#interhacktives

Not the modern journalism course timetable. Private Eye.

I’m about to meet my fourth cohort of  Interactive Journalism MA students at City University, London.

I step out of my role as head of audience growth at Vogue International for two hours a week to teach the practical element of the social media, community and multimedia management module; Adam Tinworth teaches the theoretical side.

Here are my notes from the first lesson. This covers:

What does a social media editor do?

What’s audience development?

What is a growth editor?

How have these roles changed within the past year?

What are news publishers looking for in entry level social journalism graduates?

What does a social media editor do?

News organisations started to introduce social media editors about a decade ago to gather and distribute news via social, predominantly using Facebook and Twitter. Here’s an interview from 2009 with Alex Gubbay, the first social media editor at the BBC, explaining what his role would be.

Asked in the Guardian interview if he would play a role in the distribution of news, he said: 

“Indeed, part of my work will be to extend the news and distribute them into the social networks, so that people can discuss them. We learn from the discussions that built on the stories themselves, pick up details we missed, or factor them into how we are approaching a story.”

The role was fairly similar – though needed less explaining to fellow journalists – when I joined The Wall Street Journal as a social media editor in December 2013.

I remember explaining back then that there were four areas to the role:

Engagement

Traffic

Reach / Brand awareness

Social newsgathering

Engagement

I first got interested in social media when, in 2007 and 2008, I was a broadcast journalist. The commercial radio station I worked for had fantastic community of people who would text in. This was the time that Facebook and Twitter started to gain traction and I enjoyed similar listener and engagement online. Ten years on and social provides a way for news brands to host communities of readers. This happens through commenting on site and social and Facebook groups, for example. A social media editor may respond to comments or take an action as simple as liking an Instagram post or Facebook comment, showing the reader the news brand is listening.

In 2014 I wrote how engagement is key to keeping people returning to a news site or brand.

Traffic

Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit and other social platforms have been an important source of traffic to news sites. News startups sprouted up as Facebook and other platforms provided millions of eyeballs to stories. And while Facebook traffic has dropped significantly over the past year (more on that later), it still provides 28% of traffic to the news publishers that use Parsely, an analytics tool.

Reach / brand awareness

A social media editor also plays a role in increasing the brand awareness of a publication. I remember hearing Buzzfeed UK editor in chief Janine Gibson speak at Hacks/Hackers in December 2015 when Buzzfeed traffic had exploded. She made the point that even though the site of course cared about on-platform engagement, it was equally as important for Buzzfeed to have brand reach, whether logo on a social card on Twitter or a native post on Facebook.

Social newsgathering

Social newsgathering has become a whole field in itself, with agencies such as Storyful and organisations like Bellingcat being the pioneering experts. But for many social media editors, their role extends to monitor trends, hot topics and news events via social.

What is audience development?

Audience development roles have developed over the past five years. As this 2014 Digiday article notes, “The New York Times’ Innovation Report pointed out the need for audience-development specialists to get Times content in front of more readers.”

This 2017 Digiday article explains the current climate – and how audience development a focus for both the newsroom and for the commercial side of the business.

“Audience development has become core to how publishers scale and make money. But now the question facing publishers is how to ensure it serves all sides of the business, whose interests often conflict.”

“Once a role that mainly focused on SEO, audience development has become more complicated because of the explosion of ways publishers can find and distribute content, from their own platforms such as newsletters and apps to external ones such as social media outlets and bots.”

“At the most fundamental level, both the business and edit sides want to reach new and existing audiences. But from there the interests can diverge. Whereas the newsroom wants to maximize the reach and impact of its journalism, the sales side is rewarded for growing ad revenue, which could lead it to prioritize certain audience segments over others. And then there is driving subscriptions and marketing other products like events and commerce.”

Blogging about an ONA conference on audience development in 2016, I offered this definition of audience development

“Audience development is about taking the overall goals of the news organisation, whether they be advertising revenue and/or a growth in the number of paying subscribers, and working backwards to develop a strategy to help the news organisation achieve those goals.”

I still agree with my definition from a couple of years ago and expand it to say the field involves identifying a target audience and reaching those people and keeping them engaged.

