By Denise Law, The Economist
This is the presentation slides from the News Impact Summit Prague on 14 October 2016. For more, visit http://newsimpact.io
A colleague of mine recently asked me, rather enthusiastically, whether we should start a new Twitter handle. I had to explain politely why it was a bad idea…
One of my jobs is to encourage experimentation in the newsroom and to create a culture where people aren’t afraid to try new things.
But as I’ve learned over the past year, we can’t say “yes” to everything. Throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks has it limits. Eventually, we need to prioritise the ideas that align with our broader goals; otherwise, we can expect mayhem.
I often hear the following reasons: sound familiar?
Hilariously, NONE of them focus on improving the readers’ experience or solving a reader problem.
Admittedly, that’s how we started the department. In the first three months, it was utter mayhem as you could expect with any start-up especially within a large organisation. We wanted to be everywhere and try to everything. We wanted everyone under the sun to hear about us. That meant churning more tweets across our two dozen Twitter sub accounts and piling images onto Tumblr and Pinterest. Yet this tactic came at the cost of our reputation: more volumes led to more mistakes. And you can imagine how editorial folks felt whenever they spotted a typo on a tweet.
Then, on one Saturday morning in November 2015, it happened: dozens of editorial staff piled into all-staff email chain each drawing attention to a particular typo they had seen in a tweet.
In other words, they left us hanging out to dry…
When I took over earlier this year, It forced us to get back to basics. like any journalist, I asked myself: who, what, why and how?
Who are we targeting? Intelligent, globally curious people who want a better understanding of their world
What problem do we want to solve? There’s a lack of awareness about who we are and what we offer.
Why? We want people to know that they can come to us at a time when it’s hard to find trustworthy sources
How? By offering them formats native to the platforms where they spend their time
And here’s what we came up with
Understanding what we’re trying to achieve sets the parameters within which to operate. It ensures for a start that we’re not trying to achieve scale. We want to achieve awareness among the globally curious.
That then defines everything we do on social media: from