37 From the Field:Process Engineering Helped Build a Replicable Model for Two St
37 From the Field:Process Engineering Helped Build a Replicable Model for Two Startup News Sites
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Kat Friedrich is a news editor at Yale University. She runs two startup news sites: Clean Energy Finance Forum,[1] which covers the niche vertical of the solar power industry and the energy efficiency industry deeply; and Conservation Finance Network,[2] a nonprofit partnership site that covers all aspects of ecosystem conservation from cities to oceans. She works at Yale Center for Business and the Environment, which encourages startup green business development.
As an editor who had worked in web-intensive writing roles related to energy efficiency and science education, Friedrich was adept in web editing and online media. She had a master’s degree in Science and Environmental Journalism from The Nelson Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But it is her project-management experience from a prior career in mechanical engineering that serves her most when leading the Clean Energy Finance Forum and Conservation Finance Network site teams, which have grown to 27 and 20 student staff respectively since their inception.
Clean Energy Finance Source was created by Friedrich in 2012 for Clean Energy Finance Center, a national nonprofit. Yale Center for Business and the Environment brought the site on board in January 2014 and expanded it extensively to include new technologies, international news, web interaction, and online tools.
Conservation Finance Network’s web news production began in January 2016 in response to a request from two graduate students, Meaghan McGrath and Logan Yonavjak, who were both at Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. The second site was developed as a branded partnership with Conservation Finance Network, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC.
As she started the news sites from the ground up, Friedrich pioneered a reusable model for creating new sites that includes a replicable workflow for team collaboration and a project management system for news production. The web template for both sites prioritizes web usability and user experience.
“The actual website template is one that we’re reusing,” Friedrich said. “Then we’re also reusing our processes. Then we’re also reusing our journalism training materials. All of that can be used for any new website that we decide to branch off with.”
She was also systematic in building an industrial-engineering process for the content production –documenting team workflows, developing editing checklists, compiling writing worksheets, creating ethics guidelines, mapping marketing goals, and pursuing process improvement.
“If you have an industrial-engineering process, it’s almost like you can visualize the product going through the factory,” Friedrich said. “You have different things happen to it at different workstations. It moves along. The news goes here. The news goes