And, of course, audiences may be engaged off platform. For example, launching Vogue on Snapchat has delivered millions of new, loyal weekly readers. But our owned and operated sites get zero traffic from Snapchat. So what’s in it for the publisher? Brand reach, young audiences and revenue share from the Snap advertising.

What does an audience growth editor do?

Julia Haslanger wrote this Medium post in 2015 answering that question. She quotes Thomas McBee, Quartz’s inaugural director of growth. 

“McBee says that when there’s an obstacle to growth, it’s most often an editorial obstacle, such as a story not being framed or headlined in a way that will resonate with the audience.” 

That still holds true. As head of audience growth I spend a lot of time guiding headline changes.

Here are Haslanger’s points on the role of a growth editor:

Identifying potential new audiences

Reaching out to people who might be interested in a specific story or event.

Shaping stories — and particularly headlines — to resonate with readers

Following up with new readers to build a relationship

Pushing the organization to go beyond the regular sources for stories

Analytics. Analytics. Analytics.

Assigning and shaping stories on trending topics

Events

I manage an eight-person audience growth team and consider our function as supporting the audience growth of the network of Vogues and GQs.

I’m advertising for a maternity cover and state in the ad that the primary function of my role as "responsible for audience development strategy, guidelines and a consistent approach to headlines, content packaging and SEO and identifying editorial opportunities based on audience data.”

Audience growth, in my view, relies on a three-part strategy:

Content strategy

Distribution strategy

Community strategy

The content strategy part includes:

Shaping stories. It’s helpful to think that every digital story starts with an audience of zero and it is our job as audience growth editors to find the right audience for that story.

Thinking audience-first in how people will find stories. That might mean commissioning a story that plays into a Pinterest trend, for example.

Guiding a broad offering of stories that appeal to large numbers of people

That includes evergreen content that delivers long-tail audiences

Shepherding in-depth, quality reporting that delights and keeps readers returning

Developing series to attract loyal readers

The distribution strategy part of the role includes:

SEO, social, email newsletter, and off-platform strategies

Working with product to ensure sites and platforms are optimised for search

The community strategy part includes:

Ensuring the brands host conversations and communities to keep people engaged and connected

And all of the above are underpinned with data.

What’s changed in the past year?

As this is my fourth year of teaching and updating my slides, it’s apparent that this year the social, audience and growth roles have shifted due to the Facebook algorithm change.

The move by Facebook to prioritise friend and family posts over those from news organisations and brands was announced in January. But Facebook traffic had been dropping for several months.

Data from Chartbeat (the first chart) and Parsely (the second chart) shows Facebook traffic declined throughout the previous year.

This algorithm change particularly hit VC-funded, ad-supported news startups including Mashable, Vice and Buzzfeed. But there have been positive stories for some publishers this year. Chartbeat noted in May that mobile direct traffic started to eclipse Facebook traffic, suggesting readers were going direct to sites rather than accessing via Facebook.

And social, audience and growth roles have shifted with the algorithms. The editors’ roles still include Facebook but there’s renewed focus on the following:

Search / SEO. You will have noted the rise in Google traffic in the charts above

Email newsletters, which offer direct relationships with audiences

Diverse and distributed traffic, including Flipboard, Pinterest, Upday, for example

What are news publishers looking for in entry level social journalism graduates?

In the final part if lesson 1, I take the students through the skills that publishers are looking for by going through job ads (such as this one, this one, this one, this one and this one. 

Image by Cristophe Benoit. Creative Commons

In the third class with my Interactive Journalism MA students we looked at analytics and creating an audience strategy.

In lesson 1 we looked at the role that audience development plays in a newsroom and summarised it as:

“Audience development is about taking the overall goals of the news organisation, whether they be advertising revenue and/or a growth in the number of paying subscribers, and working backwards to develop a strategy to help the news organisation achieve those goals.”

We need to know the top-level goals of an organisation before we can devise an audience strategy.

The Guardian’s overall goals are advertising and membership; the New York Times is aiming for subscribers; Buzzfeed’s model is one of scale and branded content; The Times is around subscriber revenue.

