How Desk-Net Allows Newsrooms to Plan Content That Resonates with Their Audiences

With the rise of the digital age, newsrooms are now facing new challenges in meeting the ever-evolving needs of their audiences. One of the most significant challenges is incorporating multiple dimensions, such as audiences, user needs, and topic interests, into the newsroom workflow.  

Understanding User Needs in the Newsroom 

A newsroom may have families with children as their audience. This audience will likely be interested in topics such as school or housing-related news and their user needs are to be informed and inspired. In contrast, a younger city-dwelling audience may be more interested in cultural topics and have a user need for entertainment. This again requires different planning for newsrooms.  

A newsroom must then take these topics and user needs, and ensure there are enough stories that cover those topics, across the audience’s user needs.  It also requires careful planning to ensure a steady flow of content that considers all these multi-faceted dimensions.  

How to Integrate User Needs in the Newsroom Workflow 

Integrating metadata, such as audiences, topics, and their user needs, into newsrooms' workflow is a powerful way to improve story planning effectiveness. To do this, it's important to define metadata categories, communicate them to the entire newsroom, and in many cases make it mandatory for everyone to use them.  

By tracking stories and tagging them with appropriate metadata, and editing those that have not been tagged, all content can be properly categorized and easily searchable. Using metadata in a forward-thinking way will ultimately help newsrooms to better plan and create content that meets the needs and interests of their audience. 

However, effective metadata integration requires a tool that specializes in newsroom management. This is where Desk-Net comes in. Desk-Net provides newsrooms with features that help them plan for metadata-driven content. Let’s zoom in and see how Desk-Net can help newsrooms to plan content based on their audiences’ user needs in particular. 

The Benefits of Using Desk-Net to Plan Content Based on Audiences’ User Needs  

By enabling newsrooms to define and plan metadata categories, Desk-Net makes it possible to categorize stories based on user needs and topics. By utilizing metadata tags to categorize stories, newsrooms can easily track and control that there is enough content planned which touches upon their audiences’ user needs, ensuring there is a consistent output of stories that touch on all of their audiences’ user needs and topics of interest.  

Moreover, Desk-Net's newsroom management tools enable newsrooms to optimize their workflows for editorial planning. With Desk-Net, newsrooms can keep track of the progress of their story production, allocate resources, and make changes to their plans as needed. This ensures that the newsroom workflow is streamlined and optimized for maximum efficiency. 

Let’s look at the Desk-Net features that can help you plan content that resonates with your audiences’ user needs in your newsroom workflow: 

Display and Manage User Needs per Story 

Create a list of user needs in Desk-Net and assign colors to them. 

Desk-Net users can then assign user needs to stories. 

Easily Assign and Edit User Needs 

User needs can be assigned and edited right in the story list. 

This ease of use will increase the adoption of user needs thinking in the newsroom.

Desk-Net Helps You Track and Control User Needs Coverage 

Group the story list by user need to see which stories are assigned to each user need and how many are assigned. 

This allows you to plan (“Do we have enough inspire me stories for this user type for next week?”) as well as report (“Which user needs did we address last month?”) 

Want to see how Desk-Net can help you plan content for your audiences’ user needs and other metadata? Start a 30-day free trial and see.