Client notes
What the packs did in someone else’s conference
These notes name the commission. They are not star ratings. One of them records a first draft that spoke CMS instead of English.
The Saturday package finally had a page the conference could argue with. I still wish the first draft had used our section names rather than CMS labels — we spent a morning translating “local_gov_live” into “civic” — but the revised pack is what we pin on the wall.
They refused to average print PAMCo with website counts, which annoyed the commercial director for about an hour and then saved us from a misleading kit. The memo named three newsletter experiments we could run with the staff we already have.
Priya treated RAJAR and the on-demand log as cousins, not twins. Producers stopped apologising for “small” overnight numbers that were doing perfectly ordinary work for the strand.
The election extra looked frantic from the inside. The note showed the live blog held returning readers and the explainers did not. We cut two formats for the next national night without a row.
Church End posted printed copies that survived being passed around a wet newsroom. That sounds trivial until you have watched a projector fail during conference.
A Saturday package, rewritten once
A regional daily commissioned a quarterly content performance report after a redesign of the Saturday paper. The first draft used CMS section codes because that was how the extract arrived. Conference could not match “local_gov_live” to the civic desk. Harriet spent a morning on the phone with the deputy editor mapping labels, and Owen redrew the ranked list.
The useful finding was not a league of writers. It was that two service columns, short and unglamorous, brought more Sunday returners than the cover essay. The editor kept the essay and moved the columns higher in the bundle. That is the sort of decision a pack should make cheaper, not more theatrical.
A speech-radio strand and two currencies
A commissioning editor asked for a newsroom briefing after an internal note had averaged RAJAR and on-demand starts. Priya presented them on facing pages with a sentence under each chart. Producers stopped treating overnight radio as a failed version of catch-up. The strand’s next special was scheduled for a slot the log already showed people used, rather than a slot that looked important on a wall planner.