Recently the ALLNews Team sat down with global media database and monitoring service Gorkana to talk about how the Alliance newsroom works. Here’s some of what we said:
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Alliance News’ news editor Sam Unsted and CEO Tom Waite, on covering a broad sweep of the markets, saving time for their readers and wanting to speak to CEOs outside of the news-cycle.
Sam, could you talk me through your role and remit at Alliance News?
Sam: I am the news editor and my primary responsibility is running the newsroom. In short, that takes the form of managing the flow of news we report, prioritising the most important stories, based on both the size and prominence of a company but also on the relative newsworthiness. That covers the work done by our beat reporters and by the markets desk. In addition to that, I am responsible for scheduling in the newsroom and making sure the most appropriate reporters are on the most appropriate shifts based on the news we know is coming.
Alongside all that, and in combination with Tom, I handle the editing of the stories we put out, covering the first, quicker pieces of the day to longer, more detailed updates and interviews, along with our market comment, research summaries and news overviews.
What does a typical day look like?
Sam: On a daily basis, I get into the office at about 6.10am. I go through our international content from our partners abroad. That is mostly macro-economic news, European and American company news and anything that is big enough to make it onto the wire. Then we grab any press pick-ups or anything that had been released late in the day that we weren’t in the office to catch.
That all happens up to 7am, when the day really kicks off with everything coming down the RNS feed. By this point, the reporters are in the office and we will have a chat about what needs to be done first. A big part of my job is making sure things happen in the right order. So we prioritise FTSE100 and FTSE250 companies, and then move onto everything else. Everyone is doing the flash headlines in the morning, and they’ll keep an eye on everything going on and they’ll shout out what might move. If you get a profit warning or an upgrade to earnings guidance, or anything like that, they will shout that out and either I will grab it, or the person who covers that sector will do it. We try then to work through everything in that fashion.
8am, the markets open and then we can see what is actually moving. By that point generally all the big companies are done. Then I’ll look at the small-cap index – AIM and the main market – to see what is moving. The moves here tend to be quite dramatic. We get all that done by 11am-ish, and then we work on our other content; our ‘IN THE KNOW’ and ‘TAKING AIM’ features.
The wire runs until half past six, and we have someone on late shift who’ll monitor this until then.
For the full interview, see more at: http://www.gorkana.com/news/corporate-and-financial/gorkana-meets/gorkana-meetsalliance-news-2