These news organisations with different goals all require different audience strategies and KPIs.

The Guardian cares about scale (for advertising) and therefore probably focuses on pageviews or unique users and fostering a community of loyal users, those that show a high propensity to donate through the membership scheme – which has reached 900,000, according to Digiday.

The New York Times is looking for repeat visitors who return frequently enough to hit the metered paywall. The NYT found that newsletter subscribers are twice as likely as regular New York Times readers to become subscribers. It is therefore worth the Times investing in a range of newsletters (it has 50 newsletters reaching 13 million people).

Buzzfeed, on the other hand, is looking for scale and likely cares most about reaching large, engaged audiences that will stick around to read branded content. A KPI for Buzzfeed is likely pageviews or uniques and engagement time with stories.

You get the idea that there’s no one-size-fits-all audience strategy.

Chasing clicks, chasing scale. From this week’s Private Eye

Students were asked to develop and audience strategy for Interhacktives.com, the site they will manage and write for during the next nine months.

They were asked what the overall goal of the site was and to decide on three or four KPIs.  

Creating an audience strategy

Once KPIs have been set (such as unique users or loyal users, for example), the next step is to create an audience strategy. In my view, there should be three parts: a content strategy, a distribution strategy, and a community or engagement strategy.

Here’s the briefest of introductions:

Content strategy

If the aim is to reach a large audience, you need content with wide appeal. If the aim is to reach a particular type of audience (student journalists in the case of Interhacktives.com, for example), the content has to be tailored to the desired audience’s needs. To engage loyal readers, there must be content that makes people return. This will likely include longform content, informative articles that helps a person in their job or learn about an interest, and it may include series or franchises which promote familiarity and repeat visits.

Distribution strategy

The next step required is working out how to get stories to the right people – and how to position the stories for each platform. For example, if student journalists all use Twitter, that’s a key distribution platform for Interhacktives.com.

A distribution strategy will include an SEO strategy, Facebook strategy, email newsletter strategy and aggregators such as Flipboard.

Community / engagement strategy

The third part of an audience strategy focuses on the community and engagement. You may decide to reply to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter comments, for example, to host and engage your audience.

The next step is to measure, test and learn against the KPIs and encourage the audience that will help you achieve your goals.

Here are the previous lessons:

I teach on the Interactive Journalism MA at City University. This year I’m blogging my class notes. In lesson 4 we looked at Tweetdeck, going from the basics to advanced newsgathering in the space of 40 minutes; creating Twitter Moments and we discussed social media guidelines.

Here is my advice on how to get to grips with Tweetdeck:

1. Columns: How I organise my Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck acts as a personal newswire. They key is to add columns in the order that they are most useful to you.

Here’s my current order as an illustration:

#hhldn: The hashtag for Hacks/Hackers London

Tweets from user @BBCBreaking as this gives me major news

Key follow list: A list I created because my main feed can get too busy as I follow >2000 people

My home: The people I follow

Mentions: People mentioning my handle

Messages: DMs

List: Fashion

List: Social media

Notifications: So I can see RTs etc

Likes: Tweets I’ve liked. I use like to show engagement but also to save stuff for later reading

#Interhacktives: So I can see tweets with the hashtag for the course I teach on

List: This year’s Interactive students

List: Last year’s Interactive students

List: Interactive students from 2016/2017

List: Interactive students from 2015/2016

List: WLA (Women’s Leadership Academy, which I attended in 2015)

List: Journalist starter list, which I created for students a couple of years ago

List: World Leaders

#CityJTips: A course hashtags for tips

You can add columns by using the + symbol on the left of Tweeteck and then adding a user or list, for example.

2. Scheduling tweets

You can use Tweetdeck to schedule tweets.

3. Timestamp for individual tweets

To open any tweet to its own URL, click the timestamp

4. The most useful search from:yourhandle

Know the most useful Twitter search. By typing from:anyhandle in the Tweetdeck search box and another search term you can find previous tweets. I often want to find an article I tweeted a few days or even years ago. This is the quickest way to find that.

