Matt Carlson, Associate Professor at St. Louis University

Matt Carlson, an associate professor of communication at Saint Louis University, was set to announce a collaborative research project that would “connect a lot of dots surrounding news metrics and digital distribution platforms.” He wanted to examine journalism’s embrace of real-time audience data by shining a spotlight on “all the different actors involved, from reporters and editors and news management to engineers and salespersons at data analytic firms to the audience on the other end.”

But first, he needed to find a term that tied everything together. “Measurable journalism” was the solution.

In a special issue of the academic journal Digital Journalism, “Measurable Journalism: Digital Platforms, News Metrics, and the Quantified Audience,” nine researchers explore the implications of these technological and cultural shifts. Carlson, who edited the special issue and wrote an introductory essay, “Confronting Measurable Journalism,” explained his interest in this topic in an e-mail to MediaShift: 

“When we think about measurable journalism, we need to keep in mind all the parts that go into it without privileging one over another. Often discussions of news metrics focus on technology, but it is equally about human actions that direct technology to do x and not y.

A concern I have with measurable journalism is when what can be measured takes precedent over what should be measured. These are sophisticated technologies, but they can only ever get to what people do. What we can’t know is what news audiences think or why they do what they do. I am always worried that user data becomes so fetishized that we forget it can only ever be a partial representation. We talk about such complex terms as impact or engagement but then we look for simple measurements.

The idea of measurable journalism can be both promising with the hope of creating journalism that is more accountable to the audience and frightening with the threat of journalists losing control over what is newsworthy. It may bring journalists and their audiences closer together or it might push economic imperatives ahead of journalism’s public service mission. Given these outcomes, what we need is vigilance and a solid understanding of all the forces in play.”

MediaShift discussed these forces in short interviews with the researchers who contributed to the special issue.

Quantified Audiences in News Production: A Synthesis and Research Agenda

Interview with Rodrigo Zamith, assistant professor, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Why the interest in studying measurable journalism?

There are two main reasons. The first has to do with a professional observation: Journalism is becoming more sensitive to and powered by measurement. We see this in the rise of “data journalism” as well as the proliferation of audience analytics — the latter being the focus of much of my recent work. Those shifts have important implications for how journalism is constructed, performed and rewarded, yet the phenomenon is not yet well understood by scholars (or practitioners). The second reason is personal: I’m a nerd and think in terms of numbers. I find the tensions playing out as quantification and quantitatively oriented actors gain foothold in newsrooms to be fascinating.

What did your research show?

My contribution focused on synthesizing the current literature on audience analytics and metrics, offering new lenses for studying the phenomenon and identifying future research directions for the scholarship. Three arguments stand out in the piece: First, we are witnessing a new wave of audience measurement in journalism (following two waves in the 1930s and 1970s) that is driven by audience analytics (systems that automatically capture information about individuals’ media use). Second, while contemporary journalism is not being driven by quantifications of audiences (i.e., audience metrics), both audiences and quantification are playing far more prominent roles in news production than in the past. Third, scholars and practitioners have become less pessimistic about the impact of audience metrics and now recognize more nuanced impacts on news production as well as opportunities for using them to advance journalistic goals.

I have a new piece out (in Digital Journalism) arguing that we are witnessing a third wave of audience measurement in journalism and synthesizing the knowledge across 5 areas related to news production: https://t.co/G1Fzu3rGwo. Feedback welcome! #ddj #journalism #metrics

— Rodrigo Zamith (@rodzam) March 7, 2018

What are the main takeaways for journalists, journalism educators and others who are interested in media metrics?

Journalists and educators need to take analytics and metrics seriously. The measurement of audiences will only become more sophisticated and news organizations will face further pressures to make use of those data. Journalists should seek out training on how to use their newsrooms’ analytics suites (e.g., Chartbeat) and/or ask for permission to access the system. Educators need to ensure they incorporate analytics and metrics into their curricula and also provide students the opportunity to engage with those suites (e.g., integrating them into student media offerings, at minimum). In both cases, serious conversations need to be had about how to use those data sensibly — from influencing organizational coverage decisions to developing reward structures for individual journalists. I find the argument that metrics should neither be restricted to the business side nor the primary driver of journalism to be especially persuasive. Analytics are tools that can be put to good use, and that means trying to align journalistic aims like satisfying community information needs with the many data points that analytics can offer. At the same time, those tools can be misused and practitioners should therefore maintain a healthy skepticism and promote robust dialogue.

The Audience-Oriented Editor: Making Sense of the Audience in the Newsroom

Interview with Raul Ferrer-Conill, Ph.D. candidate, Karlstad University, Sweden, and Edson C. Tandoc, Jr., assistant professor, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Why the interest in studying measurable journalism?

In the last decades we’ve seen an increasing quantification of journalism, spurred by the use of metrics and analytics. These metrics are effectively the new way by which news organizations make sense of the audience. Combined with the commercial urgency, the need to entice and engage audiences makes the quantification of audience news consumption a key factor to understand the current news production process. Researchers and practitioners should pay more attention to how journalism production is quantified, measured and understood.

What did your research show?

First, the definition of engagement is almost entirely centered on different types of metrics. Second, while audience-oriented editors take part in the editorial process, their role is to help journalists negotiate between the information obtained by their metrics and their journalistic intuition to make editorial decisions. Third, there is a lack of cohesiveness regarding what these newsroom positions are and how they operate. We provide insight on the pervasiveness of metrics and quantification of journalistic processes by offering a more nuanced understanding of a new set of editorial roles.

What are the main takeaways for journalists, journalism educators and others who are interested in media metrics?

The more that metrics are part of news production and the increasing number of audience-oriented editors legitimize and institutionalize metrics. Therefore, understanding the impact of audience measurement on news work requires an analysis of these emerging roles, who act as intermediaries between audiences and the newsroom through their interpretation and valuation of audience data. The reliance on metrics and social media insights questions their capacity to capture the audience. The analytic tools are constrained by what they can measure and rely on likes, shares, number of comments and other audience metrics to define engagement. In this sense, it is user activity and behavior that becomes a proxy for the voice of the audience. This is a limited understanding of the audience, let alone having a dialog with the audience. Editors can assess the performance of their editorial choices as they scrutinize metrics in real time, but they are limited by and reliant on the technological affordances of the tools they use. We argue that this dialog is predominantly informed by metrics and therefore it needs to be understood as such. Metrics are not necessarily a valid way to measure audience engagement and should be used cautiously.

Selecting Metrics, Reflecting Norms: How Journalists in Local Newsrooms Define, Measure, and Discuss Impact

Interview with Elia Powers, assistant professor, Towson University

Why the interest in studying measurable journalism?

My interest is in examining the ways in which journalists think about and ultimately measure their work’s impact. Impact is a buzzword in newsrooms, but there are so many ways to define the term that little can be done to move the conversation forward until there’s more clarity about what journalists mean when they talk about impact. It’s also critical for journalists to feel comfortable publicly discussing their work’s impact, because newsrooms now more than ever need to make the case to audiences and funders that civic-oriented journalism makes a difference in local communities.

What did your research show?

Interviews with journalists from a range of local news organizations in one U.S. city found that they welcome the opportunity to inform audiences and effect change, and they had no issues discussing impact with newsroom colleagues and in promotional materials. However, journalists were generally more hesitant to discuss their work’s impact outside the newsroom — in follow-up news stories, social media posts, interviews, etc. Some journalists were concerned about being perceived as too self-congratulatory or being labeled advocates. There was a perception among some participants that publicizing impact violated journalistic standards of objectivity and detachment. Additionally, journalists had many ways of defining and measuring impact, one of which was audience analytics — although many felt these were more about engagement than enduring signs of impact. Effect-oriented metrics (audience awareness, public discourse, public policy, etc) were widely considered the best to assess impact but among the most difficult to systematically measure.

