Our Notion consolidates key documents that used to be scattered and fragmented between sections. It acts as a runsheet and printsheet, where we can track our content; a roster, where we can keep an up-to-date directory of our staff; and much, much more.

Table of Contents

What is Notion?

Notion is like a spreadsheet-database hybrid. It’s generally intuitive to use, but it can take some getting used to.

Below we’ll refer to pages, databases, views, entries, and properties. Here’s what those terms mean for us.

• The page is the entire thing. The page relevant to editors and the Daily's internal operations is called Newsroom Editor Hub Template.
• The databases are different sets of data we store. They they are links you can click from the main Newsroom Editor Hub Template. The databases we have are called , , and . We also have some subpages under the Newsroom Editor Hub Template page. One example is Editor Resources Template. We’ll go over each in detail below.
• The views are different ways of viewing and organizing data (think filtering, sorting, etc.) in a database. You can switch between the views in a database by clicking on the small dropdown menu below the title of a database. The actual text there will depend on which view is currently active, so it may say something like "News Articles" or "All Content" depending on which view you currently have active. Our database has views including an “All” view that shows all its data, and a view for each section that shows just the staff in that section. Our database also has an “All” view and a view for each section, in addition to runsheet-like views that show just the content being published in a specific day or week.
• An entry is simply a record in a database. Think of it like a row in a spreadsheet. It might store data about an article, like in the database, or a person, like in the database, for example.
• A property is simply data associated with an entry. For example, a property of an article (an article is an entry) in the database is its word count, author, desk editor, and google docs link, among other things.

That’s it!

Important notes

Here are a few quick tips on using our Notion setup.

• Be cognizant of other people’s work. Section-specific runsheets are now unified in once place. We hope this will make our workflows a lot simpler. It also means that we all have access to other sections’ runsheets — so just try to be cautious, wherever possible, that you don’t accidentally change another section’s runsheet.

  • Please also don’t change the way views as a whole are configured without talking to someone important who knows what they're doing (exec-level or knowledge base director)

    <aside> ‼️ If you change a view for yourself, it changes it for EVERYONE

    </aside>

    • Please don’t change the configuration (like the filter or sort options) of views that aren’t assigned to your section.
    • Please don’t change the set of columns in a table. Deleting a column means losing all that data. Adding a column should only happen if it’s not possible at all to use the existing ones. Talk to the EIC before making any edits to properties structuring (essentially, the different COLUMNS in a spreadsheet storing things like word count, google doc link, etc. for an article, for example).

  • But feel free to configure your own section’s views however! You can Hide (but DO NOT DELETE) columns (which affect only that view), set filter or sort options, etc.

• Download the Notion mobile app if you want! Notion has an awesome mobile app.

With that out of the way, let’s look at each database within our Newsroom Editor Hub Template section.

Content database