What I’ve been reading: Journalists as TikTokers, re-thinking live news strategy for SEO and pop-up newsrooms

I’m on a period of leave at the moment, one of the benefits of this is having some time to read around and there’s interesting links below that I’ve stumbled upon. If you’re in the digital media, digital journalism, social media, digital comms space then I hope these are a good reading list. I’ll try and post these as frequently as I get chance, and if you find them useful let me know. And if you spot something I should include, or you’ve written something that you think should be shared then drop it over. I’m on edward_walker86 AT hotmail.co.uk

You can also receive this digest of interesting links by signing up to my email newsletter – just tap here to subscribe and I’ll pop it in your inbox each time I publish.

Journalists can be TikTokers too. Three journalists explain how to use the platform for news – Nieman Lab – there’s real depth and insight in this piece where Sophia Smith Galer lifts the lid on how she as a journalist are crossing over into being TikTokers too. Let’s be honest, a lot of journalists have always been personalities and influencers too (whether that nationally, in their local area or within the niche/sector/beat that they cover). So we shouldn’t be surprised that journalists translate well onto TikTok but the tips from Smith Galer in here on how to actually build a following and an engaged audience on the platform. The chart showing the how news is appearing on TikTok – which is below – was really interesting to see where news brands/publishers/broadcasters are on the platform is a good snapshot view of the current state of play.

The force of personality – not just on TikTok but elsewhere – will likely become even more of a flashpoint as an increasing amount of the views, audience performance, and therefore monetisation, will rest with individual journalists as opposed to news brands themselves.

I think the key, as with any platform, is to decide what you want to be on there – and then go and experiment and play with it.

Publishers reckon with declining Facebook referral traffic as the platform pulls away from news – Digiday – if you were in any doubt about the step-back in referrals that’s happening from Facebook then the graph in this piece from Digiday gives a very stark illustration. Those who have been experimenting with new platforms, and revisiting perhaps older, more established sources of audience, will likely be those who emerge in a better position as the months ahead unfold. As people increasingly use Facebook less as a news source, the opportunity for new or refreshed aggregators to fill this gap offers new chances for a wider mix of audience sources for newsrooms to hook into. The challenge, each platform tends to want a slightly different content mix and the technical vagaries of how it’s delivered – making efficient distribution harder to achieve.

Why Articles Should Be Optimised Before Publishing – Barry Adams – this is a fascinating read from Barry where he drills into what he thinks are three different ways that Google crawls articles (and the priority order) and particularly the impact this has on a breaking news environment. He argues that rather than rush out a ‘breaking article’ with very little information in it, arriving slightly late to the party but with a stronger article with more depth than a breaker is likely to see much stronger performance (for search anyway) in terms of maintaining its place in top stories for longer. The challenge here is that being first in theory should be rewarded (and Google’s made noises about recognising the original source of a story) and is a journalistic gut instinct. Barry’s argument is to utilise live coverage (live blogs) to ensure being first/quick but holding off on the actual story until you have a bit more depth. It also reinforces something I can remember from being a trainee reporter – we once had a training session called ‘right first time’ which was actually about preventing legal errors but in reality would be just as important for SEO. Getting the headline, captions, summary text, headings, spelling etc all absolutely spot on means you’re putting the best possible article in front of Google for its first crawl. Making constant tweaks isn’t going to help if Barry’s theory on the priority of when articles are indexed in their life cycle is correct. Barry’s piece would certainly make me think about a live news strategy differently.

How the UK’s dying high streets are being given new life by pop-up shops and galleries – The Observer – off the back of Wilko shutting down this piece isn’t to do with journalism, digital etc but there are some parallels. It’s interesting how many digital brands are running ‘real world’ pop-ups as a way of cementing their brand. There was a trend, a few years back, of pop-up newsrooms to get journalists out into communities or new patches or re-connect with established ones. Is it time to re-explore the pop-up newsroom in these times when a fixed cost office is becoming increasingly hard to justify?