What are the main takeaways for journalists, journalism educators and others who are interested in media metrics?

First, I propose that measurable journalism should not be limited to quantitative metrics, often the standard by which news coverage is judged. Much of what journalists want to measure has little to do with audience analytics. Second, as I argue in the article, “publicizing the impact of journalism, when facts support such a claim, is central to the journalistic process and necessary for newsrooms to justify their funding…Newsroom policies and professional codes of conduct should clarify that engaging in public discourse on impact is central to the journalistic process, a necessary part of communicating with the public, and a way for newsrooms to justify their funding rather than a sign of self-promotion or
advocacy.”

Dimensional Field Theory: The Adoption of Audience Metrics in the Journalistic Field and Cross-field Influences

Interview with Qun Wang, Ph.D. Candidate, Rutgers University

Why the interest in studying measurable journalism?

Fifteen years ago, I was a TV news anchor and reporter in Beijing, China. I was able to access both quantitative and qualitative audience information due to the nature of the show that I covered: on the one hand, we kept a close eye on the ratings because the show was a signature show in Beijing’s competitive TV news market; on the other hand, we had our ears open to the three hotline phones on which the show relied for audience members to share news tips, feedback and comments like “I don’t like the anchor’s hair!” We sometimes learned a lot from the audience information and sometimes got lost in it. The show ceased years ago, but I have never stopped wondering how the team would deal with today’s audience information in the digital age if the show was still around. This work experience and this particular question have contributed to my interest in measurable journalism.

What did your research show?

In the years that I worked in the newsroom, I already felt that newsroom practices and norms were often a result of the negotiation of different forces. In my study, drawing on French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, I took a historical and relational approach to embed the journalistic field into a wider media ecosystem. Particularly, the study examines how the adoption of audience metrics in news media has been shaped by influences inside and outside the journalistic field in order to understand the origin, driving forces and implications of this trend. I looked at neighboring fields adjacent to the journalistic field, such as the online advertising and online audience research fields, as well as web analytics services working with news media that I identified as the intermediate field to trace the evolution and influence of these fields. I also looked into the journalistic field itself and identified three dimensions — the techno-economic means, the subject of journalism and the object of journalism — that construct the field and serve as sources of internal influence.

What are the main takeaways for journalists, journalism educators and others who are interested in media metrics?

The main takeaway of this study is that the journalistic field is not a static or monolithic arena. Rather, it is a social universe that is subject to and constantly interacts with cross-field influences. Therefore, to understand the root, development and effects of measurable journalism, we may need to inspect our own field and look elsewhere.

Boundary Work, Interloper Media, and Analytics in Newsrooms: An Analysis of Web Analytics Companies’ Role in News Production

Interview with Valerie Belair-Gagnon, assistant professor, University of Minnesota, and Avery Holton, assistant professor, University of Utah

Why the interest in studying measurable journalism?

Journalism has been undergoing a series of fascinating changes for several decades. In particular, social media has challenged the ways in which we measure the success of journalism. Much of that success still rests in financial growth, or at least stability, which itself is increasingly dependent on audience interactions with journalists and the content they produce. We’ve begun moving past a reliance on journalistic or editorial intuition and instead see tangible value in understanding complex web metrics and analytics. So if the latter are beginning to drive journalistic decision making, particularly in news production and professional identity, then they are critical to examine.

https://twitter.com/journoscholar/status/969222955677908992

What did your research show?

Our most recent research shows that web analytics companies seek to understand and address news production values and norms without assuming responsibility as journalists. We think of these companies, or their employees more specifically, as implicit media interlopers. These are journalistic outsiders, more or less, who are bit more welcome in the journalistic process than previous interlopers (e.g., citizen journalists, bloggers) because of the value they add to news products. These companies also foster profit-oriented norms and values in newsrooms by introducing web analytics as disruptive, connective and routinized in news production. By offering a product that needs to be modified on a continuous basis because of changes in the structure of the web and audience behaviors, web analytics companies foster a milieu of constant experimentation with old and new products. This helps place them squarely in the middle of evolving news organizations that are turning more to disruptors and innovators as they grapple for financial footing.

What are the main takeaways for journalists, journalism educators and others who are interested in media metrics?

Today, like many other technological innovations in newsroom, disruption increasingly comes from innovations from outside companies and individuals. As journalism evolves, scholars and practitioners need to understand more deeply what the values and practices are that these disruptive innovators bring to journalism. We’re not just talking about web analytics here, but rather programmers, app developers, drone hobbyists, and others who are interacting with journalists and news organizations in ways that are giving new meaning to what exactly journalism is and who exactly is doing it.

Engineering Consent: How the Design and Marketing of Newsroom Analytics Tools Rationalize Journalists’ Labor

Interview with Caitlin Petre, assistant professor, Rutgers University

Why the interest in studying measurable journalism?

Way back in 2010, Nick Denton, founder of the now-defunct Gawker Media, said, “probably the biggest thing in internet media isn’t the immediacy of it, or the low costs, but the measurability.” Superlatives are tricky, but Denton was surely right that the unprecedented ability to measure audience behaviors and demographics is a defining characteristic of digital media — one that has major implications for the working conditions in this industry and the kind of journalism that is produced. Media scholars have an urgent role to play in helping to interpret and explain the causes, manifestations and consequences of measurable media.

What did your research show?

In the early stages of my research on the role of analytics in journalism, I kept encountering the same puzzle. Journalists at a wide range of news outlets would profess a profound wariness or even hostility toward analytics tools, often seeing them as a threat to their professional autonomy and integrity. This by itself wasn’t all that surprising: Sociological research has found that workers (especially those, like journalists, who consider themselves to possess some kind of special knowledge or expertise) often resist the implementation of technologies that quantify their performance and rank them against each other.

But even as they regarded analytics tools with suspicion and resentment, journalists didn’t seem to be resisting them very much. On the contrary, many journalists would describe feeling “addicted” to real-time analytics tools, consulting them more frequently than was required or even encouraged by their managers, and scheming about how to boost their stats.

My article aims to figure out why that is. I find that a big part of the answer has to do with something that often gets overlooked in these discussions: the design and marketing of real-time newsroom analytics tools. Newsroom analytics companies engineer their dashboards to provide a user experience that is strongly habit-forming, flattering and emotionally compelling. The resulting products are so “sticky” that explicit managerial coercion to boost traffic (which many journalists would not take kindly to) becomes unnecessary. Once journalists get hooked on looking at real-time analytics tools, they begin to monitor themselves. They also push themselves to work harder and harder in hopes of gaining ever-higher traffic.

What are the main takeaways for journalists, journalism educators and others who are interested in media metrics?

When we have conversations about analytics in journalism, we tend to focus on which metrics are provided: time spent or page views? Scroll depth or uniques? In other words, we assess the merit of each metric and speculate about the kind of journalism it might incentivize. But my findings indicate that anyone seeking to make sense of the role of analytics in contemporary journalism should be just as attentive to the way the data are presented, and the daily experience of using these tools, as we are to the metrics themselves.

The Elusive Engagement Metric

Interview with Jacob Nelson, Ph.D. candidate, Northwestern University

Why the interest in studying measurable journalism? 

Over the past few years, a growing number of journalism stakeholders and researchers have argued that newsrooms should make “audience engagement” one of their chief pursuits. This term has many interpretations that stem from one underlying belief: Journalists better serve their audiences when they explicitly focus on how their audiences interact with and respond to the news in the first place. However, those who hope to make audience engagement a larger part of journalistic practice need to first settle an internal debate surrounding how audience engagement should be defined and evaluated. Because the term currently lacks an agreed upon meaning — let alone metric — it has become an object of contestation. The efforts to make audience engagement central to news production therefore present an opportunity to learn how journalism is changing, as well as who within the field have the power to change it.