For example, I can find all tweets in which I’ve mentioned ‘guardian’ and ‘membership’

5. Twitter advanced search operators

The most useful search operator is noted above. You can see others by Googling “Twitter search” and clicking the link to the operators.

6. Filter button: Noise to signal 

As we move from beginner to power user, you need to know the filter button. This allows you to sort through busy search terms. On Friday, the day of the class, trending terms included “Nick Clegg” (after his new role at Facebook was announced) and #Internationalginandtonicday. 

Both were busy terms but the filter button allowed us to find the most RTed or liked tweets. By filtering to see only tweets mentioning “Nick Clegg” that had more than 50 RTs and filtering mentions of #Internationalginandtonicday to those that had 40 RTs and 20 likes, we were able to easily find the top and most engaging tweets.

7. Running power searches for newsgathering

In addition to running Interhacktives.com, the students also run two local news sites: Hackney Post and Islington Now. I encouraged them to think about Tweetdeck searches they could have running for news in their patch.

As an example, we searched for a list relating to Hackney. A Google search with a • in place of the username gives results for Hackney lists.

We found a list of Hackney councillors.

I explained that this could be used in a search such as the following:

list:realnickperry/hackney-councillors to:PhilipGlanville ?

This gives tweets from Hackney councillors to Philip Glanville, the Mayor of Hackney, that contain questions.

Creating Twitter Moments

This class also asked students to create a Twitter Moment, tweets curated into a story. The new search skills aimed to give students some power searches for finding the most engaging tweets mentioning “Nick Clegg” or #Internationalginandtonicday (see above).

To see examples of Moments you can go to the lightning flash symbol on Twitter.com. This is also where you create a Moment.

Look at example Moments on desktop and on mobile.

A few tips on creating Moments

Focus on narrative. Think about the order or your tweets and the story they tell

Aim for 8-12 tweets in a Moment. Of course a narrative may require a longer Moment but this is a guide

As with any online news story, the headline is key. Write a headline that is clear and pulls people in (but avoid clickbait)

Select a memorable or impactful cover image

Social media guidelines

This class also looked at social media guidelines and we discussed. Here are the guidelines for:

BBC News 

The Guardian

Buzzfeed

Lesson 1: The social, audience and growth roles within newsrooms

Lesson 2: Getting started on Twitter - a guide for student journalists

Every student journalist must get to grips with Twitter. You’ll need to understand how to use it for newsgathering, plus you need to cultivate your own audience and personal profile as you launch your own career.

Job ads sometimes ask for your handle and you can expect recruiters to scan your feed.

When I met my City University journalism students for the first time last week and asked how they felt about using Twitter, a couple of the comments were:

I don’t have time to check Twitter

I hardly have any followers so feel like I’m tweeting into a void

Other concerns maybe:

I don’t have anything original / smart / funny to say

I fear getting into debates

I don’t know what to tweet about

With those points in mind, here are some tips to get you started on Twitter.

1. You don’t have to give your opinion

A journalist’s job is to report impartially. You don’t need to worry about being smart, funny or enter heated debates.

Start by sharing the stories you find interesting

You can start by simply tweeting the headline to the story

You can retweet a news story you find interesting

Better still you can:

Summarise the article in your own words

Share an interesting fact or stat from the story

Share a quote that you find interesting

For example:

And remember, attribute facts and cite sources.

When one student asked ‘how many times should I tweet?’ I suggested aiming to tweet three times a day.

2. Pick a beat or beats

Not sure what to tweet about? One topic that student journalists should be interested in is digital journalism. Follow sources of news on digital journalism (see point 3) and share stories by tweeting quotes or key facts.

Aside from that, what else are you interested in? Sport? Fashion? Pop culture? Politics? Think about the thing you want to read about every day and start sharing articles related to that topic.

But how do I find that news?

3. Follow interesting people

Here are a few accounts to follow for news on the news industry.

Nieman Journalism Lab @NiemanLab

Poynter @Poynter

Digiday @Digiday

Journalism.co.uk @journalismnews

American Press Institute @AmPress

Press Gazette @pressgazette

And here is a journalism student starter list on who to follow on Twitter. This list may be a little out of date as I compiled it a couple of years ago. 