Six ways the BBC’s local digital transformation could help the broader local news eco-system – Ed Walker – a plug for a piece I published earlier this week on the BBC’s local changes which are taking place across radio and digital at the moment. Covers ways I think the increased digital output and focus from the BBC can be used to see all boats rise particularly in the local news environment.

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What I’ve been reading: young people and their attitudes to news subscriptions, Meta’s news hand grenade and bangin’ email newsletter strategies

I’m on a period of leave at the moment, one of the benefits of this is having some time to read around and there’s interesting links below that I’ve stumbled upon. If you’re in the digital media, digital journalism, social media, digital comms space then I hope these are a good reading list. I’ll try and post these as frequently as I get chance, and if you find them useful let me know. And if you spot something I should include, or you’ve written something that you think should be shared then drop it over. I’m on edward_walker86 AT hotmail.co.uk

You can also receive this digest of interesting links by signing up to my email newsletter – just tap here to subscribe and I’ll pop it in your inbox each time I publish.

Why news subscriptions feel like a burden to young people – The Audiencers – As subscription strategies become more complex for news, this study highlighted by the excellent Audiencers drilled in-depth into young people’s attitudes to digital news subscriptions. The study was conducted in Norway and with people aged 26-30 (I will let you all argue about whether that is genuinely young!). One of the key standout lines was this – “news content should not appear too exclusive, in the sense of narrow. Stories only covered on one news site, typically in a local or regional one, were valued as less important or even unnecessary by the informants: they felt less obligated to read about it and refrained from paying.” – fascinating given how in the UK anyway we seem to be seeing some strong examples of hyperlocal sites generating revenue from subscription models like Substack. The research also highlighted that when a story that was more issue-based/topic-based and the individual had an overwhelming interest in that topic the propensity to pay became much stronger. I guess, if you think back to magazine subscriptions, this shouldn’t be a surprise and again supports media organisations making more of ‘topic-themed bundles’ as a way of making their content attractive to subscribers. They won’t subscribe to the brand, as generally they don’t care, but they will subscribe by topic/content.

Journalist quits Meta job after Edinburgh-focused Substack takes off – Press Gazette – I referenced above about Substack and people paying for localness, and also featured Michael’s move last week, there’s more depth in this piece from Charlotte on Press Gazette about his decision, thought process, product and also background (the why) too. The numbers are interesting, essentially for a strong, curated, product then it’s bringing in just shy of £20,000-a-year. That’s without additional sponsorship/advertising or other commercial activities. A great return and shows the value in having a hyper-focused idea and sticking at it too – fair play to Michael!

An Update on Facebook News in Europe – Meta – Well the only silver lining to be found is they aren’t throttling news in the UK in the same way Canada is currently experiencing. There’s been a lot of reaction to the decision – which isn’t unexpected but is disappointing. The drift between the news industry and Meta has been widely discussed for a long period and now we are starting to see the kind of black and white decisions which are being made by the tech platform following the words and indications. There will still audience, engagement and reach to be had from such a large platform – which is still widely used and despite what it says is a source and active discussion platform for news – but diversification of audience and revenue streams if it wasn’t before becomes absolutely crucial.

I found a notebook full of notes from my earliest BuzzFeed days – Dan Oshinsky – now an email consultant, Dan literally opens the lid on his 2012 email strategy for Buzzfeed. As with many things, the truisms remain true for having a successful email strategy. It’s a good reminder that you don’t always need to reinvent the wheel and sometimes the answers are hiding in plain sight. I might just revisit some old notebooks!

