Editorial processes: SVT Kids Online

Part 8 of 13 in the series Some of my skills.

Editorial processes at SVT Kids by Maren Gerdes

Innovative content concepts can mean that editors need to adjust how they work. At SVT I helped make that kind of change happen.

SVT Kids is a content organization that produces video, text, and interactive content such as polls and games. Traditionally the editors for SVT’s content for kids have focused on producing creative marketing for the shows.

During my time at SVT we created new content concepts such as an Instagram like feed (which has since been replaced by a chat-bot) of content from and about our shows. These new products required that our editors change from being marketers to being … something else.

My contributions

An insight from my research with kids was that feed entries are most powerful if they have a person, preferably a TV personality, as the “author”. The feed also needs to be filled with content that has value on it’s own, rather than be an advert for future TV episodes.

Together with the concept developer Nina and product manager Malin I helped kick off a transformation both of how the editors see their work and of what they want to publish.

What you started a few years ago Björn and Nina, has finally taken off with fantastic speed and shape. So enormously much good work has been done on the way to this proud moment…

Malin, product manager for SVT Kids Online, on Facebook (my translation)

1 thing I learned

It is important to not only include the editorial team in the concept creation, but to also analyze what type of content the editorial team is able and willing to create. Based on that analysis we can choose to create a concept that the editors can already work in or we can choose to work with the editors to change what they can and want to create.

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