What a Newsroom Workflow Review Costs and What Moves the Price
A plain look at how we price a review of your pitch-to-air pipeline: what the fee covers, what widens the work, and how to judge the cost against the time it can save.
Why the price is not a single figure
People often ask for a flat number for a workflow review, and I understand why. A budget holder wants something to put on a form. The difficulty is that two newsrooms can ask for the same service and need very different amounts of work. A small regional desk with one gallery and a handful of producers is a different job from a bulletin team that shares edit suites, graphics and a transmission slot with several other programmes.
So we price the review from the shape of the newsroom, not from a standard package. Callum Reid, our workflow consultant, leads the work, and the figure on our prices page is where a quotation starts rather than where it ends. What follows explains what pushes it up or down, so you can see the reasoning before you ask us for anything in writing.
We would rather you understood the fee than simply accepted it. A review that costs a little more because it looks at the right things is usually better value than a cheap one that skims the surface.
What the fee actually covers
A review follows one story from the first pitch to the moment it goes to air, and then a few more, because a single story can hide as much as it shows. Callum sits in on the morning meeting, watches how assignments are handed out, and notes where footage waits for someone, where a script changes hands more than once, and where approvals stall.
The fee covers the time spent observing and talking to the people who do the work, the analysis afterwards, and a written report with practical changes set out in order of how much time each is likely to save. It also includes a conversation to walk your editors through the findings and answer questions.
It does not include building new software, buying equipment or rewriting your editorial policy. Where a change needs any of those, the report says so plainly, and you decide whether to pursue it with us or on your own.
- Observation of live story handling
- Interviews with producers, editors and crew
- A written report with ranked, practical changes
- A findings session with your team
Size and complexity of the operation
The biggest driver of cost is how many hands a story passes through. A pipeline with three stages is quicker to map than one with nine, and each extra stage means more conversations, more observation and more to untangle. The number of programmes you feed matters too, because a pitch that serves a lunchtime bulletin and an evening programme often follows two different routes that only appear to be one.
Staffing patterns also change the picture. A newsroom that runs shifts across early mornings and late evenings needs us present at more than one handover, and handovers are where time is most often lost. We would rather see two of them than guess at the second.
None of this is meant to inflate the bill. It simply reflects the days we need to spend to see the whole pipeline honestly. We tell you the number of days in the quotation, so the fee is easy to follow.
Location, access and timing
We are based in Chichester, and travel to a newsroom elsewhere in the UK is a real cost of time. Where your site is within easy reach, that cost is small. Where it means a long journey or an overnight stay, we set it out as a separate line so you can see exactly what it adds.
Access matters as well. If we can sit in the room during live output, we learn far more than we do from a tidy interview in a meeting room. Newsrooms that can give us that access, and a named contact who can answer questions quickly, usually get a shorter and therefore cheaper review.
Timing plays a part in these weeks of the year. Autumn schedules are busy, and a review that has to fit around a packed run of programmes may need to be spread over more days. Telling us about fixed dates early helps us plan realistically.
What can make the work longer
Some things reliably extend a review. Records that exist only in people's heads are one: if no one has written down how a story is approved, we have to piece it together from several accounts that may not agree. Shared tools used in different ways by different people are another, because we have to learn each habit before we can judge it.
A request to follow up after changes are made is a perfectly sensible addition, and we are glad to do it, but it is a separate piece of work and is priced as one. The same goes for training sessions that grow out of the findings, which we can offer through our field camera and editing services.
We try to flag these early. If something we find means more time than we first expected, we tell you and agree the change in writing before carrying on, so there are no surprises at the invoice.
- Undocumented approval routes
- Several tools used in inconsistent ways
- Follow-up visits after changes
- Training that grows out of the report
How to judge the cost against the benefit
The honest way to weigh the fee is against the time your team loses now. If a story waits twenty minutes for a sign-off several times a day, that is a measurable cost, and a review that removes some of it can be set against your own figures. We do not promise a particular saving, because it depends on what we find and on whether the changes are adopted.
What we can say is that most of the suggestions in a report are small and practical: reordering a step, clarifying who decides, moving a check earlier. They rarely need new spending.
Ask for the quotation, read what is included, and compare it with a week of your own bulletin output. If the numbers do not make sense for you, we would rather hear that than sell you a review you do not need.
The price of a workflow review follows the size of your pipeline, the access we are given, the distance we travel and how well your current process is written down. It is quoted in writing after an enquiry through the contact page, paid by invoice, and open to discussion before anything starts. If you are unsure where to begin, tell us how a story moves through your newsroom and we will say what a review would involve.