For Travis Pittman, Digital Content Manager for Central Oregon Daily News, keeping a local community informed means moving at an extraordinary pace. Operating out of market 180 in Bend, Oregon, his newsroom is tight-knit. On a good day, they have roughly 25 people across all day parts producing the news.
When it comes to digital, Travis faces a unique challenge: he is the newsroom’s lone, full-time digital producer.
“It’s very much a one-man band,” Travis explains. “Efficiency is a massive key in making sure this all works.”
Since bringing Social News Desk into their daily workflow, the platform has helped level the playing field, giving this smaller newsroom the capability to push content and stay competitive on a grander scale.
The One-Man Command Center
Managing a small newsroom’s digital footprint usually involves a fragmented workflow: publishing website stories, converting TV scripts into web copy, and uploading video packages across a myriad of destinations. For Travis, the magic of SND lies in its efficiency.
“Just being able to not have to manipulate five or six different social media feeds at the same time in itself saves a lot of time.”
With SND pulling every account into a single dashboard, his workflow is completely streamlined. Less time spent logging into individual platforms means more time focused on creating the content their audience expects.
Tracking Real-Time Engagement and Growth
In local news, intuition only goes so far; you need clear metrics to know if your content is resonating. Because SND consolidates data in one clear space, tracking performance is no longer an analytical chore.
“It’s nice that we can actually see the engagement, see the reach, and see the increase in followers on all of our platforms.”
Having immediate access to these insights allows their lean team to quickly evaluate what’s working, iterate on their digital strategy, and watch their audience grow in real time.
A Game-Changer for Small Newsrooms
When operating with limited resources, a social media management platform cannot simply be an extra cost; it has to be a necessity. Travis acknowledges that for teams like his, SND is exactly that.
“Especially if you’re in a small newsroom with a small staff, this is definitely a tool that you need to use because it will save you so much time and give your team more ability to find and generate more content because you’ll be spending less time dealing with [the publishing process].”
Driving Clicks and Aesthetics with Story Cards
Beyond managing scale, a small newsroom must stand out in a crowded social media feed. One of Travis’s favorite features to achieve this is SND’s Story Cards feature.
Larger newsrooms often have dedicated graphic design teams to manually build stylized social graphics and informational placards. As a digital team of one, Travis simply didn’t have the hours to manually format those assets every day, and traditional AI tools weren’t up to par.
SND Story Cards changed everything overnight.
“When this rolled out… I was just stunned, going, ‘This is amazing.’ It is an absolute game-changer. From the first two days we rolled these out, we were getting massive positive feedback from folks saying, ‘Oh, I love it, it looks more visual, it pops.’ It brings more attention to the story versus just the standard link.”
Even better, the feature has solved a common audience hurdle: the elusive “where is the link?” comment. By using Story Cards to prompt followers to click the link in the comment section, Central Oregon Daily News has drastically decreased user confusion while boosting click-through behavior.
For Central Oregon Daily News, Social News Desk is more than a dashboard, it’s the force multiplier that empowers a small team to deliver big results.
Discover how Social News Desk’s unified dashboard and broadcast-quality Story Cards help small newsrooms save time, look sharper, and amplify their digital reach. See more customer success stories to learn how news and government organizations master their social media presence with ease.
