Glacier Media Credits YESEO for Streamlining Newsroom Workflow
YESEO is a tool to help newsrooms get their jobs done better and for Katie Mercer, VP of Content at Glacier Media, that has meant YESEO answers questions that typically went to her desk.
“We used to have an SEO Slack channel, where it was folks pinging myself and the audience editor asking for SEO headlines for their articles,” Mercer said. “And now we can simply say: ‘use YESEO.’ Often, they’ll then come back to us with its suggestions and what they chose. It’s great.”
Glacier Media serves community newspapers in British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Manitoba in Canada. They support over 40 publications and over 160 editorial staff members across three Canadian provinces.
They saw the YESEO app mentioned in the Blue Engine alumni community, as well as the News Product Alliance newsletter.
YESEO app founder Ryan Restivo answered their questions to onboard them, the Glacier Media team dove into using its /analyze and /prep commands on a daily basis. It has changed how each small newsroom works on finding their right headline.
As a newsroom they have worked to track how long it takes to go from idea to story, and YESEO has helped cut down that time from completed story to useful headline.
“How long did you sit and look at your screen to try to come up with the SEO headline versus putting into YESEO and then amending it, you had to amend it, but it was instantaneous for you versus you kind of guessing,” Mercer said.
One benefit of the Generative AI headlines that YESEO offers has been that since it is as easy as hitting “Suggest Headlines” it has led to more conversation around practically using AI to help the newsroom.
“It's really helped us lead into more AI conversations, whereas I think they would have been a lot more resistant before,” Mercer said. “That's been helpful as we show them some of the more advanced ways that we can be making use of it in our workflows.”
One way they have looked to use YESEO is by looking to change headlines of past stories to see if they can increase in performance in certain newsrooms.
Mercer said, “We're going to assign time every weekend where it's less busy, if there's not a breaking news story, we go back through our Parse.ly, find evergreen stories that maybe aren't doing as well as we'd like them to and then see if they have SEO on them and use YESEO to put them on there.”