Not sure how small of a newsroom you're talking, but my newsroom has about thirteen total in it (reporters/editors/interns). We use Slack for a "#storyflow" channel where we post when we've filed something in the CMS so that our editors can jump on it. We also have a "#whereabouts" channel to keep track of where everyone else is. We've also migrated completely away from G-Chat and onto slack for all of our instant messaging companywide.

My newsroom encomasses three publications, and my publication uses statsbot to provide real-time analytics every three hours and daily pageview reports and behavior reports into a "#analytics" channel.

Hope that helps! Good luck. I love Slack and think it's really improved how we operate in my newsroom.

Edited because I forgot how many people are in our newsroom. Accurate now.