My latest article looks at how @wearehearken persuades newsrooms to adopt audience engagement as a goal, and the institutional obstacles they navigate in the process. https://t.co/cAXzUP5vFf

— Jacob Nelson (@jnelz) March 6, 2018

What did your research show?

My study draws on an ethnographic case study of Hearken, a company that offers audience engagement tools and consulting to about 100 news organizations worldwide. Findings show that news industry confusion surrounding how audience engagement should be defined and measured has left Hearken unable to quantify the benefit of its offerings. The news industry currently privileges measures of audience size, so newsrooms face economic incentives to pursue audience growth (which they can measure) rather than audience engagement (which they can’t). Instead, Hearken’s pitch to newsrooms relies primarily on appeals to intuition. Its employees argue that their interpretation of audience engagement will lead to a better quality of journalism, which will inevitably result in increased audience revenue as well. Though some newsrooms refuse to invest in Hearken’s offerings without proof they will yield some measurable return, others seem eager to take the chance. The success of Hearken’s faith-based approach indicates that many in journalism innately believe the profession should improve its relationship with the audience.

What are the main takeaways for journalists, journalism educators and others who are interested in media metrics? 

Hearken’s effort to spread its interpretation of audience engagement is just one piece of an ongoing public contest to determine journalistic practice. There are countless conversations about audience engagement that occur annually at a variety of journalism practice and research conferences. These conversations tend to include editors, reporters, and publishers, but rarely include employees of companies like comScore and Nielsen who are in the business of understanding how audiences behave. What makes this omission confounding is the fact that these firms are having their own conversations about audience engagement. The fact that these conversations are taking place shows that the major players within the news media environment believe that how audiences engage with media is worthy of consideration. On the other hand, the fact that these stakeholders with disparate interpretations of audience engagement have yet to come together reflects just how convoluted the term has become. How the term is ultimately defined and measured will have consequences not just for how journalists produce the news, but also what they expect of public – as well as what the public expects of them.

Elia Powers, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of journalism and new media at Towson University. He writes regularly about news literacy, audience engagement and nonprofit journalism.

The post What Research on ‘Measurable Journalism’ Tells Us About Tech, Cultural Shifts in Digital Media appeared first on MediaShift.

Twitter has signaled its intention to focus on video as a key platform feature for 2018, and some publishers have already been noticing the effects.

Last year, Twitter’s announcement that it would be partnering with a string of media companies to provide round-the-clock video content for the platform was met with some skepticism.

Was Twitter trying too hard to muscle in on a social video space that was already saturated and showing unpredictable returns? Video on Twitter was largely known for Vine, the since-shuttered service that allowed six-second looped clips, and Periscope, a live-streaming channel that faced plenty of competition of its own.

When we previously outlined four ways that publishers used the medium in mid-2016, there was a feeling that Twitter video could only every really be thought of as a promotional or extremely short clip service.

In 2018, Twitter’s video plans look a little more concrete.

What’s changed for Twitter video?

Since the partnership announcement (which was followed later in 2017 by an announcement of even more partners), there have been a few changes in Twitter’s approach to video, some of which seem to have managed to increase use of, and engagement with, the medium. With these media partnerships and increasing numbers of key live events, Twitter appears to be stepping enthusiastically into live video broadcasting, a space where Facebook has recently ended its payments to publishers..

Twitter is also reportedly working on a new feature design to reduce the number of steps users have to take to share video on the platform, while executives have signaled that video will be an important keystone of the company’s ambitions in 2018.

Back in December, a new public metric called view counts was added to Twitter videos for the first time, leading to an increased standardization among other social video formats on different platforms. Twitter’s ‘total video view’ metric is calculated by the sum of “any views which are at least 50 percent in-view for 2 seconds.” Under this measurement system, at least half of video has to be visible and playing on a user’s screen for at least two seconds to count as a view.

There are some signals that user behavior around video on Twitter is also starting to change. Last month, several publishers, including Bauer Media and CNBC, told Digiday that they had seen significant increases in video views on Twitter recently.

One of the elements that publishers have to deal with on Twitter is that the platform has not traditionally been known as a referral powerhouse like Google or Facebook. Content on Twitter has to be able to work alone natively. Still, some publishers have been noticing the increased attention from followers. According to Digiday:

“Lifestyle publisher Stylist saw a 500 percent increase in its Twitter video views as a result of dedicating more resources to Twitter. Men’s interest site Joe Media saw a 20 percent increase in video views over the last four months to 6.2 million. A source familiar with the matter said that over the last year, Twitter has had a “significant” increase in the number of video views on the platform compared to the previous year.”

What are the biggest videos on Twitter?

So how have publishers been using video on Twitter in recent months? Looking in our analytics tool Spike, the most popular videos on Twitter (ranked by total retweets and likes) in the last 30 days from influential accounts are largely made up of viral clips, fan-focused content and videos posted from celebrity and public figures’ accounts.

For the publishers that do appear among the top videos however, certain themes are evident. News videos are extremely popular, which is not all that surprising given the popularity of news-focussed content on timelines generally.

Some of the new ways that publishers appear to be using video include standard TV-news repackages, as well as more recognizable social video formats. A strong current affairs theme runs through many. One of the most retweeted and liked videos of the last 30 days was a clip of U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s lackluster 60 Minutes interview, repackaged and posted by the news site Axios.

Sec. of Education Betsy DeVos struggles to answer fairly basic questions on school performance on 60 Minutes pic.twitter.com/lFVq3USwUW

— Axios (@axios) March 12, 2018

Another popular clip in the last month was a video posted by ABC News of a parent of one of the victims of the Parkland High School shooting criticizing the NRA. Both of these clips demonstrate strong news value, but do not differ significantly from the original made-for-TV broadcasts.

Father of Parkland victim slams NRA videos:

"If this was put out by a terrorist organization, we would be raising the terror threat level in this country. Why are we letting this lobby have anything to do with DC? I don't understand it!" https://t.co/9eh7udBMsx pic.twitter.com/FZeTqvTRmK

— ABC News (@ABC) March 7, 2018

In this way, Twitter videos may differ from Facebook video, which has placed an emphasis on differentiating itself as a unique format. Instead, audiences may see Twitter as a place where they can ‘see for themselves’ a video clip or footage that is the focus of news reports elsewhere. This is certainly a notion that Twitter itself looks to pursue, frequently touting its potential as a breaking news and live events platform.

In terms of volume of video content, there is a remarkable variance is overall posting habits from different publishers. This chart, compiled using NewsWhip Spike, shows the number of videos posted by ten selected TV news publishers in the U.K. and U.S. over seven days, from March 7 to 14, 2018.

This does not include retweets, therefore giving a clear picture of the amount of original video uploads that various networks are distributing through Twitter.

Fox News is the leading poster, with 701 videos over seven days, or an average of around 100 per day, from just one Twitter account. Other networks such as CBS and ABC also post video frequently, while BBC News posted just 28 videos in the same time period.

The vast variance is more apparent than on Facebook, and perhaps points to different experiences and strategies being pursued by the social media teams.

Twitter has some characteristics that have the power to make it a unique proposition in social video publishing. How exactly publishers decide to use the feature may change throughout this year, as the platform attempts to grow its share of the online video attention space.

In addition to audience engagement and uptake however, one question that will certainly be on publishers’ minds will certainly be: where do we make money from this?

Liam Corcoran writes about digital journalism and media trends, metrics, and more for the NewsWhip blog.

The post How Publishers Are Learning to Embrace Twitter Video appeared first on MediaShift.

In January, Facebook announced an update to the news feed which would “prioritize local news so that you can see topics that have a direct impact on you and your community and discover what’s happening in your local area.”

The general idea is that users may be more interested in stories relevant to their community, helping foster the type of “meaningful interactions” that Facebook has stated it is looking to encourage in the news feed. Meanwhile, boosting the signal from local news sites helps fill any potential content gaps from other less reputable or relevant sources, which the platform has been trying to demote in visibility.

