were now able to publish approved posts directly to WordPress, they eliminated a copy/pasting role within their newsroom and focused that time on news gathering and quality control instead. Automated notifications for when things were ready streamlined their process of creating social media content around their posts.

To help their inexperienced editors, administrators set up templates in Camayak for their most common assignment types. These make sure writers are getting structured, consistent instruction for all their assignments.

Editors also asked their students to turn on their public portfolios so they could share their work independently of the site they were publishing to and leverage them for job interviews.

Camayak is an ideal tool for ambitious content marketers that dream of contributor networks.