News organizations that value learning and skill-sharing are also organizations with collaborative cultures, including across departments. Breaking down silos and finding ways to work across teams increases opportunities to share knowledge.
Vicky Ho, newly appointed editor of the Anchorage Daily News, uses project management frameworks to gather stakeholders from across the organization to participate in focused, short-term projects in an efficient and collaborative manner.
Jeff DeFrancesco sat down with Ho in March 2025, when she was interim editor, to discuss this team effort. In addition to her work at the Daily News, Ho has worked for many years with the Poynter Institute, including as a coach in the Table Stakes Local News Transformation Program.
Q: As a news leader, how do you approach cross-department collaboration with colleagues?
A: I started at the Anchorage Daily News in January 2010, beginning on the copy desk and working my way up through various editing roles.
I landed in a newsroom that I really love working in, with amazing colleagues and a very high standard that’s kind of built into our DNA. I started as a copy editor and page designer, and then shortly after that, became the Knight home page editor, and then the deputy editor online and then the managing editor. And now, I’m the interim editor, after our longtime editor retired.
I very much view my position as a management and support role: Meeting colleagues’ needs and supporting them in the way they need to be supported. With the other non-newsroom work that I’m involved in, such as overall email strategy, subscription marketing or special sections, there’s
a lot of collaboration and coordination with other departments — advertising and marketing and our reader revenue team as well. To me, communication and clear expectation-setting are vital to successful cross-departmental collaboration; otherwise internal alignment on goals and strategy is extremely difficult to achieve.
Q: What problem are you trying to solve?
A: Through a couple of programs that we’ve done, the Anchorage Daily News has experimented with implementing a scrum and a sprint model, so that we have more frequent touchpoints among a smaller group of team members who can hold each other accountable for getting smaller pieces of the work done. This helps us all build toward a broader overall strategy or tactic that the organization is trying to execute without directly involving a larger group in the nitty-gritty of the work. You could have a model like that for email newsletters, social media strategy or subscription marketing.
Q: What worked? How has this approach helped bridge silos in your organization?
A: Our sprints have generally lasted two to three weeks, and the people involved in our scrum meetings usually represent different departments, but we each have key pieces of the work that we’re responsible for executing:
- We’ll hold broader, less frequent meetings to sort out our overall sprint priorities.
- We’ll hold occasional meetings to line out what sprints we want to take on in the near-term, over the next few weeks.
- We’ll hold more regular, brief scrum meetings that are laser-focused on the tasks needed to complete the sprint and address what immediate roadblocks are standing in our way.
Q: What didn’t work? Or what happened that you didn’t expect?
A: We’ve found that the scrum/sprint model requires focus and discipline, and if you have many daily responsibilities you’re tracking, it can be challenging to sustain that discipline indefinitely. So, we’ve ratcheted scrum efforts up and down as our organizational needs require. It can also be the case in which assigning roles within the scrum group might not be super intuitive. For example, the person who might be best at keeping the whole group accountable for forward progress is likely not the person doing the most ground-level execution, because that distance can help them see gaps others miss. Or, maybe the opposite is true! It boils down to your team chemistry and how those skill sets dovetail.
Q: What advice would you give to others who try to do this?
A: Find the right meeting cadence for what that project or initiative might look like, or what that area of responsibility looks like. Don’t be afraid to adjust if what you started off doing isn’t clicking for your team or workflows.
We found it to be really helpful to “accordion” what we’re doing based on the capacity that we have at any given moment, the resources that we have, and then what our priorities are at that time. Priorities can definitely shift over time or even be seasonal, depending on different factors.
Try this
Ho suggests these frameworks for developing workflows across departments in news organizations:
- Embrace experimentation: The Anchorage Daily News applies a product-thinking mindset to coverage planning, marketing, newsletters and more. “Get in the habit of iterating, experimenting and learning. There’s always something you can learn no matter what you’re trying,” Ho said. You can use this worksheet to plan your own experiment.
- Assign roles and responsibilities: Take time to consider who could be involved and ways they may contribute. Ho suggests making a constituency map to help you be more proactive, rather than reactive, to colleagues’ concerns. “It shows that you — as a newsroom manager, a newsroom leader — are really thinking about the people doing the work and not just the work itself,” she said.
- Adopt the formula for lasting change: Identifying three factors can catalyze effective change. “I can’t say enough how DVP is really important in all of this,” Ho said, referring to The Formula for Change developed by Eric Abramson of Columbia Business School:
Change = D x V x P
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- D is the dissatisfaction with the current state (this dissatisfaction or motivation is unique to each person)
- V is a clear, shared vision of the future
- P is a process that provides a way forward and clears obstacles
By identifying the team members’ motivation for change, a shared vision and the process to work ahead together, “the better equipped you are to execute any kind of strategic work, or newsroom structural changes, or changes in communication or strategy,” she said.
Ho learned about these frameworks and other tools of Performance Driven Change in the yearlong Table Stakes program, which also teaches the table stakes, key digital skills needed for news publishers to thrive in the digital era. Both the table stakes and the Performance Driven Change tools were developed by Douglas K. Smith, who is also the founder of the Media Transformation Challenge program built around this intellectual property.
Jeff DeFrancesco has 25 years of experience in the newspaper industry. He is a member of the 2024-25 Table Stakes Alumni Advisory Board, president of the Northeast Association of Communication Executives and the audience development manager for Newspapers of New England.
