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Maestro concept


The Maestro concept is a time-management technique used in journalism in order to assist the newsroom work in a project-based, teamwork-intensive manner by "thinking like a reader".

The Maestro concept begins with a "great story idea" that is generated through collaborative idea-group meetings to shape stories before they are written and integrates writing, editing, photography, art, and design. The Maestro concept is not applied to all stories all the time. The concept applies only to those stories that are integrated with photographs, design elements, and infographics. It is a method designed to improve presentation of important stories through teamwork that brings the story to life and results in high impact and high readership.

The Maestro Concept was created by Leland "Buck" Ryan, director of the Citizen Kentucky Project of the Scripps Howard First Amendment Center and tenured associate professor of journalism at the University of Kentucky's School of Journalism and Telecommunications. Ryan created the concept in the early 1990s when he was an assistant professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. The inspiration for the Maestro concept came from a 1991 Poynter Institute study by Mario Garcia and Pegie Stark called "Eyes on the News". That study followed the eyes of readers (tracked actual eye movements) in three cities and discovered that readers do not read a newspaper as journalists believed. This study and subsequent studies, including online publications, are used in newsrooms and classrooms today as a teaching model. The original study found that good indexing for busy readers is the key to successful publishing.

The Maestro concept was developed through an "approach to newsroom management, organization and operation that applies W. Edwards Deming's management principles used in manufacturing to the creative process". Striving for quality, in both product and management, is Deming's focal point. As a statistician, Deming noted that when management focused primarily on costs, that approach over the long run drove up costs and diminished quality. Deming found that a focus by management to increase quality while reducing costs through reduction of waste and rework lowered costs in the long run. Continual improvement of the system, and not by bits and pieces, is integral to Deming's principles.


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