The Desk.
From no social at all to an operating system. Two of us.
ERTNewsis ERT’s national 24/7 news channel. When we came in it had no social at all: no Instagram, no TikTok. Two of us were brought in to build both, and to build them properly. A 24/7 channel never sleeps, but two people cannot be awake 168 hours a week, so the answer was never more posting. It was an operating system: one system that kept a tiny desk ready across the whole clock, sourced, timed and right whenever a story broke. I came in as a contractor on ERT’s marketing team, and with one colleague we built it from a blank page and ran it for about two years. Two of us, one system.
A brand-new national channel, from a standing start. Built and held by two.
ERTNews went on air in March 2022, so this was building the social desk of a national 24/7 channel while the channel itself was still standing up: a blank page, no Instagram, no TikTok, 368 followers. A clock that never stops; two people who cannot be awake 168 hours a week. The brief was never “do social.” It was to build the operating system that keeps the desk ready in any hour, then hold it live, with two of us.
Readiness is the product. A tiny desk, ready in any hour.
You cannot staff a 24/7 channel flat with two people, so you build the readiness instead. Be first, never be wrong, be ready in any hour. That is the problem a system has to solve, because two people can’t.
One system on a 24-hour clock. Ready in any hour, without a night shift.
The day is mapped into four dayparts around one clock, each with its own job, so a tiny desk can stay ready across all of it. And a holding-line sits over the whole clock, ready to fire in any hour the moment a story breaks.
The news day mapped into four arcs, so two people stay ready across 24 hours. Readiness is the product, held around the clock by the system rather than the headcount.
The first 90 seconds of a breaking story: publish the one line you can stand behind, sourced and right, the moment it breaks. Social is where a story is born for the audience. The full package follows.
The editorial conference reaches social as a plan, so on air and online tell the same story in the same beat. The social desk sits next to the newsroom.
One earned post, the angle found and built, made to be watched to the end, against the feed’s twenty reposts.
The ERT archive. A national memory, run as a feed.
ERT is the country’s public broadcaster, and its archive is one of the largest audiovisual records of modern Greek life: decades of the nation’s television, radio and news, most of it never cut for a feed. We built a lane that mined it into curated series, each one timed to the moment it spoke to. Original, branded, made to be watched. It became the engine of the account’s growth: the platform pushed it, and the following climbed on the back of it.
Ahead of the 2023 national vote we cut a ten-part series from the archive on the first elections held after the restoration of democracy in 1974, and ran it as the country headed back to the polls. It set the moment inside its own history and warmed the feed, and the algorithm, before a ballot was cast. Several million views across the ten.
One archive post pulled 35,000+ likes and 2,000,000+ views while the following sat near 16,000: more likes on a single post than the account had followers. The platform read original, branded archive content as worth pushing, and the account climbed on the back of it, past 35,000. The 35,000+ likes on that post and the 35,000+ community it helped build are two different figures.
Examples of the lane at work, earned reach rather than one-off luck. Figures are first-party and representative of the operation, some approximate from memory, not third-party audited statistics. Cited to show organic reach far beyond the follower count, not per-post averages.
The around-the-clock proof. Real nights, dated, the country watching.
The proof a 24/7 channel makes is the nights it had to hold. These are real and dated, public record. We were on the desk for them, the social running through each one, starting from a channel that had only just gone on air. The two 2023 election rounds are the ones the 1.6M election-day views are anchored to.
- National moment20 Aug 2022Greece exits enhanced surveillanceThe formal close of the bailout era, twelve years of foreign fiscal oversight ending in a single morning. Out of the EU’s enhanced-surveillance regime for the first time since 2010, and we carried it live.
- Live · national stage10 May 2023The party-leaders’ debate, on ERTSix party leaders on one stage, the first televised leaders’ debate in Greece since 2015. The public broadcaster hosted it and fed the signal out to every private channel, and we ran the three-hour night live from the desk.
- Election · two rounds21 May + 25 Jun 2023National elections, two roundsTwo ballots five weeks apart, May under simple proportional, June re-run under the bonus system. Together they drew 1.6 million views across the platforms, over both rounds.
- Field · liveJul–Aug 2023The summer wildfiresRhodes moved around 19,000 people out, the largest wildfire evacuation in the country’s history. Evros burned some 81,000 hectares by Copernicus count, the largest single fire in EU records, and we stayed on it in the field for days.
- Breaking · live03–08 Sep 2023Storm Daniel · Thessaly floodsRecord rainfall put the Thessaly plain under water for the better part of a week. A death toll in the double digits and more than €2 billion in damage, all of it covered breaking, as it happened.
- National moment20 Oct 2023Greece regains investment gradeS&P restored the country’s investment grade, the first of the three major agencies to do it. Thirteen years after Greece lost it in the debt crisis.
- National moment07 Dec 2023Erdogan in AthensThe Turkish president’s first visit to Athens since 2017. He and Mitsotakis signed the Declaration of Athens, a friendship and good-neighborliness pact, and we ran the thaw wall to wall.
- National moment16 Apr 2024The Olympic flame, at Ancient OlympiaThe flame for Paris 2024 kindled at the Temple of Hera and passed to the first torchbearer. Greece on the world stage for a morning, the road to the Games starting on home ground.
- Election09 Jun 2024European Parliament electionThe European result read at home as a verdict on the government, enough to force a cabinet reshuffle five days later.
- The country watches07 Jul 2024Greece → Paris 2024Basketball beat Croatia 80–69 in Piraeus to reach the Olympics for the first time in sixteen years. Antetokounmpo took tournament MVP, the arena full, the country watching.
Events real and dated, public record. No per-event metric is claimed. The two 2023 election rounds anchor the 1,600,000+ election-day views in the numbers below.
368 to 35,000+ in four months. 1,600,000+ views when the country voted.
The figure was never the point, the readiness was. But the figures came, and from a standing start: a community built from 368 to 35,000+ in four months on a channel that had only just gone on air, and on the day the country voted, more than a million and a half views across the platforms. Here they are, with what each one is and is not.
Representative figures, not audited accounts. A first-party read of the operation.
Two people held a national channel to a company’s standard. The system is what made two enough.
Most desks repost the same wire clip twenty times. This one earned the view once: one curated post, the angle found and built, made to be watched to the end. The editorial model, the conference-to-social handover, the dayparting clock, the holding-line, all built to outlast whoever runs it on any given day. The field needs a floor of people to do this; here it was two. You get an operation you don’t brief from scratch each morning. If it kept a national 24/7 channel ready with two people from a standing start, it holds on your channel, which is the calmer one.
No pitch. No deck. Just a straight read on what you’ve got.