The algorithm was described as “the boss” and “a beast” by editors at Ladbible, Joe and Metro who all used “authenticity” as the watchword for their social media output.
In a survey of 30 digital journalists from the Metro, Telegraph, Reach and Joe by creative agency Taylor Herring between January and March, 23% said their social news channels were the main focus for the year ahead while 39% said they were becoming increasingly important.
At an event in London to launch the report on Thursday, editors discussed the challenges of grabbing social media users’ attention in the milliseconds before they continue scrolling.
Joe Media editor George McKay said: “I think one of the negative sides of the social revolution is that… everybody’s just consuming little sweets all the time, the sweets being the content that everybody wants to share, and they’re easy and they’re nice, and they stop the scroll, and they’re really engaging and viral.
“Every time we as editors say, okay, well, you’ve had your sweets, but now it’s time to eat your greens, and this is a piece of content that you probably should be really engaging with – nobody wants to do that. So the task that we have to contend with is, how do we sneak the greens in through the sweets?
“So it’s how do we package those things in a way that are engaging and then it’s thinking about what that means for specific platforms, because that will look different on Tiktok, which will look different on a website, and will look different on Facebook. So it’s the same piece of content, but actually in three different iterations.”
Jack Peat, head of the editorial newsroom at Taylor Herring and a former editor at Joe Media, noted that this touches on the “platform versus publisher rivalry, because, in a way, you have to have the platform, you have to have the audience that it brings, but you’re sort of in competition with them at the same time”.
McKay responded: “I don’t think it will ever be where a publication will just be social or will be completely off social. It will always be that balance, because it has to be. Because the thing is, with a platform, there is an algorithm mediating everything that you see, and therefore we have to consider that algorithm, and if you can build a direct relationship with the audience, that is way more powerful in every single way, but that also has to be on social. So it’s this kind of power imbalance of attention.
“Obviously, we’re all competing with each other up here, but we are also competing with Facebook directly. We’re competing with Tiktok, we’re competing with those creators.”
McKay also noted that “gone are the halcyon days of 2015, 2016 when social media was really on the ascendancy, where you could put anything out and it could do well. Part of that is algorithmic, but I also think audiences are just really discerning now, which is a good thing, but it means we have to step up our game.”
He said Joe looks at three key questions at the start of the commissioning process when deciding if a piece of content has a “reasonable chance of success”: what the headline will be, what the imagery will be and what the caption will be. If they aren’t happy with those at the start, he said, it’s not worth doing – both because “money is tight” and because pages get punished by the social platforms if they put out underperforming content.
McKay added: “We have to keep the audience on side, but then we also do have to consider the engagement rates versus the clickthrough rates, and finding that balance is where you can see real success on a platform, because you can’t just go for one or the other, especially not when it comes to the website.
“So we really have to find that balance. So the way I always tell my editors to do this, is to [think] which way is the content telling you to go? So again, you have to be brutal with yourself, but it’s: is this a piece of content that people are going to click through? If the answer is no, why are we trying to make them? And is it a piece of content that people are going to want to share or comment on or engage with, and if the answer is no, it’s probably something that people are going to click into, why are we trying to go for the engagement? So the content almost dictates what we do with that content.”
Editors develop ‘sixth sense’ for algorithm changes
Ladbible editor Ben Smith also spoke of the power of the algorithms. Describing his relationship with them, he said: “I mean, the algorithm’s boss, isn’t it? But I think for me as an editor, we have the duties of the traditional news editor, but one thing we have to really be able to master is the algorithm, and that dictates what we do.
“And sometimes it means that the best pieces of content aren’t necessarily always the ones that perform and you’ve got to be able to tell journalists that and they don’t always understand. And these social platforms always preach, we want original content, and we’ll do a big feature piece with a lot of investigative work, and it won’t perform to nearly the levels of just doing kind of ‘celebrity said this on Instagram’, and that’s kind of the reality of what we’re working with here.”
He continued: “I’ve worked at Lad for nine years, and you almost develop a sixth sense and an instinct of when an algorithm changes, and then you’ve got to dig the data, and you’ve got that out, you’ve got to theorise and you have these hypotheses, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t… So we’re very much at the mercy of social platforms.
