4 newsroom rules for creating strong content

Community building starts with an audience that returns regularly to a site. You can keep your audience coming back for more with posts focused on a few specific subjects you know to be of interest. Creating this content for your online community must not be an afterthought; you have to plan ahead to create credible and compelling content. The best way to do this is to take advice from a group of people who have been doing this for decades, journalists.

Newsroom rules

The Poynter Institute suggests that any content creators follow some basic rules of a newsroom, and offers these guidelines:

Make an editorial calendar and hold weekly editorial meetings.

An editorial calendar can very easily help you get organized and see where regular columns can fit in. The meetings give you time to reflect on what is working and what is not. Giving people the time to create content (according to a calendar) and being held accountable for your content (editorial meeting), takes away some of the pressure and focuses content creators on quality, integrity and ethical standards. This is paramount to establishing trust with the audience, which leads to community building.

Develop (and stick to) a regular schedule of publishing.