Harvard Business Review is a hallmark of high quality journalism. Each day, the folks at HBR.org publish five to seven pieces of top-notch content with a staff of fewer than 10 full-time digital editors and no full-time writers -- and they have over four million unique visitors reading their content every month.

Today, more and more companies are creating and hiring for corporate blogs that cover topics target buyers are interested in. Brand journalism, corporate journalism, corporate media, whatever you want to call it -- the content on these blogs is attracting and engaging an audience of potential customers.

So when it comes to building a corporate newsroom, why not learn from the people who do it best? To get the inside scoop of how the HBR newsroom works, we had the pleasure of speaking with web team's editor, Katherine Bell. In our interview (transcribed below), she tells us about HBR's editorial process, what constitutes an "HBR-worthy" topic, how they keep track of all the moving parts, and how they find time to experiment and innovate.

Q: Who is HBR's core audience?

A: We tnk mainly of executives and managers when we choose what to publish, but our content is actually useful for a global audience of ambitious professionals. Over half of our audience is outside the U.S.

We've found that a significant amount of our traffic comes from social media, which means people find our content useful and are sharing it a lot. We have about four million unique visitors each month, and at least 45% of that comes from social media, including dark social like email and apps. Even before social media, we found that our content was being shared a lot, but that behavior has only increased with social media.

Our most shareable content is directly relevant to the daily experience of being at work. It's the personal stuff -- pieces about managing yourself and your team, about handling the daily challenges of the workplace. Sometimes, as people move up in their careers, it becomes harder for them to talk to their friends and colleagues in real life about the challenges they hit at work. At some point, it's hard to admit you're having a problem, and you have to be careful about what you talk about at work. In those cases, it can be really helpful to go somewhere you trust and get opinions from experts about how to solve these problems.

Q: What makes a topic "HBR-worthy"?

A: We choose any topics that help people:

1. Do their jobs better;
2. Know and run their businesses better;
3. Understand something new about the context in which they're doing business;
4. Understand the forces that are changing business right now;
5. Be aware of the new ideas coming out of academia that are relevant to management; and
6. Understand which management ideas are behind business stories in the news.

To choose these topics, we have a team of editors who stay on top of new ideas and new research and the experts behind them. The majority of our pieces are expert-written and edited by our editors in-house. In addition to that HBR.org team, HBR's magazine and book editors all contribute to online content as well.

We often use news about interesting companies doing interesting things to connect real-life situations to the theories and principles happening behind them. We don't just report the business news -- we help people in business understand what's important and what it means for them.

We've been doing a lot of coverage of brand new research recently because our audience tends to want to be ahead of everyone else and have the next new idea. These pieces perform really, really well. A lot of other media companies are doing more coverage of new research lately too, but we try to go one step further than them. We'll explain what the new research means, but we'll also explain why it's important in the context of management. We reach out to the researcher and ask them questions our readers might have, and we push the researcher to explain their findings in a way that's accessible.

But no matter what, we specialize in getting the "expert take" on every subject we publish on. It used to be that that expert was also the author of every piece. When we wanted to do something quickly, it meant finding the right management thinker who had the time and way of thinking to be able to respond very quickly. But that was really difficult to manage because sometimes the person with the most relevant idea can't turn around a piece quickly, and researchers aren't always sure how to articulate what is relevant about their research to people outside academia.

So, we've been working hard to come up with other formats -- other ways to translate experts' ideas in different ways. The result is faster turnaround and access to more of the good ideas out there. We've also begun focusing more of our content around themes. Some of these themes are the big shifts changing management. Others are the perennial challenges managers and businesses face -- managing relationships, creating sustainable business models, and so on. We're always looking for different ways to frame those problems, and for new ideas for our readers to try in their own businesses. So we balance our content across these three horizons of importance: what's important to our readers this week, this year, and all the time.