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What I’ve been reading: Life without Tweetdeck, the Public Interest News Foundation’s Local News Map reaction and the future of Google

I’m on a period of leave at the moment, one of the benefits of this is having some time to read around and there’s interesting links below that I’ve stumbled upon. If you’re in the digital media, digital journalism, social media, digital comms space then I hope these are a good reading list. I’ll try and post these as frequently as I get chance, and if you find them useful let me know. And if you spot something I should include, or you’ve written something that you think should be shared then drop it over. I’m on edward_walker86 AT hotmail.co.uk

TweetDeck is officially becoming a paid service – The Verge. Farewell to Tweetdeck. A mainstay of any journalist’s toolkit, Tweetdeck (which began as a start-up and was then bought by Twitter) has become a paid-for part of X as it continues the Musk era. A really powerful search and monitoring tool, not just for journalists but all manor of industries that either had a digital presence or were producing digital content. Your choice is either to cough up the monthly fee, use the free X platform but save things like searches/lists as tabs to move quickly between them, and this TechCrunch piece sheds light on how difficult to replicate Tweetdeck it is. And how the closest similar tool, HootSuite, comes with a hefty monthly price tag that suddenly makes paying for XPro seem well worth it.

Reflections on the Local News Map, and next steps – Joe Mitchell, Public Interest News Foundation. There’s been plenty of reaction to the map, with many pointing fingers at missing publications, odd definitions etc. The basis behind the map is sound, trying to get a feel for where there isn’t the intensity of news coverage in the UK. I feel there’s definitely a missing piece around trying to score the ‘newsiness’ of an area. Journalists have that in-built knowledge around which places they just know if they source a story about then it will perform better and get people talking – because those places have strong news and digital eco-systems. This probably warrants a longer post from me but it feels like for a local authority area it’s not as simple as saying ‘x publication covers y’, are there active Facebook groups? Twitter accounts? What is the story count for major towns within those local authority areas? Are there Local Democracy Reporters? What’s the population? You could then find places with a strong potential news eco-system which are not being covered as regularly (and this becomes a starting point for helping encourage more publication in these geographies), and likewise places which don’t have the news eco-system as mature so the starting point there becomes in encouraging things like distribution channels which then encourages more news provision because there’s a distribution network digitally. The first review step is a good one, opening up the map to allow people to submit missing publications. I’ll be putting in a few I know of.

Fortune’s Chief Customer Officer: Targeting reach failed to deliver revenue for publishers – Pugpig – there’s some really interesting insight pieces from Pugpig at the moment digging into the strategies behind publishers. There’s some good stuff in here about workflows, ensuring any strategy around content is user-focused rather than content-focused and much more.

Facebook and Instagram start blocking news in Canada – The Verge – across the Atlantic and there’s a war going on between Canadian media, the tech giants and the Canadian government. The thorny issue of the tech giants needing to pay, make a contribution, however you want to call it for the use of content on their platforms has reached boiling point in Canada. It’s pretty scary that important news about locations, and wider, is not being served up on one of the most-used digital platforms in the country – see this Guardian piece about the impact the news sharing ban is having in the North West of the country which is experiencing intense wildfires. While people who are conscious consumers will then probably seek out a news platform directly – potentially seeing a boost in direct and engaged audiences for some publishers – many people are passive consumers of news. And it is those people who will be most affected – and lost to publishers – by this kind of action by Meta. And Google is due to follow suit. A worrying test case?

Seven sources of free images for journalists – Journalism.co.uk – so often you’re writing a story about something which doesn’t relate to a specific person or organisation, limiting the images you can use. Hence the stock picture. Taking that bit of time to find a picture that’s different or more unique, or matches the content, will make it perform so much better regardless of platform. This is a genuinely handy list from Jacob Granger and features some well-known and not-so-well-known picture site options.

Google changed the world but search is on for the next big hit – Tom Whipple, The Times – I read this is print over the weekend, was the Weekend Essay in The Times. Reads as a ‘what’s next for Google?’ and struck me just how geared to hyper-serving their users the platform is, and it’s important to remember that is what is behind many of the decisions, products and changes that are made. But if we do see legislation or competition, then will there become a broader set of search-engines which are more topic/industry focused than one to rule them all?

Want more links to read? Here’s the last round-up I did.

Lessons learned from editing below the line

I really quite like comments on news stories and on Facebook too. We live in a world filled with trolls, haters and the like. Yes there are some despicable people out there who see using the Internet to sound off with vile comments directed at individuals as having no consequence – see the Malicious Communications Act for how those people are clearly on the wrong side of the law.

