Genevieve Robey is the editor at Wotnews. It’s a news monitoring and aggregating service that I’ve been playing with for a while now and find that frequently it delivers the best of the professional journalism and blogging world to me in an easy-to-scan-then-click kind of way. It also has an Australian focus and the emails are well and cleanly designed. It’s definitely worth checking out.
Anyway, it’s no secret that the old school journalistic world is at a cross-roads. People don’t trust journalists like they used to – scandals, money for comment, lies, opinions masked as fact, copy and paste of press releases as ‘news’… none of it has helped their cause. But it’s also an exciting time, a time to reinvent. The internet has levelled the playing field and changed not only what’s possible but also what people want.
As a monitor and aggregator, Genevieve, in her role at Wotnews, gets to see in real-time the dynamics of this change through access to two key chunks of data:
1. What people are actively monitoring, what they care about, and
2. What content type and approaches to writing get clicked on.
In the 30 days prior to this post, Wotnews received over 475,000 unique visitors so Genevieve has a tonne of insight at her fingertips and I thought I’d ask her to share some of it with us.
1. Headlines are the great equaliser
Bloggers, industry associations and large news organisations are often on equal footing – if their headline and description are compelling and relevant.
2. Fluff don’t fly
Fluffy stories don’t get very far among quality news articles – they are still quite prominent in publications though.
3. Keywords are Superman
News providers are realising the importance of relevant keywords and less rubbish in their headlines and descriptions – this is a benefit for the reader too.
4. Go to 4th base with your readers
‘Relationships’ and ‘connections’ in the news are visible and allow people to explore further avenues related to the particular news issue.
5. Write deservingly
Publishing2 wrote a great article addressing ‘Why not writing a story is innovation‘. They refer to “innovation-by-omission” saying that news organisations “need to stop writing stories that don’t deserve to be written. …. Readers will simply go somewhere else.” So while we often talk about ‘information overload’, aggregation and analysis provides a good tool to get to the quality.
6. Make yourself easy to expose
It’s surprising how many people are still unaware of how to give their news decent exposure or even have the capacity/knowledge to get news onto their own websites. Obviously it’s fantastic to be covered by a news organisation or prominent blogger, but you shouldn’t just rely on that. You make it easier for bloggers to talk about you and link to you if you provide updates on your site.
7. Stop hiding in your PDFs
I still see so many organisations that don’t produce news in any way other than uploading a PDF media release to their site and/or emailing it out to their usual list. These PDFs are often quite cumbersome for people who want to then click through to the ‘about’ or ‘contact us’ section of the website to understand the context in which it has been written.
8. The first click is just the start
Too many organisations are still not linking to relevant information within their article. Corporates need to keep in mind that we’re driving traffic to their news and they need to:
- think about how to continue engaging with the user
- realise that webpages are not pieces of paper! (this may seem so straight forward to many, but there are still so many people who have not learnt to love the link!)
Bonus insight:
The two most monitored people are Kevin Rudd and Gail Kelly (Gail Kelly was leading Kevin Rudd until recently). The two most monitored companies are Telstra and ANZ.
/ End
Many thanks to Genevieve Robey, Editor of Wotnews, for taking the time out to talk about some of the behind-the-scenes stuff that the news aggregator plays with daily. You can find her on Twitter: @genrobey.
Got any content tips or gripes to share?
Let’s hear them!
Photo courtesy of Juliot.
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