So far, the move is restricted to U.S.-based publishers, many of which already perform strongly on social platforms. The last time we ranked Facebook engagements among regional publishers was in January 2017. Back then, many of the most popular stories related to local news stories, and human interest pieces. As the blog post put it:

“Many regional sites have been innovating on Facebook in particular, where the potential to reach large geographic-specific audiences is great… this data shows that regional sites have gone a long way towards establishing themselves as leading social publishers in their own right.”

One year on, things have changed slightly, with many smaller news sites having reported drops in reach and traffic from Facebook. Despite this, a Pew Research report in January indicated a continued widespread interest in local news from audiences around the world.

We took another look at the prominence of local news publishers on Facebook at the start of 2018, in light of the new Facebook announcement. The data is from NewsWhip’s Analytics platform, which shows the performance of publishers, stories, and trends across social media. Looking strictly at engagements on web-based content, these were the top ten U.S. regional news sites on Facebook in January 2018, ranked by total engagements with the stories they published that month:

Top regional U.S. news publishers on Facebook in January 2018

The first thing to note is that, like many general news and entertainment sites, engagement on content from a lot of these regional news outlets on Facebook has fallen in the last 12 months.

In January 2017, the New York Daily News was the number one regional site on the platform, with over 4.4 million monthly engagements. One year later, that figure has declined to 2.47 million interactions. While the Los Angeles Times remains high in second place overall, its engagements declined by roughly 1.1 million in the same time period. Although January 2017 was the month of Trump’s inauguration, a news event which resulted in mass engagement lifts for many sites, it’s a shift worth keeping in mind.

In January 2018, the New York Post comes out on top, with over 3.6 million engagements on content published during January. In the Post’s case, the most popular stories of the month consisted largely of national and even international news stories, but also plenty of local interest reporting, such as extreme weather coverage.

In second and third place are the LA Times and southern California broadcast outlet ABC7.com. The Times had a lot of popular national stories, but stories about poverty in California, regional rail infrastructure, and coverage of the aftermath of a mudslide also performed strongly. Meanwhile, ABC7.com had one of the lowest outputs of the top 15 regional sites, with just over 1,000 posts for the month, indicating an impressive average engagement rate per story.

In the last analysis of these regional publishers, the top three sites had a marked lead over others. In 2018 however, things are more evenly distributed. This mirrors what we’ve seen among larger publishers generally on Facebook in the last 12 months.

There are also some new names in the top 10 ranking, such as the Alabama news site AL.com, and Patch.com, a site with multiple local news versions for different cities.

Another site that has managed to grow its engagements since last year is freep.com, the digital version of the Detroit Free Press. While part of the site’s strong performance on Facebook in January was due to its coverage of the Larry Nassar trial, a local news story which also featured heavily in national and international media, its real success lay with another local news story, centered around immigration.

The piece, titled “After 30 years in U.S., Michigan dad deported to Mexico,” saw almost 430,000 interactions, and was easily the site’s most popular story of the month.

Tip for developing a local news audience

In a previous post, we offered some advice for regional publishers looking to develop a community on social media. The points remain good practice:

• Develop a real community by doubling-down on the type of stories that differentiate your site from bigger publishers that already have a massive audience.
• Recognize your audience’s reading habits, and serve them.
• Regularly review data, and re-engage: It’s probable that not every story is going to work well in the news feed, even with the latest Facebook boost.

There are other aspects of Facebook strategy to consider. Many local news sites also carry national news coverage, some of it syndicated. A worthwhile review of Facebook to carry out is to consider how what percentage of that content performs strongly in the news feed.

According to NewsWhip data, outside some very well-known regional media brands in the U.S markets, local news sites are more likely to see their unusual or exclusive local stories achieve high engagement on Facebook, particularly if they have a larger national or international resonance. One other place that local news sites may consider trying to seed their content is through Facebook groups.

Facebook may have more plans for local news on Facebook. According to Recode, it’s testing a feature called ‘Today In’ in six U.S. cities, which is “a feed made up entirely of local news, events and announcements,” from sources vetted as being local publishers by the Facebook news partnerships team.

The top 15 sites, with data

See below for the top 15 U.S. regional sites on Facebook, ranked by total engagements on stories published in January 2018. These numbers count all Facebook engagement on these sites’ links in January, including shares from publisher pages, copy-and-paste shares and use of social sharing buttons on the websites themselves. The numbers don’t include engagement on live or native videos.

The biggest regional U.S. sites on Facebook, January 2018

Liam Corcoran writes about digital journalism and media trends, metrics and more for the NewsWhip blog.

The post The 15 Biggest Local News Sites On Facebook In January appeared first on MediaShift.

Recently announced changes to Facebook’s News Feed algorithm are causing a lot of fear and uncertainty among publishers. The company has not provided specifics on how or when the changes will be implemented, and the majority of the discussion is driven by speculation rather than facts. Based on our data, there is no reason to panic.

Facebook has announced similar changes to News Feed before. Starting in June 2016, after news broke that the algorithm would begin prioritizing posts by friends, we noticed a U-shaped curve: some publishers’ engagement went slightly down, but then Brexit and U.S. presidential elections happened and the same publishers’ engagement went back up.

In the second half of 2017, overall engagement for digital publishers again fell — this time dramatically. Digital publishing isn’t a monolithic industry, however, so we broke out the data to look at engagement with news outlets on Facebook separately from engagement with producers of viral content and controversial publishers. We also compared engagement trends across the U.S., U.K., continental Europe and the Nordic countries.

All of this suggests to us that news publishers will be hit hardest of all by Facebook’s latest decision. It’s less clear how viral and controversial publishers, who showed continued strength through algorithm changes last year, will be affected. What’s certain is that publishers can’t abandon Facebook, they will have to focus on sharing and engagement to stay in the game, and keep a close eye on analytics to gauge any big changes.

A note on data

To understand Facebook engagement trends, we analyzed how much readers engaged with (i.e. liked, hated, loved or shared and commented) posts by top publishers in each category of news. Publishers that made the list had Facebook pages with the biggest volume of engagement on their posts as of December 2017.

For news and tabloids, we analyzed the top 10 publishers in each country, and for viral and controversial news, the top 5 publishers. The table below shows the total number of Facebook interactions we analyzed from December 2016 to now.

Publishers’ engagement trends

Here’s what Facebook engagement looked like for publishers in 2017.

United States

Publishers included in the analysis:

News and tabloids: Fox News, CNN, ABC News, HuffPost, NowThis, The New York Times, NPR, NBC News, ATTN:, The Epoch Times

Viral news: The Dodo, Sun Gazing, Power of Positivity, Word Porn, Memes

Controversial news: Breitbart, Daily Caller, American News, Western Journalism, Conservative Tribune

United Kingdom

Publishers included in the analysis:

News and tabloids: BBC News, Daily Mail, The Independent, The Guardian, Channel 4 News, The Sun, Daily Mirror, Sky News, BBC Swahili, BBC Arabic

Viral news: UNILAD, The LAD Bible, SPORTbible, Pretty 52, UNILAD Tech

Controversial news: Tommy Robinson, Paul Joseph Watson, EU – I voted LEAVE, Goodbye EU, Jayda Fransen

France

Publishers included in the analysis:

News and tabloids: 20 Minutes, Le Parisien, LExpress, LCI, Le Figaro, Le Monde, France 24 Arabic, FRANCE 24, Ouest-France, La Provence

Viral news: Minutebuzz, Incroyable, BuzzFeedFrance, Golden Moustache, HuffPost C’est La Vie

Controversial news: Macron Dégage, On Aime La France, Droite Nationale 3, Je mage du porc et je t’emmerde, J’ai honte de mon président

Sweden

Publishers included in the analysis:

News and tabloids: Expressen, Aftonbladet, AlKompis, SVT Nyheter, Omni, Göteborgs-Posten, TV 4 Nyheterna, Metro Sverige, Svenska Dagbladet, Dagens Nyheter

Viral news: Newsner, The Typical Jag, Newsners bästa, Uppskattat, Newsner Familj

Controversial News: Politikfakta, Politiskt Inkorrekt, Political Scrapbook

Spain

Publishers included in the analysis: El País, La Vanguardia, Antena 3 Noticias, Diario Público, ABCes, laSexta I Noticias, El Mundo, eldiario.es, La Voz de Galicia, NacióDigital

Germany

Publishers included in the analysis: Bild, Tagesschau, SPIEGEL ONLINE, WELT, RTL Aktuell, ZDFheute, FOCUS Online, ZEIT ONLINE, HuffPost Deutschland, The Epoch Times – Deutsch

News declines, virals steady, controversials grow

Looking at the overall decrease in engagement volumes, it’s possible that Facebook already made changes to the News Feed algorithm last year, and only announced it now.