4. Write your bio

As a trainee journalist you need to think about how you present yourself. Ideally you will have a headshot photo and a bio that explains who you are. You might want to include the @interhacktives or @cityournalism handles. This will mean your profile will show in search results of others are looking for City students.

You can use FollowerWonk to search bios and see how other students present themselves.

5. Set up notifications

You need to set up alerts on your phone so that you will see when someone mentions you, RTs or follows you. This will mean that you don’t miss messages and you can see when others are engaging with you (below left). 

You might want to set up alerts so you can see every tweet from a particular account. For example, I recommend you do this with @BBCBreaking (above right).

6. Start engaging

Now you have found interesting people to follow, it’s time to start engaging. You can simply lurk and ‘like’ a few tweets. This shows that you are listening and gets your name out there.

You should also:

Respond when people mention you

Like tweets in which you are mentioned

When you tweet a journalist’s story you may include his or her @handle. Again, that helps you start to make connections.

7. Tweet from live events

One of the Interactive Journalism students asked how to grow follower numbers, particularly if you are starting from a small base. You can follow other journalism students and City and beyond. Here’s a list of this year’s Interactive Journalism MA students and there are lists of previous students here and here and here. Follow a few folk from those lists and see who follows back.

One of the best ways of gaining followers is to tweet from a live event. This may be a journalism-related event with a hashtag (like #hhldn for Hacks/Hackers London which I co-run). Tweeting from an event where others are following the hashtag or jumping on a trending topic with a hashtag should ensure you pick up followers.

8. Look at your data

Twitter analytics allows you to track engagements. Don’t simply measure your success by follower count, look at mentions and other engagements.

9. Understand some basics

Know that in 2017, Twitter made the decision expand its character limit from 140 to 280.

Know that in 2015, Twitter launched RT with a comment.

Here’s a pro tip for you, if you want to add bullet points to a tweet, you can do so by using the alt + 8 shortcut (on a Mac).

Use threads

Twitter officially launched threads in 2017. Users had been threading tweets before then by replying to their own tweets. There’s now a + button allowing you to create a thread when 280 characters isn’t long enough.

Here are three examples from the past 10 days:

FT reporter Khadim Shubber who covered the Christine Blasey Ford testimony

This BBC Africa thread on the investigation into a chilling story

This NY Times thread on the investigation into President Trump’s tax affairs

Now you have these tips, create a strategy for your own Twitter use. How many times will you aim to tweet? What will your approach be? What will your beat or beats be?  

I’m a guest lecturer on the Interactive Journalism MA at City University London.

Making incredible journalism from the past and the present

Here’s a tweet that cheers me immensely:

https://twitter.com/alisongow/status/655047183532728320

Beth Ashton – who created the slide – is a former student of mine. She was one of the very first generation of Interhacktives I taught at Cityback in 2012 and 2013. I don’t think she’ll mind me saying her talent wasn’t immediately visible in the lecture room – but, my goodness, did it shine through…

An important part of any journalistic innovation is considering how it is going to benefit you in financial terms. It's all very well making something look smashing but it has to make 'business sense' as well.

This is an engagement funnel. It represents the activity of a reader on any given article with the majority of readers (subscribers) at the top of the funnel simply reading the article. The number of readers that then engage further with the article by rating comments or commenting publicly on the article themselves is far less than the number of people who simply read the article and bounce straight out again.

As a producer of content you want your readers engage with your stuff as much as possible. This is important if you run an advertising based business model because your content becomes more valuable to advertisers when people spend a longer time reading a page. It is also important from a subscription-based perspective because the more a subscriber comments and gets involved in the community of the publication, the more likely it is that they will then go on to re-subscribe.

Our Build the News project seeks to make this engagement funnel shorter and wider by allowing readers to recommend and annotate an article privately or semi-publicly. We believe that people will be more willing to comment on an article if they can determine who sees their comments. In this way the number of people who become involved will increase and result in more people returning or re-subscribing to your site.

With this system in place we think the engagement funnel will look more like this.