How to Define Operational Processes and Scale in Content Production?

When we kicked off NEWJ’s operations back in 2018, one of the first tasks I took on was to learn the process of news gathering and video production from scratch. I even took up a short course in video production in order to understand the technicalities and turnover time for a video to be ready for distribution. If you are a newbie in the digital media or video production space, here are some of my learnings that may come in handy to you in producing and distributing content pieces:

1. Keep Standard Procedures for branding, design elements, and quality check ready: Before beginning any operations of a new vertical or property, the first and foremost thing was to define the graphic elements, fonts, colours, and tonality in terms of overall branding.
2. Based on the average turnaround time, define the daily scale for your writers, designers, video producers and other team members. (In some organizations producers double up as writers too). The daily output will easily help you project your weekly and monthly scale too
3. The scale of content distribution is unique to the platforms you intend to optimize. However, always remember, the production scale should ideally be more than your content distribution (in our case we call it publishing) scale in terms of the unique content pieces.
4. Based on the production scale, you can easily define your targets on a weekly as well as monthly basis. The targets should always account in for backup or a few evergreen content pieces which can be used in case of adverse circumstances.
5. Last but not the least, when you see consistent positive results based on the defined performance metrics, plan on scaling up by hiring new talent and thereby enhancing your output.

As a result of these steps, we have managed to persistently scale up the number of unique videos published as well as scale the number of verticals and languages on a quarter to quarter basis.