We also need to consider that news-wise, the second half of 2017 has been relatively calmer than the first half, with the exception of the #MeToo movement, which continues to have ripple effects across the world. In the first half 2017, media was full of reports about the start of Trump’s presidency, fake news, Russian meddling in the US elections and natural disasters, including several hurricanes. In Europe, we saw news around Brexit, elections in France, The Netherlands, Germany, and other countries, Grenfell tower, the Stockholm terrorist attack and more.

All of these events drove a lot of engagement, and we haven’t seen as many big news events in the second half of 2017. That could be another reason for the overall lower volume of Facebook engagement for news publishers towards the end of last year.

On the other hand, viral publishers’ engagement has remained steady throughout 2017. We would expect to see this as their content is designed to be shared, liked and commented, and the News Feed algorithm will continue rewarding that behavior.

Worryingly, however, controversial publishers’ engagement rose throughout 2017. Their stories are designed to evoke strong emotions which drive engagement and debate, things that Facebook suggests will be important for News Feed visibility in the future. Recently Mark Zuckerberg added that Facebook will give more weight to “reliable” news sources, as marked by the users. Will this have an effect on controversial publishers, since people who regularly engage with these pages are likely to mark them as reliable news sources? We’ll have to wait and see.

What does this all mean for publishers in 2018?

• Web shares are growing in importance. Make sure it’s easy and compelling for readers of your website or app to share your stories.
• Engagement has always been important and that’s clearly not changing. While some publishers are struggling to convert engagement into traffic or revenue, publishers who’ve invested in this area already have stable business models and revenue streams. These publishers will focus on maximizing the potential of their Facebook presence as usual. Publishers who haven’t invested in this area are likely to suffer, though they’ve probably been lagging behind in terms of social traffic already in 2017.
• Keep calm and carry on. With 2 billion active users, Facebook is (still) an important source of referral traffic for publishers. Whether your business relies on traffic, subscriptions, or additional streams like events, reaching your audience through Facebook is still possible and free.
• Look at the data. Uncertainty over News Feed changes causes fear and that uncertainty is not likely to go away as Facebook will continue experimenting with their algorithm. Publishers need to have a strong analytics team and reliable tools to look at their own as well as their competitors’ data to understand what’s really going on. That way, they can respond to the real effects of any changes and not the imagined scenarios.

Varpu Rantala is EzyInsights’ data scientist. Anna Bessonova contributed additional analysis.

The post Which Publishers Benefit Most from Facebook’s News Feed Change? appeared first on MediaShift.

You know by now that Facebook is overhauling the News Feed to focus on friends and family. In an email to Facebook Journalism Project partners, Facebook’s Campbell Brown wrote: “We know even a small update to News Feed can be disruptive to your business.” Sara Fischer at Axios says this is “a step to ensure users don’t abandon” Facebook in search of more meaningful interactions.

As Casey Newton of The Verge tweeted, “So many publishers think they have audiences, when what they really have is traffic. I think we’re about to find out who has an audience.”

So what to do? “The best strategy in the short term is to diversify,” writes WGBH’s Tory Starr. She also says to expect smaller audiences with a bigger focus on loyalty and conversion metrics. Do work that serves your readers, says Jason Koebler at Motherboard. Jennifer Brandel suggests embracing platforms like Hearken that already help publishers “spark conversations,” which the new News Feed will prioritize

What To Expect From Media Metrics in 2018
Jason Alcorn / MediaShift
We asked 10 experts in media metrics what they expect for this year.

Facebook Is Testing a Separate Destination for Local News in Its Mobile Apps
David Cohen / Adweek
‘Today in’ is available in six cities to start.

A Marketer’s Guide to Models
Will Critchlow / Distilled
This advice for consultants is also helpful for dealing with internal stakeholders who want to know whether something will work.

AI Is Coming For Your Job — And Only A Humanities Degree Can Save You
William Powers / Traffic
Interesting reading on robots in digital media, if not directly about metrics.

How Many People Did That Story Reach? It Depends Who’s Counting.
Benjamin Mullin / Wall Street Journal
Did Mic reach 11.9 million unique visitors in October, as comScore says, or 40 million as Nielsen reported?

More From MetricShift

The New, Smaller Reality for Media Metrics
James Breiner

MetricShift20: Honoring The Leaders in Media Metrics
Jason Alcorn

How Charities And Non-Profits Succeed On Social Media
Benedict Nicholson

Quality or Quantity? Depth Can Be A Metric For Both
Andrew Sweeney

The Growing Impact of Local Non-Profit Investigative Journalism in 2017
Brad Racino

Upcoming Trainings and Events

5 Tech Tools to Improve Your Reporting [Jan. 10]
Instructor: Evan Wyloge of the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting

How to Verify Photos and Videos [Jan. 17]
Instructor: Aric Toler of Bellingcat

FREE! — How to Get Better Newsletter Metrics [Feb. 7]
MediaShift’s Jason Alcorn and Special Guests

Jason Alcorn (@jasonalcorn) is the Metrics Editor for MediaShift. In addition to his work with MediaShift, he works as a consultant with non-profits and newsrooms.

The post Media Metrics Roundup for January 17, 2018 appeared first on MediaShift.

Rather than mass media, the future is niche media supported by fans.

Forget about the big numbers of total pageviews per month or unique users per month. Those numbers are misleading and meaningless. They had meaning only in the days when the media business depended on mass media, massive audiences, and products aimed at the masses. That was when the news media depended on advertising.

Fans are engaged and willing to give their time and money to their favorite projects.

Today the business of media is all about touching potential customers with personalized, customized messages. It’s about identifying the small number of people who are truly fans of your publication or the stars on your team. It’s about strengthening the emotional attachment people have to your brand and its mission.

How big numbers mislead us

In their very successful campaign to reach 1 million paid subscriptions for their digital-only edition, the Washington Post learned that the users most likely to subscribe came to their site at least three times a month.

And what percentage of their roughly 90 million unique users visit the site at least three times a month? Only 15 percent, according to an article in the Economist that looked at digital subscription campaigns of various publications.

In other words, the other 85 percent are arriving at the site through a one-time referral or maybe by accident:

“The Post has settled on three site visits a month before hitting the paywall, which means 85% of visitors will not encounter it. The other 15% are asked to subscribe at the introductory rate of 99 cents for the first four weeks.”

As you may have read previously on my blog (and in the Economist article cited above), a small number of loyal users is far more important in the new economics of journalism, which depends on users rather than advertisers to pay the bills. And small numbers of loyal users can mean big revenues:

• The 22,000 “partners” who pay 60 euros a year for eldiario.es in Spain represent nearly 40 percent of their revenues but less than 1 percent of their total unique users, according to the CEO (in Spanish).
• The 2.5 million digital-only subscribers to the New York Times represent less than 3 percent of their total users but now generate more revenue than print advertising, a historic milestone.

