Kapost Customers
Featured: TravelShark Takes Content Management to Cutting Edge with Kapost
Posted in: Kapost Customers, Press Date: January 26, 2012Kapost customer, TravelShark recently wrote a great review about their use of Kapost on their company blog. Prior to finding Kapost they were struggling to manage their freelance writers (located around the world) and the need to scale and increase their content production was imminent.
We loved their insight and always are learning from our customers, so we wanted to share.
Here are some highlights:
Kapost caught our attention because they knew exactly what we wanted—to spend less time managing deadlines, tracking down missing articles, and approving stacks of invoices; and more time working on the content itself. We reach out to and connect with writers in each city who are local to that city. Moreover, we wanted a scalable solution that would allow us to continue growing our operation in the future.
The impacts have been felt across the company. Obviously, the content team is happier, but some of the impacts were unexpected. We’ve noticed that our best writers are now taking on MORE work. We can only assume this relates to the autonomy of being able to choose their own articles based on interest without having to bother another human on our team. In addition, it makes it easier for our content team to track the progress or our writers and the articles they are working on. Accounting is over the moon; as anyone making small payments to vendors knows, it takes the same amount of time to generate a small check as a large check, and now we’re nearly check-free on this front.
Kapost has made our content team more efficient and agile, allowed us to expand our production levels without making any sacrifices to quality, and kept us dedicated to our goal of producing useful, relevant, and interesting travel content for cities all over the world.
You can read the post in full here.
Thanks to TravelShark for the insight and for being a great customer!
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This is the third post in an ongoing series called, Kapost Customers. We will be featuring some of our wonderful customers, learning their editorial process, featuring their great online publications and of course, learning how they use Kapost. Enjoy!
I’m excited to introduce Jennifer Davidson, Managing Editor of TheFashionSpot.com.
1. Tell us about your yourself and your publication.
I am the managing editor of The Fashion Spot, an online fashion magazine and subscriber-based fashion community that reaches over 1.5 million readers per month.
Managing a freelance writing staff spread out across the country and Europe, publishing 10 or more articles per day was cumbersome to manage. We used our own combination of calendars for scheduling, online documents for planning, and email for sending articles and photos. It worked, but it was far from elegant or ideal.
Kapost has revolutionized our editorial process, streamlining everything from pitching story ideas and scheduling to uploading content and images. There’s virtually no learning curve for my writers and it allows the editorial staff, also spread out across the country, to seamlessly manage every stage of content production.
Scheduling: Managing our editorial calendar is a breeze.
Organization: We no longer have to email articles, images, and comments back and forth. Everything related to an article is neatly contained in Kapost — notes, supporting documents, revisions, comments, copy, and images are all in one place and accessible from anywhere, by anyone with permission.
Efficiency: Now that we use Kapost, we no longer have to transfer an article from an email or a word doc into our CMS. Our writers submit and format their own articles, thereby saving us time (and money!)
I love managing a talented team of writers who create interesting and entertaining content. Seeing an article go from concept to published article is a thrill.
5. How has working with Kapost increased your efficiency?
Our efficiency has increased incredibly. Personally, I have cut at least an hour from my day that was spent on mundane tasks that are easily handled by Kapost. We were also able to dramatically cut the hours spent formatting articles which puts less of a burden on our staff, saving us money.
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Today, I’m excited to introduce Lori Cuthbert, Editor-In-Chief of DiscoveryNews.com
1. Tell us about yourself and your publication.
I’m Editor-in-Chief of DiscoveryNews.com, a science and technology daily news website.
Discovery News is a remote operation; my team is spread across five time zones in a few different hemispheres. We didn’t have one place where everyone who works for Discovery News could interact – an online water cooler, if you will – share ideas, make pitches and see what everyone else is up to. As Editor-in-Chief of Discovery News, I needed a place that allows me to oversee my newsroom, as well as manage my writers, without having to use a handful of software programs. Kapost is that thing.
Kapost lets us all see what each other is doing in one place – or not, if we want to just see a subset of the whole. That transparency makes it easier to manage story pitch and publication flow, and the calendar function allows a high-level view of the publishing highway that we just don’t have now. So, Discovery News writers can see incoming story pitches from other writers, and can avoid duplicate pitches. Editors can field pitches all in one place, and writers can submit their stories right there too. Also, Kapost allows commenting within each post, which keeps a record of back-and-forths about specific stories in one place. No more searching emails for chains.
I love a lot of things about my job, but mostly the variety of what I do. I get to learn something new every day; I get my mind blown routinely multiple times a day; I get to make people smarter about the world they live in.
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This is the first post in an ongoing series called, Kapost Customers. We will be featuring some of our wonderful customers, learning their editorial process, featuring their great online publications and of course, learning how they use Kapost. Enjoy!
Today, I am excited to introduce Rachel McFarland, Managing Editor of Momtastic.
Tell us about yourself and your publication
Momtastic.com is an online lifestyle publication focused on delivering quality content that is relevant and timely for mom’s.
Our article topics address what mom’s want to know in a concise usually humorous, always positive and well written way. Our eye candy (DIY’s and Home Decorating tips) make even the least crafty of us think we could actually make that starburst mirror or little sundress and our recipes are mouthwatering at any time of the day. We have 3 professional food writers, a nutritionist, an interior decorator, 2 teachers, a career nanny as well as numerous business women who work full time jobs, blog on their own blogs and write for Momtastic.com and to top it off they are all Moms.
I personally am the managing editor of Momtastic.com and am tasked with corralling all my super writers and making sure that they not only turn their articles in on time, but that they still have time to head to the soccer game or dance recital.
What were some of the editorial challenges you faced before using Kapost?
Before Kapost the editorial challenges I faced were numerous. I have 28 writers, all on different schedules, writing different types of articles with different pay scales. I had the day to day editorial calendar on a monster excel spreadsheet that was tracking where in the process each article was, I had my columnists scheduled on a google calendar and was tracking invoicing on another spread sheet entirely.
It was spread sheet chaos.
What are your favorite Kapost features?
I love that I can toggle between a list view or a calendar view for posts, and that I can either look at when articles are due or when they are going to be published. It gives me a much better view of where I have holes in the editorial calendar as well as where I maybe have too much scheduled. I also love the ease of assigning stories to writers or putting an idea up for “bid” if you will.
What do you love about your job?
Almost everything. I love working with my writers, they are an extremely talented and genuine group of women and moms. I learn from them every day. I also love that in some small way I am able to help give back to people by the editorial topics that I choose and the articles I assign. I hope that we are helping mom’s even if it’s just giving them a few seconds of quiet.
How has Kapost helped you and your team?
Kapost has helped us in so many ways. It has really streamlined our uploading process as well as our tracking and calendar process. It has enabled us to get off our numerous spreadsheets and really be able to see where we are editorially.
For our writers it has been awesome. Our backend is tricky to use and does not allow for previews of articles so now that all our writers are uploading to Kapost they can preview and edit their own posts before they go live. It has also been great for the pitch process. As opposed to me having 100′s of emails throughout the month with different ideas my writers now use Kapost to send me their pitches which is so much more organized.
Find Momtastic:http://www.momtastic.com/ | Facebook.com/Momtastic | Twitter
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