Spectrum News: Digital Strategy Manager

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Spectrum News Challenge is an original streaming show that airs on the Spectrum News CTV app. For two successful seasons, I have been an executive producer for the digital marketing and content strategy to promote this show on each of our news stations’ websites. From project managing the process, working with marketing, product and editorial teams - I have successfully been part of the launch and creation of this show. 

For each season’s premiere, we created a social media strategy to pair alongside the on air premiere, digital and streaming premieres. I focused this strategy on current trends and platforms that paired best with the targeted audience.

Spectrum News is a unique group of news networks in that the content is paired with the company’s wifi and cable. Because of that aspect, the company elected to keep their content behind a paywall and opted to not focus its content strategy to include social media. 

When I arrived and did an analysis of the stations and their performances, I discovered that leaving out social media platforms was a mistake. Metrics showed that customers were searching for their presence on social media. With that in mind, I gathered analytics from the presence each station did have on social media and talked with each of the digital teams. Thanks to my investigations, I was able to determine that the majority of the digital teams were seeing massive views from barely posting to social. They were interested in updating and, in some cases, creating an entirely new social media content strategy. 

Together with my team, we are in the process of launching an entire overhaul of social media content strategies that focus on current trends and forecasts where the future of social media and news media will go - this time together. 

Because so many of the digital teams were neglecting or disregarding social media, on-air talent struggled to have an understanding of where to direct their efforts online. Every summer, Spectrum News offers several classes to take to help employees grow and learn more about the company where they work and each individual role. 

My team noticed that there was a gap for on air talent and their social media presence. I created four classes/sessions surrounding on the following: 

1. Building your brand online 
2. Social media in the reporting process [two parts] 
3. Creating short-form video 

These classes empowered and educated new talent and some more senior talent on how to keep up with current social media trends and ways to share breaking news before and long after newscasts. 

With 26 digital news stations, Hearst Television had tons of content that could easily be repurposed. When the national team decided to present a series of video content, I presented several ideas but one that performed exceptionally well [millions of videos per video on Facebook] was the “This day in history” series. 

Mirroring what others had done with the idea, I took content archived from our stations and grabbed quotes exclusive to the Hearst Television coverage. Everything from aliens landing new our New Mexico station and how our Florida stations covered Ted Bundy’s escape and eventual capture. 

I’ve covered elections at the local and national level. Finding ways to create content that piques viewers interest and elevates their understanding of what is happening is a personal gift of mine. For Hearst Television, I dived into the many women who were running for office and what that meant for the future of the country. 

Creating voter guides that empower constituents to understand what is on the ballot before voting is integral and the content I’ve worked on over the years has done just that.