The Washington Post, which crossed the one million digital subscriber mark in 2017. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Hope for small publishers

For smaller digital news publications, the road to profitability depends on converting a high percentage of their audience into a community of loyal users, fans, content producers, and contributors rather than subscribers.

The logic of journalism as a public service rather than as a business means that publishers need to recruit followers who believe in their mission rather than subscribers who merely pay for a service.Financial support needs to spring from an emotional connection rather than a mere economic transaction.

And it can also mean that they draw support from foundations, non-profits, and philanthropists, a strategy used successfully by MinnPost, Voice of San Diego, Texas Tribune, and CalMatters, as described by the Columbia Journalism Review.

They need to collaborate with other organizations that can provide content or labor or distribution to multiply their reach and impact, as ProPublica is doing with local news organizations: the national organization brings expertise in investigative journalism and the local organizations get extended reach for their work.

Crowdfunding and crowdsourcing are key elements on the revenue side and content side. The way forward is still being mapped, but these success stories can help others find the way.

James Breiner is a bilingual consultant on digital journalism and entrepreneurial journalism. He is currently a visiting professor at the University of Navarra in Spain. His websites are News Entrepreneurs and Periodismo Emprendedor en Iberoamérica.

The post The New, Smaller Reality for News Metrics appeared first on MediaShift.

It’s not just brands and publishers that are competing for our ever-diminishing attention spans on social media. Charities and non-profits are also vying for the same audience eyes, despite their different way of working.

At NewsWhip, we decided to look at what these charities and non-profits, including some of the big United Nations programs, are doing to maintain their social presence and win on social.

To do this, we looked at various aspects of social performance, including earned media, owned media and social content, across several of the world’s largest and most ubiquitous social-good organizations.

Engagement on articles about the groups

For our purposes here, we define earned media as articles written about the non-profit. In terms of content written about these groups, the most covered in the press were TED, Unesco, and Unicef.

TED, the non-profit whose mission is to spread ideas through series of short talks, had the most engagements on articles written about it in the three-month period from September 1 to November 3, 2017, with more than five million engagements.

Unesco and Unicef, two UN programs devoted to cultural preservation and helping children respectively, were the next two group to receive the most engagement on earned media, and the only organizations other than TED to garner over one million engagements on such content.

Stories tended to be about serious issues, with themes including from the crisis in Yemen, the potential economic problems caused by Brexit and the Israel-Palestine conflict. This is perhaps to be expected for content written about charities, who after all exist to work on these kinds of serious, hard-to-solve issues.

The most-engaged article about a charitable group is also perhaps the most controversial. The Open Society Foundations had the highest average engagement score due to one false but hugely viral article about its founder, George Soros. The story was rated by PolitiFact as untrue, but it garnered more than 200,000 engagements put it firmly in the top five for total engagements.

More generally, the publishers that garnered the most engagements writing about non-profits and charities were the Independent, The Hill and CNN. The Independent drove the most engagements on its non-profit-related content with nearly 300,000 for the period. The Independent also had the most engaged story after the untrue OSF article with its coverage of the crisis in Yemen, which cited Save The Children research.

Engagement on their own content

It is a slightly different picture when it comes to engagement on charities’ own content. The World Economic Forum received the most engagements with 1.6 million engagements, and TED was close behind with 1.4 million, almost exclusively on links to videos of its talks.

Content from these two websites dominated to such an extent that they were the only two domains that featured in the top ten articles, with TED and its specific TED Ideas site appearing seven times, and the World Economic forum appearing three times.

There was a lot of thematic unity with what content was successful, with big, sweeping ideas and innovations dominating engagements across the board. TED speaks for itself in this regard, but the World Economic Forum posts that were most highly engaged with could easily be the subjects of TED talks themselves.

Beyond these big two, the Council of Foreign Relations was the next biggest in terms of engagement on its own content and was the only other organization to break six figures for the period by this metric, garnering 100,235 engagements over three months.

Engagement on organization Facebook Pages

For Facebook Pages, we see two dynamics at play. TED, again unsurprisingly, had the highest number of followers, with 10 million, and as a result drove the highest number of average engagements, at 5,787 per post with their well-defined brand of informational video.

TED did not however have the highest number of total engagements, as that honor belonged to the World Economic Forum. This was driven mostly by the sheer amount of content they posted, with 4,521 posts over the three months — or 50 per day.

This was over six times higher than TED, and helped them to their total of 11.7 million engagements for the period, compared to TED’s 3.9 million.

Both TED and the World Economic Forum had immense success with video, with it comprising roughly 10 percent of each of their Facebook posts, but being responsible for 65 percent and 85 percent of their respective engagements on the platform.

Conclusion

There are multiple ways to get attention on social as a charity or non-profit organization. Here are just a few of them:

• Be an authority. If you or the studies you do can be a cited authority in earned media, this will help make people aware of the work you do as a charity.
• Define your voice and stick to it. TED has a very defined voice for its videos, which keeps people coming back to its content.
• Post frequently. The World Economic Forum posted fifty times a day on Facebook, which resulted in over 11 million engagements. If you have the content to post frequently, do so.
• Use video to your advantage. Video vastly over-performed for the two biggest non-profit pages we looked at on Facebook. If you can take advantage of this trend with well-produced, informative video, it’s worthwhile.

Benedict Nicholson is a writer at NewsWhip.

The post How Charities And Non-Profits Succeed On Social Media appeared first on MediaShift.

Most likely, they’re posting stories from your staff on Twitter and Facebook. They’re checking Google Analytics or Parse.ly or Chartbeat to see if those links are successfully penetrating the fickle social media universe. They’re explaining to another young reporter why she needs to change the name on her Twitter account to, well, anything else but @FoxyGrrrl15.

What’s that? You don’t have a social media team anymore? It was abandoned in the pivot to video, or maybe during the third round of staff cuts since April? In that case, someone might remember to post a photo on Instagram in between remaking the home page and writing a city council meeting brief.

A decade ago, Facebook, Twitter and subsequent platforms were viewed suspiciously by some people in newsrooms and greeted with hope by others. But in so many average American newsrooms today, the years have not been kind to those who work with social media.

A 2017 American Press Institute survey of 59 newsrooms across the country shows that many social media teams and activities have been decimated by staff cuts and newsroom reorganization. Others have remained intact or grown, but still struggle with lack of leadership, weak (if any) strategy, and a lot of random daily tasks.  

The survey, along with dozens of interviews with social media journalists and experts, generally shows that social media efforts in newsrooms have changed little since their adoption of Twitter and Facebook about 10 years ago. The social media universe, however, has changed considerably:

• In 2008, 24 percent of the world used social media. Today, it’s 81 percent and growing.
• Facebook still leads the pack, but over 20 other platforms now have more than 100 million users each.
• Misinformation pollutes many of these platforms, and websites that exist only to distribute fake content are growing. Google identified at least 340 such sites in 2016.
• Politicians, candidates and other people in power routinely use social media to make news and communicate with followers.
• Ways to engage and reach a variety of audiences have grown considerably, and they’re often complicated and technically challenging.
• Metrics used to track social media success have not only become more widespread and more complex, they’re now sometimes used to measure journalists’ performance.

But while the social media industry has grown larger and more sophisticated, training for social media journalists in many newsrooms is typically non-existent or consists of “on the job” learning.

And the people being hired to handle social media are often “entry-level” with little experience in the journalism world.  That doesn’t make sense to social media veterans.

“In a news environment, social media is the most grueling job in the newsroom,” says Elyse Siegel, an audience development expert who’s worked at Huffington Post and now is managing editor at Swirled.

Even today, social media teams are sometimes isolated and not considered an integral part of a newsroom’s journalistic mission. Said one experienced social media journalist in our survey: “…we’re the second-class citizens of the newsroom, not real journalists.”

