How the WSJ programming strategy team worked together in a pandemic

Leslie Yazel, programming strategy editor at The Wall Street Journal, writes about how her team has worked together in the past 12 months despite not seeing each other in person during the pandemic.

Yazel writes, “Thanks to the pandemic, we’ve only ever worked together through our screens, spread across nine time zones. I started onboarding on March 30, a little more than two weeks into the WSJ’s closed offices, and my team was formed and announced over the course of April.

“There would be no bumping into colleagues in the hallways or gatherings at the news hub.

“And because the newsroom hasn’t had a team like this before, we needed to create a structure, workflow, culture and dynamic from scratch.

“Our editors are embedded around the newsroom, yet we come together regularly to share lessons learned and tactics. And as part of WSJ’s Digital Experience and Strategy unit, we draw on the unit’s teams in community engagement, data science and product development for our work.

“Over the past year of lockdown, here are the things that helped bring the 12 of us — strategy editors, SEO editors, and a data scientist — together as a team.”

Read more here.