Judd Legum is the Editor-in-Chief of Think Progress, a popular American liberal news site. He and his his team have been using Spike for the past year. Here, he tells us about how it helps with his site’s journalism.
Finding interesting stories to write about every day is the number one task at hand everyday in any digital newsroom, Judd told us. In particular, Think Progress focuses on creating stories that relate to progressive topics – and often finding news events that have not yet received much exposure. Sometimes, with little on the news horizon and nothing in the diary, finding those events can be difficult.
With this starting point, knowing what stories are being engaged with across the web is a huge asset, especially if the stories can be found very early or quickly. That’s where the team turns to Spike, NewsWhip’s platform for newsrooms.
Spike tracks millions of news stories, videos and images each day to see which ones are driving social engagement. What are people talking, caring and tweeting about?
Each day, the Think Progress team flick through Spike’s filters to get a sense of the news that’s trending and about to trend across the US and elsewhere. “People here look at it on a daily basis,” says Judd. “It’s a great way to stay informed, even while we’re covering other stories.” He and his team use the 1 hour view in particular to spot the freshest stories emerging in various niche topics in real time. Spike’s filters allow users to drill into news about health, the environment, politics, and other niches relevant to the Think Progress audience.
Spike’s one hour view shows the stories and content published only in the last hour but already driving major shares – a view of what’s about to be viral.
Spike can also enable journalists to find smaller, more local news stories with the capacity to go global. With this in mind, one of Judd and team’s favourite Spike features is the US regional view. This allows journalists to click into local media stories from LA to New York. “The regional view surfaces interesting local stories that are not being covered by national media,” explains Judd. “We’ll often find a story in Spike that we can give more coverage to.”
He gives the example of a recent Think Progress story which featured a schizophrenic teenager being shot dead by police in North Carolina, which Think Progress journalists originally spotted trending in Spike on a regional news site.
Thanks to the hyperlocal views offered in Spike, which bubble up regional stories from numerous specialist local news sites around the US, Think Progress journalists managed to bring the story to their audience first.
Sometimes the team will hold off and monitor a story’s progress using Spike to see how it develops. “We’ll look at a story and think ‘should we track it more closely?’ It’s an ongoing process,” says Judd. To track a story in Spike, users add it to their “watch list” – a recently added feature.
Judd explains that his team also use Spike’s search function to find stories that would be a good fit for Think Progress coverage. A Spike search for key phrases and topics will turn up the most viral and engaged with stories in those topics.
This means the newsroom never misses an important story.
In particular, the Think Progress homepage features a ‘trending’ bar across the top, highlighting the important issues of the moment for their readers – public health, climate change, abortion, reproductive rights, poverty and housing. With Spike’s searches and alerts, the Think Progress team can keep on top of trending stories in each of these.
This ‘social awareness’ certainly seems to be paying off – Think Progress placed strongly in our list of the top 50 Facebook publishers each month.
“Social is a huge driver of traffic for us,” says Judd. “It fits really well into what we’re trying to do with Think Progress.” He admits to having less interest in SEO, but says that “it’s important to have a balance.”
Of the other digital tools that have caught Judd’s eye, he’s enthusiastic about Thinkup and of course, Tweetdeck.
But when it comes to finding reliable content, Think Progress already have a secret weapon. “Spike is a powerful tool for a newsroom like ours.”
If you’re interested in seeing what Spike can do, start a trial now. It takes two minutes, and you’ll start finding the web’s most engaging stories straight away.
