Back-to-school season marks a fresh start for media founders and leaders. It's the right moment to step back, reassess practices, and establish strategies aimed at strengthening internal organization while enabling the smooth launch of new projects. Whether it's revisiting management methods, improving onboarding for new hires, optimizing meetings and work tools, or reviewing the past year to better anticipate what comes next, here are some best practices for approaching back-to-school season with confidence.
Improve internal organization
Use the right tools
The period before the new school year is a good time for reflection. Why not use it to assess, and perhaps change your work tools? Nothing is more frustrating than feeling blocked by a third-party service.
⟶ To help you make choices or discover new possibilities, we're opening the hood by offering you the chance to discover the tools we use every day at Médianes. Among these: Spark for emails, Notion for shared note-taking, Figma for web projects, and Dougs for accounting.
⟶ To actively monitor updates on tools, we recommend the following resources.
- Product Hunt, a platform that lists new tool and service releases daily;
- Wonder Tools, a newsletter by Jeremy Caplan featuring new tools and showcasing case studies.
- Jostack, a tool database powered by Jonathan Lefèvre, where he lists and rates tested tools, whether digital or physical. A comprehensive list focused on optimizing work processes.
- Splice Frames, an exciting newsletter from Splice, dedicated to product news in the media.
Reorganize your schedule
Tired of accepting meetings on Friday at 6 PM? To prevent an emergency workaround from becoming the norm, it can be helpful to reorganize your personal calendar. Our tip? Schedule blocks of personal focus time or no-meeting time in your calendar. Repeated daily, these will save you precious time.
⟶ Need some inspiration? Here we share the rules for organizing Médianes meetings. Among them: prepare the meeting in writing to have a clear view of the questions and points to resolve, invite only the necessary people and keep a record of discussions, schedule dedicated time slots in your calendar so you don't spend your whole week in meetings.
Review one's management practices
What do the economic developments and results of the media
Contexte and Mediapart have in common? Strong investment and deep reflection on team management. While Mediapart strives to highlight
new figures to embody the project and to strengthen its support in
human resources matters (work culture, gender issues, well-being),
Contexte offers ongoing manager training and a genuine delegation culture.
⟶ Management is often viewed as a weak point in media organizations, primarily due to the lack of training for people who find themselves leading journalism teams. Yet several situations can lead journalists to take on management positions and oversee teams. Follow our guide to caring for your human resources.
Welcoming new recruits properly
Taking time to care for the onboarding process of new employees is worthwhile. But a well-trained employee integrated into the structure saves much time in return. At Médianes, each new arrival benefits from a dedicated contact person, a training and networking program, and a site that allows them to understand and access the company's tools, methods, practices, values and culture. These elements are brought together in a welcome guide that makes it possible to share the principles and tools of internal communication and the rules for organizing meetings.
⟶ From drafting the job description to setting the agenda for the first days after a new hire arrives at your company, here are the steps to keep in mind to facilitate your recruits' onboarding journey.
Plan ahead for your projects
Prepare your roadmap
Nothing beats prioritizing and planning your tasks over time to avoid panic. The best approach is to build a roadmap, just like when you plan a road trip. At Médianes, we have a dedicated practical guide. If the objectives you've set seem achievable, all that's left is to establish a reverse timeline. Quite the undertaking.
Conduct an audience analysis
Back to school is also a good time to review your offering and products. To do this, it can be useful to ask your audiences about their needs. Here's an example with this audience study launched by the survey site Mediapart on August 15, 2024. You can also draw inspiration from the annual studies conducted by the podcast studio Louie Media (2023, 2022, 2021, 2020). They then systematically share it on social networks like LinkedIn or Twitter.
Moreover, we sometimes have misconceptions about our audience. The audience study conducted by the feminist magazine La Déferlante the year following its launch revealed to the team that their readers were younger than expected. The audience expressed wanting more educational content, reading recommendations and a more affordable publication: an opportunity for the media to adapt its offerings to the needs and habits of its audience and to build the project's future together with those directly concerned.
⟶ To learn the method and get concrete examples to inspire you and create your own, we're sharing a ready-to-use practical guide here that you can adapt to your media.
Publish accounts
At the start of the school year, several media outlets choose to reveal their financial health, subscriber numbers, and the impact of their investigations and reports over the past year. The economics education channel on YouTube Stupid Economics makes the choice each year for complete transparency by publishing its accounts on a web page accessible to everyone.