But online comments can regularly be an indicator of the strength of feeling about a local issue, raise a smile at a witty quip or reveal there is more to an issue than previously thought.

One of the things I wanted to do at getreading was increase the number of comments we were seeing on news stories. To me this shows our readers care about what we are producing and getting a chance to have their say. I am pleased to say since January the number of comments has seen a strong increases both on the site and on Facebook and Twitter.

How did we do this and what are the lessons from skirmishing below the line?

Asking a question generally gets a response. It’s like when you ask a question in a text message, the person on the other end feels more compelled to reply. We try where possible to ask at the end of a story what people think, but not in a bland catch all way. These have to be bespoke to each article as each topic demands a nuance to seeing what line is going to trigger that debate. The same with Facebook status, adding the question mark seems like a trigger a greater response. But don’t do it with everything or your readers will think an Australian has taken over their news feed.

Haters gonna hate. When the newspaper associated with the website has recently closed there are going to be people unhappy about this. Unhappy about story choices and all sorts of things. Reply to the ones which are well thought out and demanding of a debate. Ignoring others for the hate-filled rants that they are sends its own message.

Questions. If your audience ask questions of your journalism, take the time to respond. How did you…. Why did you… These kind of queries I reply to regularly.

Use the comments. When we get a lot of comments about an issue we publish them. We’ve taken the listicle format and applied X things you said about (insert issue) to see a really encouraging response. People like seeing their comments featured and other readers like us plucking out a selection so they don’t have to wade through a 132 comment long thread.

Could a commenter be your next blogger? We had someone who was a keen letter writer and commented about certain issues regularly. After he emailed a complaint about the lack of a letters page we asked him what topic he wanted to write about. A guest article about whether Wokingham’s road network needs to look to Europe for inspiration…

Go where the debate is. There’s a strong local forum in Reading which is well moderated and has a committed and passionate group of users. I try to keep an eye on debates here and like many local media outlets we see our stories used as the catalyst for discussions. Sometimes there are queries about our stories or our journalism is called into question. I regularly respond to these. Not ashamed to admit we often pick up story tips through here too.

Beware the screengrab. I often think about how would this response look if I screengrabbed it and presented it out of context. You will be surprised what you decide to say with this in your thoughts. Asking a reader to email or call you to discuss something can regularly defuse a situation.

Shouldn’t you have someone to do this for you? I won’t name who asked me this but there was an implication I should be too busy (in meetings?) to be responding to comments. As publisher of a local news website to not be sleeves rolled up and responding to the people who read the content me and the team work tirelessly to produce would feel like letting them down. If someone cares enough to comment even if I can just take a second to thumbs up them on a Facebook comment or up vote them in the comments lets them know we are listening.

And isn’t that one of the most important things local media should be doing, listening?

The return of the evening publication?

I was recently looking through the Blog Preston stats – the hyperlocal site I run in the North of England – and noticed something.

Everything we posted of an evening tended to do a bit better. Looking then through Facebook, there was a trend. Evenings, anytime at weekends + Facebook equalled our best performing stories.

We had a directors meeting on Sunday and we are giving something a try, based around this premise…

If our audience according to social media analytics tools is most active in the evening and weekends why publish our content during the day?

If the bulk of your audience is coming to you via social media and search, with very little direct traffic to the site, why not model your behaviour around them?

Notes and thoughts from #tal13: Keeping the hyperlocal mojo, hyperlocal social media usage and loving where you live

So I braved the Travelodge in Middlesbrough (once again) for the latest round of debate with hyperlocal site owners and local community sites at the Talk About Local event #tal13.

The day ranged from trying to rediscover your blogging mojo, to best tips for using Facebook and Twitter, how traditional media can work with hyperlocal sites and finally what does the growing usage of mobile internet and mobile consumption mean for hyperlocal sites?

Held in the impressive surroundings of MIMA, the beauty of unconferences (you pitch sessions and stick them on a big board which the organisers then shuffle about so inevitably all the ones you want to see happen at the same time 😉 is the range of speakers/sessions is always so varied.

