Today, journalism has adopted practices that were once performed irregularly or were utterly foreign in the newsroom setting. In this digital age, news organizations face challenges that require joint effort to figure out and share what solutions work.

One of those joint efforts is the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative.

The Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative brings together representatives from newsrooms across the US to advance the digital transformation. The initiative's outcome is an online manual that news organizations can use to understand the learnings developed by the program's participants. The WAN-Ifra team led the first European Table Stakes program.

As part of the program, the Seven Table Stakes have been developed. The first three of them are:

• Serve targeted audiences with targeted content/experiences.
• Publish on the platforms used by your target audiences.
• Produce and publish continuously to meet audience needs.

However, once you have developed these and begin to optimize your newsroom's operations, the question beckons: How do you deeply ingrain these concepts in day-to-day operations?

It turns out the editorial calendar tool Kordiam has what it takes to transform or convert your organization into a successful audience-first newsroom.

Target content to audiences and audience segments

Newsrooms are learning that they don't have one but multiple distinct audiences. These audiences want specific content.

The new Topics feature in Kordiam allows you to specify and document audiences, plan campaigns, and – most importantly – review the content that has been planned for them.

Plan your content flow across platforms

While you may have one core platform to serve, you typically need to spread your content in variations across several platforms.

Assigning a story to one or multiple platforms is a core feature of Kordiam. Plan a piece for digital and print, or for digital, Facebook, Instagram, and the weekly newsletter, and the content appears in the story budgets of those platforms.

Publish content at the right times for your audiences

Different audiences access content at various times a week and during a day.

Kordiam allows you to define specific time slots across the day. Those time slot sequences can vary from platform to platform.

When you plan content for a specific audience and platform, simply select the appropriate time slot per platform. Sync these scheduled times with your content management system. Of course, specific times can be assigned to your publication.

The story lists can be sorted by time slot. That way, you manage the story flow across the day. With drag & drop, you re-arrange the content schedule as needed.

Switch to an audience-first strategy

The Table Stakes program provides a manual of seven key digital practices news publishers will need to adopt to thrive in this new era.

For newsrooms and organizations looking to venture into modern journalism, there is an urgent need to move their news into an audience-first mindset. In response, they are figuring out how to increase engagement by selecting subjects that matter to their audience and prioritizing limited resources accordingly.

The Kordiam editorial calendar is the tool organizations need to ensure they are producing, publishing, and planning audience-first content that converts and grows a loyal, paying followership.