New tool helps you manage your site and find your FLOW

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With its many layouts, editing steps and deadlines, journalism can be a messy process. Managing the work can be chaotic. It doesn’t have to be.

Now SNO has a way to help you get organized. You can replace the white board, ditch the spreadsheets and throw away the sticky notes. The new SNO FLOW grading and management tool helps you track each story element, from the moment it’s assigned to the moment it’s published. 

Old media and new, online news sites and print editions, magazines, even yearbooks–FLOW can help bring order to chaos.

At a glance, editors can view the status of every article, photo, video or design in their section. Advisers can know what each staff member is working on. The whole staff can see when each article is expected to be published.

Current journalism adviser Jason Wallestad built on his experience in the classroom to meet the challenges of today’s complicated, dynamic newsroom.

“As an adviser, I wanted to be able to find this information from anywhere,” Wallestad, SNO’s co-founder, said. “You can’t take your whiteboard home with you. FLOW is portable. It can be updated anywhere and anytime.”

Sort and filter assignments and tasks in the way you need. Sort by student, section or type of media. Filter based on deadline, draft status or what’s been published and ready to grade. A useful calendar display even lets you see the publication schedule. The notifications feature will send an email when a story is ready for editing.

Wallestad explained the goal was to allow any student to log in and see what’s relevant to them. “They don’t need to see 200 active stories,” he said, “they just need the 10 stories in their section. No digging or searching. It helps pull attention to their work.”

At $300 a year, FLOW can be used to be manage multiple publications with an unlimited number of users. And SNO stands behind FLOW with their promise of unlimited support.

FLOW is about managing the publishing process. Customize the tasks, leadership roles and assignment statuses to fit your newsroom. The content is just one click away. FLOW links to your articles and images in Google Drive, Dropbox or WordPress — not in a proprietary database but in tools you control.

Discover how easy it is to assign, monitor and grade — with FLOW.