Right from the outset Camayak became an invaluable tool for our magazine. It's changed my life as an Editor.
Save conversations alongside your content to speed-up feedback cycles and make it easy to reference editorial decisions.
Camayak has made my staff more efficient and more accountable, not to mention better communicators.
Creating deadlines helps editors plan the days and weeks ahead and gives their colleagues a clear view of their upcoming responsibilities.
What's so good about Camayak?
Camayak lets you work with your media staff in the same place as your copy production team - mimicking a physical newsroom.
In-line comments are automatically stripped out when you publish assignments directly to your website or CMS.
One of the most challenging parts of being a journalist or an editor these days is trying to keep afloat in the huge volume of content that is created and published to the web everyday. I went from being a freelancer for Discovery Latin America to managing a team of writers who provide five to six times the amount of articles I did for them, and in that transition I noticed a huge vacuum of software that lived somewhere between a CMS and a project manager. Camayak is exactly what I and a new generation of virtual newsrooms need.
Writers, stakeholders, sponsors and anyone else with access to your newsroom can pitch an idea for editors to consider. External contributors can also send their pitches via email without requiring access to your newsroom.
Editors can invite entire mailing lists to work with specific groups within their community.
Your staff can publish directly to WordPress and other platforms without ever having to logout of Camayak. Contact us if you have other CMS integration requirements.
Receiving new assignments and comment notifications via email helps connect colleagues when they're not logged into Camayak.
Camayak has been instrumental in increasing student retention.
Like many newspapers, the student newspaper at Duke University is trying to figure out how to most efficiently reach its audience in both print and online. That kind of transition always means restructuring resources - from the times of day we work, to the numbers of various types of stories we do, to the entire editing workflow. Camayak has allowed us to start making those changes, but also understand the current workflow and structure with actual data as opposed to just "how it feels." Using Camayak, we've been able to look at who our most prolific writers and editors are, and how long various tasks tend to take. From there, we were able to see which tasks in the editing workflow were sitting at chokepoints. That allowed us to begin thinking about re-allocating the staff duties as well as altering the times of day we do certain work. I'm also beginning to look at which stages of our story workflow add the most value - both qualitatively measured in terms of the types of edits made, but also quantitatively in terms of changes made, errors caught and duration.
As managing editor last year before we used Camayak, I had to rely on section editor updates in order to be aware of story progress. It has been indispensable for me this year as editor-in-chief to be able to easily see for myself at any given moment where assignments are in the workflow, and to be able to approve them and publish them to the website in one easy step. I can check if writers made deadline, if editors have edited stories, and I can access all assignments and read all the various revisions for myself without having to rely on email threads.
We've made tracking changes user-friendly so staff can quickly see what's changed from one revision to the next.
Since you can see how active your colleagues are, staff can rank themselves against their peers.
Once submitted, assignments are always accessible by editors. The more senior you are, the more control you have over your content and staffing.
Camayak saves me time by centralising almost all our tasks and all our stakeholders.
Staff can activate their own portfolios which can show all the work they've helped to produce, whether they've written, edited or photographed for it.
We were looking for a system that would help us create, manage, and edit content from multiple locations and then publish that content on multiple platforms. We needed a tool that would help us create a truly virtual newsroom geared toward primarily digital output - but that could also be used for our ongoing print needs. Since our students are spread across four campuses and routinely report on breaking news and live events in the Phoenix metro area, we needed the ability to have multiple users collaborate simultaneously from different locations. Camayak has allowed us to do all of this -- and do it very effectively and efficiently. Our digital content output doubled over the last year and Camayak has been a huge part of that ramp up.
The Student Journals' managing editor is in London, the web editor is in Madrid and the lifestyle editor is based at Warwick. Then we have writers, other editors and members of the team dotted around the UK and the globe. Camayak has really helped us to streamline our editorial process: previously we accepted articles and manually created a calendar of the most time-sensitive articles before giving them to sub-editors. Camayak means that we've reduced the number of emails we send dramatically - saving us a lot of time - and ensuring a smoother process, not only for our editorial team but also for our writers. We've found it easier to keep everything under control, especially as we've grown, and the Camayak team have always been very helpful when we've had any questions or feedback.
Allowing staff to see who's working on every assignment at any given moment removes the need for folder-system training of new staff.
Once you're set up with Camayak, turnovers in staff will no longer mean hours of on-boarding.
We've created sensible permissions levels that are effective and easy to understand.
Video and other departments can work in the same newsroom and launch their own using their existing Camayak accounts.
Our new staff have found the software incredibly easy to use.
Before Camayak, we might have been able to pull five or six story ideas out of a staff of 20 students. When I just checked, there were 49 story pitches stacked up waiting for editors to accept or reject. Camayak has made the job much, much easier. We also love having an alumni desk. Keeping a database of all staffers lets advisers stay in touch with students, track their professional success, recruit guest speakers and plan reunions. It also lets student journalists reach out to former staffers to solicit.
