Co-hosting CBC's YouTube Community of Practice and more
Goal: When I started my role as YouTube Producer for @CBCNews, CBC had a company goal to increase watch time across channels.
My role:
Create a best practices guide: Develop and launch a best practices reference guide for broadcast shows and regional bureaus across the country. This guide was updated periodically, whenever YouTube made a product change. The best practices included guidance around how to package titles and descriptions, how to optimize videos for Shorts vs 16:9 vs livestreams, and how to consider ad rankings for sensitive stories. This guide created a source of truth and level of consistency for teams across the country that previously had scattered communication. It also allowed me as YouTube Producer to focus my time on more nuanced questions that came up.
Monthly analytics tracking: I updated our analytics spreadsheet and published a newsletter monthly sharing what stories resonated most with our audiences. The distribution list for this email spanned across the company, including graphic designers, executive producers of popular shows, standards liaisons and CBC’s editor-in-chief. I received feedback from multiple teams that the newsletter made them feel their work was seen and they also felt inspired seeing the work of others.
Monthly community of practice: We launched a monthly meeting to equip stakeholders across the country with the tools they needed to reach out audiences on YouTube. I co-hosted the meeting every month as the News rep. My favourite meeting I hosted was a knowledge sharing session where producers shared learnings from YouTube’s newly launched title/thumbnail AB testing tool. As a result of this meeting we saw a higher scale of experimentation, which turned into positive metrics (higher retention, longer watch time, better CTR).
“Learning” modules on Workday: I was responsible for delivering the “journalistic standards” portion of our thumbnail learning module available to producers on Workday. The idea of this module was to make YouTube learnings more accessible and mandatory across the country. My portion was crucial so our journalists remembered to uphold our news standards (ie. graphic images, AI visuals, protecting sources, using text responsibly).
Executed news graphics: I led the execution of new branding across regional channels — ensuring every channel under the CBC News umbrella updated visuals to align with new branding.
These examples are just a sampling of the work I did at CBC News in my role as YouTube Producer — which was a brand new role to the company. After my first year, the News channel surpassed 4M subscribers and we increased our watch time (beating our goal) by 146% for CBC News specifically. This in part was led by a dramatic news cycle (tariffs, two elections and the prime minister resigning).
