Tomorrow, NewsWhip’s Paul Quigley will be talking at the first Mobile Journalism Conference in Dublin. Ahead of that, here’s NewsWhip’s take on how mobile and social have disrupted content distribution.
NewsWhip are excited to talk and exhibit at the first Mobile Journalism Conference in Dublin tomorrow. Our CEO Paul Quigley will be talking on the ‘Social: Create, Curate; Verify’ panel at 2pm. In advance of that, we share some of our thoughts around the impact of mobile and social on content distribution.
‘Trending’. ‘Viral’. ‘Shareable’.
These are words that can provoke strong reactions in editors. To many, they sum up what’s wrong with online publishing today: cheap attempts to grab clicks and mollify fickle readers.
But beyond the runaway llamas and the piano-playing cats, social signals can provide publishers with a powerful means of delivering the right content to the widest possible audience.
At NewsWhip, we think that the joint rise of mobile content consumption and social distribution have influenced content strategies in several major ways.
1. The Feedback Loop
Firstly, the audience relationship has turned into a feedback loop. Mobile and social have completely disrupted the traditional ‘breaking news’ paradigm, where audiences could only find out a new story by watching TV at prescribed hours, or by buying a morning paper.
Thanks to smartphone technology, breaking news is now videoed and photographed in real time by eye witnesses from all sorts of backgrounds. The huge distribution potential of social platforms like Twitter and Facebook then means that a global audience is just a hashtag or a retweet away.
Newsrooms then act as information curators, determining which videos and pictures are real, and what they mean to a bigger story. They are the editors, the filters, and those eventually who weave a story out of the threads and patches of inputs that come in on all channels.
Newsrooms can also mine the real time sharing signals to see which stories matter. What videos are getting traction this hour? What stories or events are getting traction on competitor sites? For newsrooms that want to serve their readers by presenting them with the best stories at the right times, and not solely pursue their own editorial agenda, it’s now imperative to monitor how stories are breaking and developing on social from different publishers.
The most successful social publishers are working tightly within this feedback loop: using the people formerly known as the audience as a source of content, and listening to what is getting a reaction. By keeping this feedback loop tight, breaking news media stays relevant in the mobile social era.
2. A New Definition of Breaking News
Once, a news story was “broken” once a key event defining the story had been published in print or appeared on TV in any place.
Today, that definition is somewhat irrelevant – it might matter to the Pulitzer Prize Committee who first discovered an event, but it does not matter to your audience. The audience is no longer in one place, and no media outlet can claim perfect penetration. So if an event is important, the job of a newsroom is to take responsibility for “breaking” it to their audience, even if that event has been covered by another publication already.
Also a news item is no longer an atomic unit. Different angles or aspects of an event will be of interest to different audiences. And events develop in real time today, so even after a news story is broken, outlets can find many ways to keep it moving and fresh for their own social audience.
The short version: The end of ‘prescribed media’ means that publishers shouldn’t consider a story to be fully broken until it’s actually been delivered to their own readers.
A word of caution on this topic: reacting to popularity must be done quickly, even predictively if a story is picked up by other publications. With mobile and social, there is a new speed for news: how fast it can be shared. And a new time to be late to a story: after the social newswires are already saturated.
Saturation points depend on the level of penetration of publications already covering a story, the number of people sharing it, and the algorithms powering the news feeds of social networks, in particular Facebook’s Edgerank. Generally, in our experience journalists are at the breaking edge of information and so overestimate the degree of saturation of a story. While Twitter may have been abuzz about a story for ten minutes, it’s likely the rest of the population does not know about it yet.
3. The Rise of the Niches
Social networks have allowed niche publishers to directly connect with their audience with a speed and regularity that did not exist before, in the time of monthly periodicals. So the mobile social era can have big consequences for these publishers, who can become a daily, even hourly, personality in their audience’s news feeds.
NewsWhip data shows that niche publishers can attract much higher average engagement rates than general news sites, when we look at an “interactions per story published” metric. For example, looking at business news, we see a specialist publisher like the Harvard Business Review, can attract a dedicated sharing audience.
4. The Big Social Mobile Data
Another way that mobile and social have helped editors to improve their content strategies lies with data.
Mobile content consumption has greatly aided social distribution – the means of reaching new readers and building loyal audiences through social media.
More people scrolling and clicking, commenting, tweeting and sharing not only gives publishers greater reach on all platforms, but also presents them with a richer dataset with which to make informed decisions about where to focus their attention, and how to best package their content for distribution.
According to our data, the number of English language publishers achieving over 1 million monthly interactions on their content has exploded in recent years:
And it’s not just the big social media names that have been gaining from the overall rise in engagements. Niche and local news sites, from the Verge and the Manchester Evening News, have all seen big lifts in their engagements.
Examining the engagement figures around individual stories and competitors allows social media teams to learn what kinds of content are performing on different platforms, what tones are popular, what times content is most engaged with, and lots more.
In the future, smart publishers will be using these social cues to provide a better experience for their readers, just as they already monitor at referrals and page views.
For publishers, social is no longer just an output, a place to dump links and hope that algorithms are kind to them. It’s an input, helping inform them what their readers care and want to learn more about, and how to better reach them.
The Mobile Journalism Conference takes place in Dublin on March 27 and 28. Follow us on Twitter for images, info, quotes and more from the event.
