Setting OKRs for 4th Quarter 2020

The 2020 pilot Q4 OKR at the CEO level was designed to break through an ambitious revenue figure for
advertising. It had three KRs that needed to be achieved to meet the objective which touched on three
different departments: Editorial, Advertisement and Product. with allocated owners for each

Each of these owners and their teams then wrote their own OKRs. Their teams then wrote sub-OKRs.

The OKR set for Q4 2020 was to exceed audience and digital advertising revenue on Newsweek.com year on
year by 33%.

Mid-way through Q4, Pragad stretched the digital ad revenue goal to a 55% increase YoY for Q4 2020. In the
end, the teams achieved 100% of the stretch OKR.

Transparency and Alignment:

It was the first time everybody knew everyone else’s goals, allowing them to work towards achieving common
objectives. This generated a process of continuous improvement with collaboration and input from people
from other areas.

consistent process to monitor content from a company-wide perspective.

Operation, technology, editorial and strategy leaders had always worked together, but their teams did not.

The first step toward collaboration was clearer, deeper visibility across the teams.

The first step toward collaboration was clearer, deeper visibility across the teams

one team’s challenge could easily be seen as another team’s opportunity

First, the stretch OKR goals impressed on everyone that business as usual would not work. Everyone needed to
think differently about their business processes.

Second, the free-flowing discussions at meetings made people think differently.

By the end of the quarter each team was beginning to approach problems with the mindset of other teams,
something that hadn’t happened when the goals were simply shared by email and spreadsheet

There is a team spirit that wasn’t always there before

Stretch Goals
A defining feature of the goal setting process were the stretch goals.

But Dev kept changing the numbers to make a stretch goal.

Cascading of OKRs:
Each team created their own cascading OKRs to achieve goals in the company-level OKR.
One of the key results of the company OKR became an objective for a CEO-minus-one executive, who then built
his/her own OKR around it. Each CEO-minus-two executive did the same using one of the key results of his or
her manager. These level-three OKRs were quite granular and required tracking processes and data that
otherwise would have gotten little attention.

They identified a subset of stories called “duds” that generated neither impact (for example, getting a major
social-media corporation to change its policies) nor a sufficiently large audience. The goal was to ensure that
each writer’s “dud ratio” was below 35 percent in any given week.

Editorial OKRs:
Pragad had defined a vision for more impactful and fair journalism, and it fell to Cooper to translate that vision
into editorial workflows and journalism goals.

Journalism didn’t lend itself naturally to measurement using quantitative metrics. OKRs, with their emphasis on
data and deliverables, became key to that effort.

Ambitious Journalism and High-Impact OKRs:

Newsweek had set out to quantify what good journalism is, with a data-driven approach.

So they needed to find an objective way to measure the quality of the journalism that they published

News Director Juliana Pignataro was charged with creating a metric for high-impact journalism, the kind that
builds a news organization’s reputation and turns readers into subscribers.

She and her team agreed that any journalism deemed “good” must focus on impact.

They came up with a weighted index that would allow them to grade stories according to their impact
As an editor or reporter, you tend to judge the worth of a given story or project instinctively -- I’m interested, or
I’m not so interested. But now we think hard about what is likely to fill one of these OKRs

Working on the hypothesis that it would be possible to create an OKR for fairness, the team drafted one for
consideration
“We set out to write the Newsweek Fairness Index from scratch and settled on three questions.”

1) Are we using the fairest words, and using them fairly?

2) Is the frame of the story fair or does it imply a particular judgment or point of view?

3) Is the overall coverage fair?