About The Village Ukraine
The Village Ukraine is a city online newspaper and a service-oriented media outlet. The Village’s goal is to create content that covers what’s happening in big cities. Through its content, The Village Ukraine’s editorial team tells readers about ways to interact with the city effectively: useful businesses, services, interesting events, and cultural happenings in Kyiv.
The Village Ukraine’s editorial staff is growing slowly but steadily, for the employees to feel comfortable and for clients to get accustomed to cooperating with them. The online publishing company has a small team, but their work is widely valued on the Ukrainian market
In early 2017, the team consisted of 6 persons. Later, the team grew a little, and they started bringing in freelance journalists to help with the work.
We met Alina Nikitina. She has been supporting The Village Ukraine’s projects for a year and a half. We have asked her to tell us about the role of a project manager in the Ukrainian media.
Service and commerce in media
Alina tells us about the newsroom’s work and principles:
I work as a project manager in the Commerce Department of The Village Ukraine. As a project manager, I support the editorial projects, deal with clients within projects, track deadlines and prepare reports.
First and foremost, our team creates journalistic content. We spotlight interesting city events, useful services and businesses in Kyiv. We publish this completely free of charge for the reader’s benefit.
Commercial activities. The Village Ukraine produces promo materials, stories, and articles on the site to promote a client’s brand or products.
The editorial staff have serious standards for promo materials. On the pages, we flag promo materials for readers and name the advertiser. We apply our service-media rule to all promos — they have to be useful to readers. We only advertise products that can be useful to our audience.
The chief editor of our publisher talked about advertising on the site in his 2017 lecture at the UCU School of Journalism:
For us it is important that promo materials do not hinder the journalistic content.
The Village Ukraine’s purpose in using Worksection
Alina is continuing:
We have a lot of projects and an efficient team. We’re a modern publisher, and to avoid wearing out our manager and the rest of the staff, we looked for a management tool. That tool turned out to be Worksection
Worksection is the first page in the browser when I get to work. There I collect all commercial projects actively handled by the editorial staff of The Village Ukraine.
I collect projects in Worksection for the team to know its tasks and progress of projects, and for the employees to be able to share information with each other.
As more and more brands were contacting the publishing company for advertising, it became difficult for the team of journalists to manage taking in, handing over, and approving projects. For that, we needed a convenient tool to hold all the terms of an advertising project and track the work on it in the same place.
Everything is simple in Worksection: you can assign a task to an employee, describe it, set deadlines and priorities.That way no one gets confused — everyone gets their tasks and knows all the details of a project or task. Tasks can be assigned by managers, employees, and the clients who’ve been added.
For example: a client has set a task for our employee, and the task asks them to describe specific product features.
- It is better to keep a task’s title short and to the point.
- Task priorities helps you gauge how important a task is. 1 is the lowest, 10 is the highest.
- Task label. It makes it easier to see what stage a task is at and what’s specific about it.
- Responsible team member who is in charge of its execution.
- Deadlines for completion of a task.
- The task description, which spells out the details.
- A checklist for quickly ticking off completed items. It’s handy for marking small subtasks and crossing them out.
When starting a workday, I write a list of tasks for the whole day to see the scope of works and to obtain a general picture. The list of tasks conveniently shows everything.
Team work
We settle work deadlines, page structure and design, as well as project details with the client.
It is often the case that a client needs to correct something, and the project manager has to keep in touch with the client.
Worksection provides a special team category for the client. The client see only the tasks they’re involved in. At the same time, the editorial information is available only to the members of The Village Ukraine.
A promo project results in a page on the site, which can’t be created in a couple of days. To get a good result, a special project like this is handled by a large team: the art director, editor, designers, copywriters, managers, and programmers. They all need to stay in constant contact so that the end result comes out cohesive and engaging.