As we approach a new year and, importantly,  the 2018 elections, it’s time to take a close look at how newsrooms can reinvent their social media efforts to accomplish three essential functions of journalism:

Finding and fighting misinformation, as journalists on the front lines of “fake news”;

Engaging audiences with a goal of increasing trust in professional reporting;

Participating as full partners in the newsroom’s accountability reporting efforts.

That sounds like a heavy load, but here’s the good news: There are changes that can be relatively easy to make but still have great potential in addressing your newsroom’s current and future challenges. Other ideas might be a bit more complex but, we believe, are ultimately achievable.

Social media app icons ( Daniel Sambraus/Getty Images)

So take these 10 tips along to your 2018 planning and strategy meeting, and let us know how we can help:

1) Revise your social media job postings.  

If you’re lucky enough to have a job opening in 2018, don’t pull that old job description out of the drawer. Hire an experienced journalist — just as you would for a newsroom reporting job. Here’s an aspirational job posting written by veteran social media editor Scott Kleinberg. Find more hiring ideas in our report.

2) Get training on identifying misinformation and other fake content.

Now is not the time to make the embarrassing mistake of tweeting a fake photo or fictitious news story. Verification is a key element of journalism, but when it comes to social media, a surprising number of journalists don’t know the  basics. Learn more about bots and fake accounts  and how to spot, block and report them; how to identify falsified photos, audio and video; and other basics of verification.

3) Stop posting all those links.

By far the most common activity reported by respondents to our survey was “posting links to stories.” Re-evaluate the amount of time you’re spending repetitively posting links. A common strategy by sophisticated social media teams is to choose only one to three stories per day — content most likely to get traction — and spend time instead on other activities that may be more fruitful.

4) Get to know your community, through data.

Do you really know who lives in your community? We found that many journalists aren’t even familiar with their regional census data, which is easily accessed and potentially eye-opening. Find out who’s buying your newspaper, paying for your app and subscribing online by talking with your marketing and circulation department. Knowing your demographics is the first step in figuring out your social strategy.

5) Meet your audiences, in person.

Now’s a good time to plan community events for 2018. Even the smallest event — a meet-and-greet happy hour, a “fake news” workshop with the local library, a blood drive or a bar trivia night — gives you a chance to glean useful information from your audiences and potential audiences.

Two Capitol Hill reporters tweeting in 2012 (PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images)

6) Learn how to deal with fact-resistant audiences.

It’s not enough to simply learn how to identify and flag misinformation. The next step is understanding why and how people are disseminating that information, and how to lessen its effect. This will take some psychology (which you probably didn’t learn in journalism school so just read this) but you may save the internet from one more piece of misinformation. And who knows, you may win a fan or two.

7) Create a strategy and goals that go beyond page views.

First, find out if your social media team even has a strategic plan, or if social media is included in your newsroom’s overall planning for 2018 and beyond. Rather than focusing on collecting friends, followers and page views, think about how to create a more loyal and engaged audience. Here are tips from nine experts in audience engagement.

8) Provide quality training so that people can execute that strategy and meet those goals.

This doesn’t have to be expensive:

• Look for people in the newsroom and in other departments with expertise in social media, verification, audience development and other skills. (The American Press Institute’s Changemaker Network is working to organize peer-to-peer training on a variety of issues.)  
• Seek out online tutorials like API’s Better News, free and low-cost online courses, and newsroom partnerships. (Here’s a quick list of tips for newsrooms on a shoestring budget.)
• Research the best journalism conferences of 2018, squeeze some money out of your budget, and have your journalist(s) present a session to the newsroom with the knowledge gained from that conference.
• A number of Facebook groups have been created to offer support to newsrooms and academic social media efforts.
• Gather offers resources and video “lightning chats” to discuss better ways to bring newsrooms and communities together. Hearken helps newsrooms connect with audiences in smart ways.

9) Experiment with social-only content created by your social team.

Forbes’ “social-first” strategy provides good examples of content created by the social media team specifically for the organization’s vast social media audiences. As this Digiday story explains, the Forbes team not only creates content, they identify topics of interest on social platforms and assign them to other newsroom reporters.  

10) Involve social media staff at the inception of every big story or project.

Remember, they’re journalists too.

Jane Elizabeth is director of accountability journalism at the American Press Institute. This study was supported in part through a Knight-Nieman fellowship at Harvard University.

The post 10 Things You Can Do Now to Up Your Social Media Game in 2018 appeared first on MediaShift.

What type of stories go viral on LinkedIn, and how does the algorithm impact the visibility of certain posts? Below, we take a closer look at the content process on the business professionals’ network.

Earlier this month, we looked at how LinkedIn has been investing in video capabilities. But video isn’t the only area of content that has been succeeding on LinkedIn. Earlier this year, Digiday reported on how business publishers were seeing growth in referrals from the platform.

Here’s how engagement, measured as shares of links on LinkedIn, looked like for English language publishers on the platform from January to September:

August seems to have been a banner month, with over 50 million shares of new articles. Indeed, we’re now seeing that for some business-focused sites such as Forbes and Inc.com, LinkedIn engagement is beginning to rival, or even surpass, their shares on Facebook.

According to Executive Editor Dan Roth, the platform had three million writers and around 160,000 posts per week as of the end of 2016. Those articles either get distributed by LinkedIn’s in-house editorial team, made up of around 25 editors based around the world, or algorithms. LinkedIn claims that 87 percent of users trust the platform as a source of information, making it an attractive location for gaining people’s attention.

But what sort of messaging works on LinkedIn, and how does it get distributed? Unlike Facebook, there isn’t a whole lot of discussion about the influence of LinkedIn’s algorithm on what their users see when they log on.

As with most algorithm-based news feeds, we can divide the question of why certain stories go viral into two sections. First, we need to analyze the actual substance, tone and presentation of the stories themselves. Second, we need to consider the distribution particulars of LinkedIn, the role of its algorithm and the influence that a writer or publisher can have on that process.

The Content: Aim For High Quality

First, let’s consider the types of stories that are seeing high engagement on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is actually quite explicit about the types of stories that it sees as being likely to go viral on the platform. In a guide, they note that articles should “share professional expertise,” and suggest titles such as “What will (or should) your industry look like in 5, 10, or 15 years and how will it get there?” and “What advice do you have for career advancement?”

Looking at the most popular stories of the last few weeks on LinkedIn in NewsWhip’s Spike tool, we can see that these type of stories also resonate when they come from publishers. Career advice and professional development insights are extremely popular.

In presentation however, LinkedIn makes an effort to distinguish its content from more mass-appeal platforms. The platform discourages the use of listicles and obvious clickbait and recommends that writers “keep articles appropriate for the LinkedIn audience. Don’t post anything obscene, shocking, hateful, intimidating or otherwise unprofessional.”

Being able to maintain these editorial standards is something that LinkedIn takes very seriously, and to reasonably good effect. You won’t have noticed LinkedIn mentioned very often in ongoing discussion about the spread of “fake news,” and the platform is not known as a place where viral publishers go to thrive.

It’s also important that articles aren’t seen as overly promotional; it’s fine to mention where you work, or the product you’re building, but going overboard results in risking spam status and a visibility downgrade. LinkedIn isn’t trying to compete with Twitter for the breaking news audience, or Facebook for mass appeal. Its strengths lie in allowing users to develop thought leadership, and sharing content relevant to their careers. Developing a genuine persona on LinkedIn with expertise around a specific topic is a surefire way to build an audience base on the platform. LinkedIn also recommends that articles are at least three paragraphs long.

Distribution: the Algorithm at Work

Distribution of content on LinkedIn is an algorithmic process, and that algorithm is theoretically designed for engaging, interesting stories to go viral. In this sense, the algorithm isn’t all that different from the type that the bigger platforms employ, but it’s aimed at a more niche user base. LinkedIn is open about the effect that its algorithms have on content visibility in the news feed, using a “man+machine” approach to classifying content in real time based on signifiers such as early engagement, previous reaction to content from the page, and more.