143 new likes: How being consistent helped a hyperlocal news site to finally get Facebook

At the start of March, partly inspired by my boss David Higgerson’s post about doing Facebook right, I decided to get Blog Preston’s Facebook page into shape and see what would happen if I gave it the same amount of love and attention as our Twitter feed.

Blog Preston is the hyperlocal news site I set up in 2009 to cover community news, events and much more in the city of Preston, Lancashire.

Our Facebook page had always been ticking over (on around 550 fans), powered first by a combination of RSS feed from the blog and then through a “ah, crap, I really should post this story to Facebook” strategy.

Looking at our analytics, we still get more traffic from Twitter – where we have over 5,000 followers – but Facebook is rapidly growing in the referral stakes. So at the start of March I decided to see if I followed the simple steps below to see what kind of impact it would have on the number of people liking the page and most importantly engaging, commenting and liking our Facebook status updates:

– Pictures. I would try to post more pictures with updates rather than relying on Facebook to pick a picture from a post.

– Writing the status updates. Instead of just using a combination of the headline and first paragraph I’d inject a bit of character into the updates and write them for Facebook.

– Scheduling. I’d try to think about when our audience would be using Facebook, what type of stories they’d like and at what time they’d like them. Also, I’d try to avoid swamping updates. Previously I’d often post out three or four links in quick succession when having chance to update the page.

So what happened?

You can clearly see the point when we got it right and suddenly our reach and interaction went up – but our post numbers stayed consistent.

So here’s a few highlights:

1. People love to talk about things which have opened/closed. Any post about new shops opening, new developments or the closing of shops/buildings were always doing well in terms of their likes, comments and shares.

Take this post about the closure of an independent store Orbit, the re-opening of a pub or a new block of student flats down one of Preston’s main shopping streets. I tended to post these types of stories with a strong image and ask a question along with it to try and provoke a response.

2. Introducing posts is always a good idea. Rather than posting a headline you write the status in a personal and conversational style, so looking at Facebook insights the posts with over 3% ‘virality’ i.e. people writing about, talking about or using your post as the basis for a conversation and sharing it, started like this:

“While Friargate might be bustling today for…”
“Bit of breaking Preston Bus Station news for you”
“Looks like Bernie Blackburn has been up to..”
“Brrrrrrrrr! It’s cold out there”
“Did you see this in St George’s Shopping centre?”

They tend to start off with a question, statement or something that gives the Blog Preston page some personality rather than just repeating what’s in the story.

3. Pictures, pictures, pictures. After the purchase of Instagram it’s obvious the direction Facebook is moving in and posting photos with an update are crucial to getting interaction, particularly likes, and a reaction from your fans. I started using the highlight function too as a way to really make use of some of the great photography we have from our co-editors and contributors.

4. Break news. We’d always thought of Twitter as the place to break news but actually Facebook is a much better medium. The chances of someone having their news feed open in Facebook is higher than someone seeing something in their Twitter feed. We broke the news about the escaped prisoner Brian Lynch being on the run on our page and it went viral, and we followed up by posting at after 11pm about an offer for Preston Bus Station by a local businessman being rejected by the city council – it got far more traction on Facebook than Twitter because, I’m convinced, there are more people logged onto Facebook at that time.

5. As your reach grows, so does your ability to find stories. I started trying to use the page as more of a person, so liking and commenting as the Facebook page itself. We also have an inbox functionality so anyone can send a message to the Blog Preston page. We had one reader who sent us a message about how an independent store, opened in 1972, was closing down. We were able to get a photo and find out what had happened. It’s proved to be one of our most popular posts for March and also one of the most talked about stories we’ve posted on Facebook.

6. Scheduling. Pre-writing and scheduling status updates has been our biggest weapon on Facebook. It’s fairly recent for Facebook to let you schedule updates, but it allows us to pre-write them and space out our posts. The key thing is to be prepared to rip-up your scheduled posts if something breaks – otherwise you can end up looking like a prize idiot if your future status’ don’t make sense.

