Teamwork makes the dream work

In the previous issue, I promised to update you on the ways our editorial council is reshaping our editorial “org chart” to accommodate our growing content production.

First, a reminder: In Marvin Olasky’s column last July, we announced our editorial council as a way of transitioning from our longtime editor-in-chief to a more collaborative editorial model that works better across all of our platforms. That has been one of our biggest challenges, and biggest opportunities, as we have grown.

The council has been busy in the roughly six months they’ve been managing the editorial function, mostly with the everyday work of reporting the news, but also with imagining a way for our three platform teams to work more like one big team.

The solution? Supplement the platform teams with cross-platform teams organized by content type. In the new structure, we’ll have three main new teams:

› News, led by Lynde Langdon. This is the largest cross-platform team (by number of staff) and the one that produces the most content (by word count). Her team will produce reported pieces for the news sections of WORLD Magazine, for WNG.org and the daily newsletters, and for the newscast and news stories on The World and Everything in It.

› Features, led by Lynn Vincent. This team will produce longer-form reported pieces, covering a greater variety of stories than we ever have. Her team will produce content for WORLD Radio and WORLD Digital in addition to WORLD Magazine.

› Commentary, led by Tim Lamer. This team combines all of our non-news coverage—reviews (books, music, movies/television), Voices and WORLD Opinions columns—into one shop that will produce for all of WORLD’s platforms.

With the new setup, the platform leaders will be able to focus on providing the content best suited to their own platforms and audiences. They will work with the cross-platform teams to give direction to our coverage.

In this system, the leaders of the cross-platform teams and the leaders of the platforms themselves are all members of our editorial council. These are the people who will work together to provide overall direction for WORLD’s content.

This cross-platform concept is not completely new to WORLD. Our Digital and Radio teams have been collaborating on news content for a few years, and since February we have been reworking some of the same news stories for the news sections of WORLD Magazine. During that same period, we have developed a handful of feature stories with both a Magazine and Radio presence. Still, the structure of our staff until now didn’t lead naturally to such cross-platform cooperation. We hope the new structure will.