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Centering Teams in Practice
How to Take a
Collective Break
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CONTENTS
By Resting When Our Audience Rests, We Meet Their Needs Throughout the Year
We all know the feeling right before going on vacation: There are a million things to do and not enough time to do them, so you end up working overtime just to be able to take time off. Then, when you’re back, the emails in your inbox have multiplied like a wet Gremlin and there are even more Slack messages you need to catch up on. It’s exhausting.
Don’t get us wrong, we’re big fans of vacation and highly encourage our team to take at least three weeks off a year. But this kind of individual rest comes with the extra burden of making sure you’re setting your team up for success while you’re gone.
But when an entire office closes for collective rest, it’s completely different. You may have a couple of things that need to be done for stories or external partners before you go, but, for the most part, everyone sets the same out-of-office, deletes Slack from their phones, and just… stops. No handover to colleagues, no checking messages while lying on a beach, and no missed work to follow up on when you get back. It’s actually restful.
At The Appeal, we’re big on living our values, so we take our commitment to “Self and Community Care” seriously. This means the sacrifices involved in collective rest (yes, maybe not publishing that breaking story) are worth it to us for the health of our team and the sustainability of our newsroom. By taking planned, intentional breaks, we can help minimize burnout and turnover.
For a lot of newsrooms that don’t publish daily news or employ hundreds of people, there’s another option to constantly trying to find reluctant volunteers to work on holidays: give everyone a break.
At The Appeal, we close down twice a year: For one week over summer, and two weeks over winter. And we’re in good company. Scalawag does it. So does The Markup.
Here’s why you should consider it, and how to implement it, in your newsroom.
How to Take a Collective Break
HOW SUMMER AND WINTER
BREAKS WORK
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As with anything in a business, you can’t just make a decision and hope it turns out for the best, and closing the doors even for a few days is just the same. We’re incredibly thankful to Your Other Half, who helped us think through how to carefully implement short-term breaks and successfully lead our team through them.
Here are our biggest takeaways:
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Think About the Timing
Think about when your audience is off and what your team’s personal needs are when selecting break times.
We usually take our summer break at the end of July/ beginning of August when our traffic begins to dip, parents need time with their kids before school starts up again, and we feel ourselves starting to descend into burnout mode. Remember, these can change each year as your audience grows and your team changes. We select closure dates in January each year.
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Don’t Add More Work
We make it clear to our audience when we’re taking a break and we’ve never had a single reader express disappointment.
What’s critical to collective rest is not making more work for yourselves. Worried about not publishing articles or a newsletter for a week? Don’t produce more work to fill in the gap, just manage expectations with readers.
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Prepare Your Team
In the one to two months before the closure, make sure the break is clearly on your team’s minds.
Bring it up at meetings, ensure the editorial, newsletter, and social calendars reflect that a break will be happening, and make sure workflows have taken this into account.
How to Take a Collective Break
Covering Your Bases
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Traffic in many newsrooms dips over the holidays and at the height of summer. Recognizing that no one was clamoring for our work during this time helped us realize we would not fail to serve our audience by taking care of ourselves. By resting when our audience rests, we ensure we can better meet their needs for the rest of the year.
Realistically, much of the pressure we feel to maximize productivity at the expense of well-being is internal, not external. The Appeal benefits immensely from having an incredibly driven team with an unparalleled work ethic. But that means we have to take extra care to maintain the health of our team.
We build time into our newsroom’s workflow to prepare for closures so people actually have the time and space to rest without worrying if everything got done.
Here are some tips for how we make sure to cover your bases in advance:
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Audience Engagement
Harness those social scheduling tools!
The end of the year is a time of reflection, so share old stories, create lists, and publish wrap-ups. Your newsroom undoubtedly has a wealth of evergreen or important news stories that are still impacting people—just make clear in the social text that the piece was published at X time and you’re good to go.
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Breaking Stories
An opportunity to do better journalism!
Maybe you don’t need to cover the event itself, but your newsroom can own the second-day coverage, bringing fresh ideas and analysis that will serve your audience far better in the long run.
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Fundraising
Planning
These emails can be scheduled too!
You can write them in a way that they don’t need to be updated before sending or, at most, only take someone five minutes of work before hitting send.
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Editorial
Planning
Plan your calendar around your breaks!
Set deadlines for your team and freelancers so it’s clear that if copy isn’t turned in by a certain date, a story won’t be published until after the break. You can also let newsletter readers know that you’re going on break and when you’ll be back.
How to Take a Collective Break
Enjoy the break
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Now that you’ve put in the work to ensure a restful time off for your team, enjoy! Grab a book, a plane ticket, or a recipe, and indulge in your favorite self-care practices. We all do the best work when we are the best versions of ourselves, so invest in all the things that brighten your day and fill your cup.
Centering Teams in Practice
Building Newsrooms That SPUR Impact
and Support Journalists
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RETURN TO Care & Collaboration Toolkit
The Appeal is a nonprofit news organization dedicated to exposing the harms of the criminal legal system, equipping readers with the information they need to make change, and elevating solutions that emerge from communities most impacted by policing, jails, and prisons.
In a country where nearly half of all American adults have had an immediate family member incarcerated, we are committed to sharing untold stories of incarcerated people, holding power to account, and examining alternatives to the criminal legal system.
As one of the first worker-led, nonprofit news organizations in the country, The Appeal is partnering with RJI to provide deeper insights on how to center care and collaboration in all types of organizations. This toolkit goes behind the scenes, offering practical tools and guidance for transforming newsrooms in both big and small ways.
Learn More About Us ⟶