How Classmates Helped '24 Fellow Manage Breaking News
April 3, 2024
For Class of 2024 Fellow and Baltimore Banner Managing Editor Emma Patti Harris, big news stories seem to follow in the wake of her quarterly Media Transformation Challenge sessions.
Two days after returning from her January session, The Banner’s chief competition, The Baltimore Sun, was purchased. Two days after returning from the March session, the Francis Scott Key bridge collapsed.
In the second update on her experience throughout the yearlong program, Emma talks about progress on her performance challenge, The Banner’s breaking news coverage, and her cohort’s support.
My performance update was centered around growing audience, and thus also subscription conversions [starting with our] Express Desk – which is essentially our Breaking News & Trending Team.
We implemented some structure: workflows, deadlines, and pitch meetings. And we’ve done a lot of training; we want them to write interesting headlines that have curiosity gap, and be SEO-friendly. And we know that The Banner needs to expand regionally to reach sustainability. So we’ve been more intentional about breaking news in target counties.
For my update, it was pretty clear that things are moving in the right direction: story production is up around 176%, we saw a 286% increase in new visitors, and we saw a 400% increase in subscriptions. Those numbers are starting to level out, but we’ve seen nice bumps after both of our major breaking news events.
On the Tuesday morning after her return, her phone rang well before dawn.
Our reporter, Justin Fenton, said, ‘The Francis Scott Key bridge collapsed!’ And it was just like, Bam! Let’s go. The audience and digital teams got up and running and it was a full-court press after that. I was actually on vacation at the time, so I handed off coverage to the rest of the team. I couldn’t be prouder of how the newsroom reacted and is continuing to cover the story.
I heard from so many Fellows through direct messages and in our giant group chat. I started getting tagged in things and people told me that they were reading us and that they were excited for our coverage. And then a couple of people told me they subscribed.
A couple of colleagues in the cohort from very practically supported me. Michael Kreisel from ABC News and I were talking about sourcing video and how we were interpreting fair use. And then The Associated Press was able to source a video for us all to use. So there was a little bit of community sharing journalistically that was helpful.
You know, when we saw the graduating cohort in January, we were all extremely skeptical of how lovey-dovey and connected they were. And now we’re all BFFs and messaging each other all the time! I already feel an incredibly strong connection to these other 24 people plus the coaches. That’s something that I’ll take with me forever.