7. Overall fan numbers. We started out at 550(ish) likes at the start of March and we finished on 693. Considering the Facebook page has been running for about three and a half years, to put on 143 fans in 30 days is a good achievement and one I believe is down to our consistent posting, tone of updates and making it clear we’ll provide updates which enrich your timeline and not just clog it up with guff.

So what’s next for our Facebook page? I still feel we can improve the amount of liking, commenting and sharing of other fan pages on Faceook. I’d like to try and get the page up to 1,000 likes in the next three months but most importantly it’s about sticking at it and recognising that putting the story on Facebook needs thought put into it – not just bunging a link on.

Do you run a Facebook page? Do you have a hyperlocal site? I’d be interested to hear your techniques on Facebook fan pages…

The brief: Facebook trends articles + how social media is 'taking over' the news

Not too much in today’s brief, as I’ve been up in Birmingham all day working with our the Trinity Mirror Regional teams on their video editing skills – but here’s two links which caught my eye.

Facebook trends articles in news feeds

Anyone who publishes content onto Facebook will know the importance of getting into their fans’ news feeds. Why? Well because simply this is the navigational device for Facebook and the first screen you see when logging into Facebook. A good step forward for publishers though as it looks like Facebook are bringing out trending articles which feature in news feeds – a bit like the way music will show what friends are listening to and how people discussing the same thing e.g. ‘Christmas’ will show in one place. This is a good step forward by Facebook and shows for publishers why it’s even more important to engage with Facebook than ever before, to help drive more traffic.

The brief: Facebook buys Instagram, YouTube pays for new channel + MySociety data hack day

Took a few days off over the Easter holiday weekend, so back on it today. Here’s some of the links which have been catching my eye today as the world goes crazy over Instagram, YouTube goes after the fashion market, old-school journalists get a letter from a digital guru and MySociety launch their journo hack day.

Facebook buys Instagram. But why?

A lot of chatter about Instagram, the hipster photo service, being bought by Facebook for $1 billion dollars (it’s got a slight Dr Evil from Austin Powers ring to it doesn’t it?). Instagram is a rather cool app and web service which allows you to add effects to your photos after you’ve taken them, and then share them around an ever-growing network. People who are on Instagram, love it. So I was looking for a bit of analysis behind the ONE BILLION DOLLARS headline and found this insightful blog from Pete Warden who is behind Jetpac (a website and app for sharing travel photos).

He hits the nail on the head when you look at the numbers, Facebook is essentially a photo-sharing website – with 10 billion photos added a month. Yep read that figure back again. I know from looking at interaction reports that photos shared via our brand pages on Trinity Mirror (who I work for) get much larger interaction rates, and this backs up my personal experience. If I post a photo of me with a beer looking like an idiot, I’ll get far more comments than the usual status update (unless it’s a life-changing status update e.g. I’m just getting married…)

Warden outlines some great reasons why Facebook is on the money to time their purchase, because although Instagram hasn’t ever made a penny that’s not the point. Facebook is buying functionality and a community. Of course there will be a backlash, but Zuckerberg has shown rather than sit around and wonder what might have been he’d rather live in the now.

The brief: Pinterest, hyperlocal disputes and new live blogging tool

I find myself reading loads of stuff via Twitter, blogs and more but despite trying numerous bookmarking services I figured I should start sharing them – and a few thoughts – in a regular fashion.

So I introduce, the brief, a mix of media news, hyperlocal news and other journalism news condensed into a handy guide of what I’ve been spotting that day.

Pinterest – why you no make some money

This piece on the Telegraph technology section from Julia Green focuses on whether the new social media darling, Pinterest, will actually generate some serious dollars.

If you’ve missed it, Pinterest is like browsing through one of those really fancy fashion/style magazines with loads of stuff you can’t afford plastered all over it. Green is right when he says they’ve got the ‘pinning’ bit sorted out, so you can make something look beautiful very quickly – and people like doing that. But whether it’s because he’s involved in some other tech start-ups which are a little similar, but not as slick, he doesn’t think it will pull in the revenue needed.