The expansion of Brafton’s newsroom has coincided directly with the maturing of the content marketing industry. From “a handful of writers and marketing strategists” in a small office in Boston’s Post Office Square, Senior Director of Content Francis Ma said he has watched Brafton develop into who we are today: a large scale editorial operation.
Like a traditional newsroom, Brafton is home to a variety of editors, writers, researchers and managing editors. Tenured writers who show mastery of our editorial standards and a strong work ethic have a variety of promotions to strive for: positions specific to editing, researching and expertise-writing have all been created for the benefit of both the growing Brafton newsroom structure and clients’ evolving content needs.
In Brafton’s editorial skills matrix there’s a clear outline of the various newsroom positions and how a news and content writer can develop a career, based on tenure, experience, skills and overall performance.
“I was playing the video game Portal 2 a lot at the time it came to me, and the idea was that you needed to get to the next level, but had to have certain skills or experiences first in order to get there. That’s kind of like our skills matrix,” Ma explained.
Creating careers from writers’ passions: How Researcher Hollie says her hard work was rewarded
Research associate Hollie Heath said she initially sought a job at Brafton’s Chicago office because she was intrigued by the work-hard play-hard atmosphere. Starting as a news and content writer, Hollie tested the waters in several roles, eventually working her way up to the desk where her passion was best utilized: the research team.
“Brafton employees are welcome to take their skills and put them in a position they think they’d enjoy or that they think they’d be really great at,” she said. “I knew I loved interviewing, doing research and sourcing, and when a position opened up on the research team, I felt like my hard work was certainly rewarded.”
As Brafton’s editorial force has grown significantly, the priorities outlined in Brafton’s mission have remained the same: Premium content from a resilient team that thrives on the versatility of an ever-changing industry.
Creating editorial roles for a dynamic industry
While Brafton’s products have grown to include video, graphics and social media, the structure of the written word offerings have evolved as well. Brafton initially provided clients short-but-sweet, high-quality news articles. Now, with a variety of around 20 types of content marketing offerings, the writing team within the editorial department is responsible for an array of different forms of content: landing pages, industry news, white papers, case studies, interviews and more.
Because of the diversity in Brafton’s editorial landscape, different roles are created based on client needs and team talent. For example, the senior writer position, Ma explained, is dedicated to writers looking to strengthen the depth of their subject matter expertise by concentrating on feature articles, white papers, and topics that require extensive research.
Several milestones have been met since our editorial operation took flight. As a department the editorial team has more than 260 years of Brafton experience. In August of this year, the team reached a historic Brafton achievement: publishing our 1,000,000th content unit.
We’re grateful for our editorial team, and so are our clients. Here’s what some of them are saying:
Even in markets that seem highly technical and very niche, Brafton has writers who have experience in those fields and, if they don’t, Brafton’s writers can develop expertise very quickly. Keith R. Crosley, Director of Market Development at Proofpoint, Inc.
I really feel that the writers do an excellent job. They’ve been actively suggesting new topics, and they’ve been working with us when we develop new topics as well, so that’s been outstanding. Erik Karff, Manager of Digital Marketing at Allegis Group Services
We found the editorial team to be very responsive during the early stages to finetune the direction of all four categories that Brafton is writing about [for us.] I think Brafton did a very good job of capturing both the technical nature of the topics at hand, as well as the overall tone. There’s a lot of research and editorial quality that goes into the content Brafton develops for us. Brad Edmond, Director of Marketing at CADD Edge