Playing the transparency game is also a good way to convince audiences to financially support a project. The Danish media outlet Zetland took the experiment further, for example, as part of a 2021 fundraising campaign, by offering an interactive tool through which readers could interact with the media's finances to assess the economic impact of certain decisions.
Assess your impact
What is impact media? Often, we think of journalism's ability to highlight stories from those finding solutions to social and environmental problems. But beyond editorial content, it can be worthwhile to take concrete stock of your media's impact, from foundations to post-production. Thus, every new year, the independent media StreetPress publishes its impact report. It documents the concrete consequences of published articles for people encountered in the field. The local investigations website Mediacités also takes on the challenge by producing an impact report for each city covered by the media. Example here in Nantes or there, in Toulouse.
The exercise answers an existential question: what is our media for? Beyond building trust, impact reports are an opportunity to assess the concrete consequences of our articles and initiatives from the past year, and to verify that we have fulfilled our mission. They also make it possible to set new objectives for the coming year based on our readers' needs and to bring our archives to life by inviting the public to revisit the most-read and most-popular subjects among their peers.
Establish your editorial guidelines
But what is my article really for? Since 2019, the Swiss daily Le Temps has incorporated a simple question into its daily editorial meetings for each article on the agenda: what objective does it serve? While this might seem surprising or confusing at first, this question changes the way people approach their work and helps better allocate time and priorities for everyone, while respecting the media's editorial, economic and ethical principles. This principle allows for a new editorial hierarchy that rewards not only stories that drive more audience or prestige, but articles that directly serve the public.
Getting GDPR compliant
In June 2022, developer David Libeau filed a complaint with the CNIL by submitting 42 complaints against as many media outlets not complying with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into effect in 2016. The problem? Google Analytics, which sometimes collects far more data than necessary. By setting clear metrics and collecting only the essential elements needed to track them, it's entirely possible to stay within the rules. Alternatives to Google, which has been ordered to change its practices, exist. It's simple, and it concerns all of us.
Understand the assignment
To pay independent journalists, there's only one rule: payment as salary (freelance fees). On one hand, paying journalists by invoice or through author royalties might seem like an easy solution. On the other hand, it's completely illegal. Beyond making it difficult for journalists to obtain press credentials and assert their rights, media outlets expose themselves to sanctions. But don't worry—becoming compliant isn't that difficult! The website Paye ta pige lists the rates practiced by media outlets and their payment terms, while also listing resources to do things correctly. And to understand everything about freelancers' rights, here's a list of best practices published by Médianes for editorial teams, in collaboration with CFDT-Journalistes.
Plan to know
Cash flow plan, budgets, business plan… so many terms that we sometimes want to ignore. Monitoring your financial situation month after month, preparing a business plan so you can react if a loan or subsidy request comes up: activities that can become almost addictive (promise!). Angel or Bpifrance, for example, offer solutions for generating a business plan, and a few services and institutions provide free cash flow plan templates.
To go further
- Valentin Levetti is the co-founder of the YouTube and Twitch channels for economic education Stupid Economics, embodied by Arnaud Gantier. He is the guest on the second episode of the second season of Chemins, the Médianes podcast. How can an independent media channel accelerate on YouTube? How can transparency become an asset in your business model?
- Other examples of impact reports in the media.
- Upskilling, media viability… Delegation is essential to building a virtuous business model. We share our advice here on how to learn to entrust responsibilities to your team.
- From legal procedures to accounting, including developing your business plan, Augustin Naepels, chief executive officer at the online media outlet Les Jours, outlines the essential steps for launching your media, with an emphasis on management.
- How can you run an effective project within your newsroom? That's the central question we seek to answer in this guide, created alongside Robin Kwong, audience engagement director at the Wall Street Journal, and Thomas Seymat, editorial projects and development manager at Euronews.
- This article offers 10 essential recommendations for independent media, and highlights key principles such as inclusivity, accessibility, and transparency. The goal? Work toward building futures that align with society's needs and rebuild connections with audiences.
- Editorial, marketing, financing… Our book, Creating a Media Outlet, makes accessible the methods and best practices useful for creating and developing a media outlet. This work aims to provide keys to understanding a complex media ecosystem where threats and opportunities are multiplying, as well as concrete advice for succeeding in navigating it as media founders.