LinkedIn uses a feature called “FollowFeed” to help determine what gets prominence in users’ feeds. FollowFeed aims to provide high precision and recall, or relevance. For a technical explanation of how FollowFeed works, see this great detailed explanation from LinkedIn engineer Ankit Gupta.

LinkedIn has a three-stage process for identifying and dealing with low-quality content. As the post is being created, a classifier buckets posts as “spam,” “low-quality,” or “clear” in near real time. Next, the system looks at statistical models based on how fast the post is spreading, and the networks engaging with the post, in order to spot low-quality posts. Finally, human evaluators review posts flagged by users as being “suspicious.”

There are some factors that help determine how much preference articles secure for algorithmic distribution based on factors related to the personal details attached to the author’s LinkedIn profile. Here’s what LinkedIn recommends regarding article distribution factors from individual writers:

(Stories are) shared with a subset of your connections and followers. This is determined by connection strength, your connection’s notification settings, and notification state (i.e. number of unread notifications). Members who aren’t in your network can choose to follow you and by doing so they will receive your articles and posts in their feed.

1. Followers may receive notifications when you publish an article. Your articles may be available in their LinkedIn homepage feeds and can be included in news digest emails.
2. In an effort to simplify the notifications experience, we often aggregate notifications to your connections.

So as with any news feed, there’s quite a bit at play behind the scenes in determining how many people will see and share your posts. Analyzing other success stories and changing techniques learned on other platforms can help in boosting your own signal.

Ultimately, LinkedIn’s editorial mission statement is to provide timely and professional content to users. Those users can be divided into different cohorts – engineers, salespeople, executives and countless other – but timely relevance remains the key consideration.

Liam Corcoran writes about digital journalism and media trends, metrics and more for the NewsWhip blog.

The post Your Quick Guide to Using LinkedIn to Distribute Content appeared first on MediaShift.

Read the full series

In 2009, when the New York Times was looking to hire its first social media editor, it knew it wanted to tap someone with deep reporting and editing experience. In that way, Jennifer Preston was a natural fit: she’d been a reporter and editor at Newsday and then the New York Times for the past 25 years. One thing about her qualifications for the job, though, seemed a little strange to other social media editors of the time.

“I did not have a lot of experience with these tools,” Preston says. “When I took the job, I didn’t even have a Twitter account.”

Hi, I'm the NYT's new social media editor. More details later. How should @nytimes be using Twitter?

— JenniferPreston (@JenniferPreston) May 26, 2009

Preston is now vice president of journalism for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, where she oversees a $30 million annual portfolio. She says her experience as a social media editor helps in her current role, as Knight looks to fund projects, because she has an understanding of how social media and other digital storytelling tools can be used in a “positive way to promote engagement with readers to build trust, strengthen reporting and the business.”

I interviewed Preston about her time as social media editor at the New York Times, why she moved out of social and back to reporting, and how metrics for journalism have evolved in the past eight years. (The interview is edited for length and clarity.)

Q&A

How was the social media editor position at the New York Times created?

Jennifer Preston: Social media efforts at the Times were well underway when I took on the role as the first social media editor in early 2009. Thanks to Cynthia Collins, Soraya Darabi and Stacy Martinet from the marketing and communications teams, the Times had already developed a strong presence on Facebook, and working with Jake Harris, a rock-star developer, the Times had created multiple organizational accounts. At that time, we also had key Times staffers using social media brilliantly including Brian Stelter, Nick Kristof, and Jenny 8. Lee.

Senior newsroom leadership saw the importance of social media beyond its obvious role of distribution, marketing and branding. So in 2009, Jon Landman, who then oversaw the digital news operation, asked me to take on the role of exploring what social media meant for Times journalism and to be an evangelist in the newsroom for social media.

At the time, I was a veteran journalist who had worked as both an editor and a reporter with a deep interest in data journalism and multimedia storytelling. As a former circulation marketing manager for Newsday, I also saw the obvious potential in using social media to find and engage with a new audience. My initial focus was on answering the question: What is the role of social media for Times journalism?

What stood out about social media back in 2009?

Preston: These tools were powerful in the hands of a great reporter – key to newsgathering – to identify trends, find sources, breaking news and other information. And most importantly, listen and engage with people you meet online.

Because it was easy to demonstrate the value of social media for reporting, I did not meet with tremendous resistance when I worked my way around the newsroom offering to train Times reporters and editors in how best to use these tools. You have to remember that social media was the first time that many journalists were able to “touch” the web and engage with people directly online.

We often underestimate the role that social media has played in accelerating innovation in creating new business as well as the digital transformation of traditional newsrooms.

What was it like to be in that new role, even though you’d already been at the Times for more than a decade?

Preston: I had a lot to learn. And I had to learn fast and publicly. Since I had little or no experience using Twitter when it was announced I was taking on the role, I endured a lot of skepticism from Twitter users. I made a lot of mistakes early on from posting broken links to not responding right away to @-replies. I will say that I got an enormous amount of help from Twitter and other social media editors and users along the way. I learned in real time – and brought that empathy to my work in training other journalists to use these tools.

As I recall, I faced the question: Why did the Times put a veteran journalist — and not a digital native — in the job? The answer was that Times leadership wanted someone who could help find and show the value of social media for reporting, for the journalism. That was considered the best way to persuade Times journalists to take up and embrace these tools. The idea was to have someone with longtime editing and reporting experience figure it out. That was my job.

I will say that I was lucky to work with so many innovative people around the newsroom who were willing to embrace change, especially in the Sports Department. I tell everyone to start with your colleagues in the Sports Department if you want to experiment. And the best way to get reporters back then to use social media was to show them what they were missing by not using it.

How did metrics come into play with social media early on?

Preston: At that time, we were looking at primarily building up followers on all the platforms. We were also looking at trying to use social media, specifically Facebook, to create a community around specific areas of coverage such as theater coverage, and niche areas, such as a Facebook community around our Civil War blog.

Since we were, at that time, introducing the metered [paywall] model, we were very interested of course in understanding what platforms drove the most traffic to nytimes.com and what platforms could be used to find, build and engage with an audience that would consider digital subscriptions. So paying attention to both engagement metrics — and overall traffic — was key. Chartbeat, as I recall, was just getting started then.

What led you to return to being a staff writer?

Preston: In early 2011, I returned to reporting to use everything I learned about getting my fellow journalists to embrace social media to reporting and writing about the impact social media was having on everything, around the world.

I was able to begin reporting on the Arab Spring and explain to Times readers how people used Facebook and Twitter to try to overthrow an authoritarian regime. It was fascinating to be able to report on how social and mobile was rapidly changing the way that people eat, love and pray in those early days.

Now you oversee the Knight Foundation’s journalism grantmaking. What metrics do you look at most often?

Preston: At Knight Foundation, we are looking to support people and projects who are filling critical gaps with innovation and digital transformation, finding new methods and models, that can be widely adopted. We don’t have enough resources to support one newsroom at a time. So we are always looking at how solutions can be scaled and benefit many newsrooms and people. When we see an investment in a tool — such as DocumentCloud — get widespread use across the industry, that is the best measurement of success.

What do you think are the “right” metrics for journalists to value?

Preston: Most people finally now recognize that all the traffic in the world is not going to address the ongoing concerns about the business models. That is why metrics focused on engagement — and metrics focused on your most engaged users — is important.

This is the fifth in a series. Did you start out in a social media position between 2005-2010? Where are you now? Get in touch with the reporter and share your experience. Julia Haslanger can be reached at juliahaslanger@gmail.com.

Julia Haslanger worked for The Wall Street Journal last year as an audience engagement editor. She is now an engagement consultant at Hearken.

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