“Even though you know you’re doing good content and you’re doing the right thing, it can be kind of annoying that you can’t do anything about it, almost.”
Smith said user-generated content from creators and everyday people is key, describing Ladbible as “almost like You’ve Been Framed in the social era because of the bank of content we’ve got”.
He said Ladbible’s “main objective” is to identify “what’s going viral, or even better, what we can make go viral” so often sources content from social media, both via staff scrolling on their own feeds as well as with a more systemic set-up that uses data. But it also still uses traditional methods like newswires and speaking to sources.
He said: “You’re not coming to Ladbible for your US affairs but might be coming for a 20-second clip of Donald Trump, and that’s the kind of thing we’re looking for in the morning.”
Smith added that “people-led” content creates high-performing videos for Ladbible: “I think it kind of validates the story. In a world of fake news if you can see the person who the story’s centred on, you’re more likely to read that.”
McKay at Joe similarly spoke about the importance of authenticity: “At Joe there’s an expectation with our politics content that we will handle that in a particular way.”
He named Joe’s politics team Ava Evans, Ed Campbell and Oli Dugmore. McKay said: “At Joe, there’s an expectation with our politics content that we will handle that in a particular kind of way… we have these names and these faces that people respect them.
“So it’s how you build that authentic relationship with an audience, but then how you leverage that relationship across all of these different platforms and through these different mediums, like newsletters, like podcasts, like long-form video, articles.”
‘Now or never’ on social video for Metro
DMG Media-owned Metro has “gone really heavy” on social media in the past 18 months, with an emphasis on social video that has seen it go from a team of one to 17, head of social video Alex Goldsmith told the event. The brand also has a commercial video arm up and running working with brands.
She said: “I think for Metro, it was really just a recognition that it was now or never, and we had to go hard in order to ensure that we were in the right place for the future, and really future-proofing our presence within social video.”
As well as its main accounts on Tiktok and Instagram, Metro has separate pages for gaming, entertainment, travel and sport. Its main Tiktok account crossed the one million follower mark in January and is now on 1.7 million while its core Instagram page is on 259,000.
Goldsmith said the rationale behind expanding into gaming is that it has “ such a massive potential in terms of reaching audience, and I think we are exploring things now beyond just news in terms of our original content”.
She said a mantra for Metro is “keeping people at the front” of everything they do, both in terms of using user-generated content and their own journalists.
“I think there’s kind of a two fold approach to it, in the sense that you can always look at the audience as creators as well. We use a lot of user-generated content because it feels most organic to what they’re used to seeing, and that’s how they consume a lot of it as well,” she said.
“But then I think in another sense, it’s also really informed how we’ve gone about building our channels. From the very start, our theory and hypothesis was even if we’re growing a bit slower to begin with, if we have our social video journalists and our talent at the front of what we do, it will always be the most engaging content and therefore the most valuable content. And we’re really seeing that pay off now.”
She cited a new Metro Explains strand being fronted by video journalist Anna Staddon, known for science and tech content, the first episode of which got more than one million views within a few days.
Goldsmith said members of the team are “the ones that are online every day, scrolling. They understand the conversation, what’s going on. So it’s natural that they’re at the front of the content as well.”
Goldsmith also spoke about the importance of saying “no” due to the risk of ruining all of Metro’s hard work with one video that underperforms.
“A lot of people have a lot of ideas, and a lot of people in the newsroom think that they know what will work on social video, but actually the algorithm is a beast, and it’s so complicated, and we are so beholden to it that we know exactly what will work and what won’t, and we have that instinct…
“There’s a lot of consistency in what we do, we package a lot of our stories in very similar ways. And even though we’re branching out now into doing a lot more repeatable formats and original content, we’re doing it slowly and in a really considered way that basically isn’t going to mess up our numbers, because we all have KPIs. They’re a thing that exists for everyone, including our team. So we have to get a certain number of followers, we have to get a certain number of views, so everything we do feeds into that.
“And generally, if we put something out that is completely wildly different, it won’t just tank that video, but it will tank everything around it. So we’re incredibly cautious about what we put out.”
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