About The Village Ukraine
The Village Ukraine is an urban Internet newspaper and service medium. The Village aims at creating materials to highlight events in megapolises. Through the content, The Village Ukraine’s editorial staff spotlight tools such as useful businesses, services, interesting landmarks and cultural events in Kyiv for efficient interaction with the city.
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 appreciated in the Ukrainian market.
In early 2017, the team consisted of 6 persons. By 2019, the headquarters was enlarged to some extent, and the team started to involve freelance journalists to do the work.
We have 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 is telling us about the publishing company’s activities and fundamentals:
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 publicize these absolutely free of charge, for our reader’s benefit.
Commercial activities. The Village Ukraine provides promo materials, news stories and articles on the website to promote brands or products of our clients.
The editorial staff have serious standards for promo materials. We mark promo materials for our readers on the pages by indicating the advertiser. We apply the service media rule to all promo materials — they should be useful for readers. We advertise only products which can be beneficial for our audience.
The Chief Editor of our publishing company outlined the advertising on our website in his lecture at the School of Journalism under the Ukrainian Catholic University in 2017:
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 many projects and a very active team. We are a contemporary publishing company, and, not to torture our manager and other employees, we were looking for a management tool. And we found Worksection.
Worksection is the first page in the browser which I open having come 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 the receipt, transfer and confirmation of projects. To do this, we needed a convenient tool to contain all terms of advertising projects and to track how it is handled.
Everything is simple in Worksection: you can assign a task to an emplyee, describe it, set deadlines and priorities. Nobody gets confused while obtaining assignments, knowing all details in a project or task. Managers, employees and connected clients are entitled to assign tasks.
For example: a client has set a task for our employee, and the task prescribes to outline specific product characteristics.
- It is better to entitle a task briefly and in substance.
- Task priorities contribute to realizing the importance degree of a task. The 1st degree is the minimum, the 10th degree is the maximum.
- Task label. It facilitates recognizing the progress stage of a task, as well as its specific features.
- Responsible team member who is in charge of its execution.
- Deadlines for completion of a task.
- Task Description outlining task details. .
- Checklist to tick off completed items. It is convenient to use the checklist for ticking small subtasks and for 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 may see only tasks he is involved in. At the same time, the editorial information is available only to the members of The Village Ukraine.
A promo project results into a page on the website, which cannot be created in a couple of days. To achieve a positive result, such special project is handled by a large team of people consisting of the art director, editor, designers, copywriters, managers and programmers. All of them need to stay connected in order to deliver an integral and interesting product of work.