A newsroom with no dedicated social staff used the cohort to assemble a cross-team working group and plan its first original creator collaboration, a series on the city's beloved sausage culture.
Signal Cleveland had been gradually building capacity for a more thoughtful approach to sharing its work on social media, and opening the door to creator collaborations was a crucial piece of that. The newsroom has been trying to reach audiences who consume news primarily on social media, people who do not normally visit news websites.
The newsroom's pick changed as it went through the process. It initially wanted to collaborate with I'm From Cleveland, an Instagram page that curates headlines, stories, and other content focused on Cleveland culture. As it honed in on the kind of collaboration it wanted, the team realized that creator was not the best fit, because it wanted to work with a creator to make original content.
Adriana Lacy
Signal Cleveland is now planning a pitch to Stefan Johnson, known as Snack Daddy. His content focuses on food, and he has a global audience. He is from Cleveland, and the newsroom has collaborated with him loosely in the past. His audience and content fit well with a series Signal Cleveland is creating this summer, exploring the cultural significance and history of the city's many different types of sausage.
Before the cohort, Signal Cleveland did not have structures in place to enable creator collaboration. Participating pushed the newsroom to think more critically about how collaboration works and what it would require.
It took a couple of meetings to nail down, but the team put together a group of stakeholders from both the editorial and audience teams. That was a crucial first step the newsroom did not know it needed.
One of the biggest challenges was simply capacity. Signal Ohio's audience team oversees multiple newsrooms across the state, and the Cleveland newsroom has no one dedicated to running its social media. So the effort required bringing together several people who could tap in and out of social media strategy, including creator collaborations, on top of their other responsibilities.
The team is planning to test its first collaboration on the sausage series, because it is more light-hearted yet still very dear to many Clevelanders. There is room for creativity and humor as well as serious reflection.
The newsroom has defined success in concrete, community-rooted terms. This might sound strange, but Clevelanders are very passionate about sausage. So success looks like consistent, vibrant discussion and debate in comments, shares, and responses to a survey the newsroom will launch with the project. The team wants to hear about the secret family recipes passed down through generations and the unique takes brought to Cleveland by its newcomer communities.
Reflecting on the process, the newsroom's main change for next time would be to brainstorm with the wider newsroom a bit earlier. You never know what ideas could come from throwing a lot of paint at the wall before expectation creeps in.
Signal Cleveland plans to see how this more formal process goes and then build from there. There is a strong sense that the newsroom will continue to work with creators; it just has to see what that looks like and what a good fit would be.
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