When chasing the story pays off big time
Interesting to read that the Hearst group titles are showing “soaring” cross platform growth. This news comes via the latest Magazine Media 360 Brand Audience Report, in which The Association of Magazine Media looked at which of the 110 magazines had growth across all three online platforms — web, mobile and video — in November 2018, compared to the prior year.
Hearst was the publisher with the most brands on the list, with seven! The Hearst portfolio includes such well known titles as Elle Décor (129% growth in November 2018 compared to the year prior), Cosmopolitan (71%), Town & Country (70%), House Beautiful (56%), Harper’s Bazaar (46%), Esquire (37%) and Road & Track(33%).
The reason I am mentioning this data here is because it ties nicely with my many blog posts about the importance of doing two things:
- Following the stories, NOT the editions.
- Appointing content managers who do just that, manage stories, study the data about them, then consider how the story will be played on different platforms and at what times of day.
It seems , although I do not know this for sure , that this is how the Hearst newsrooms are operating, based on the quotes in the article below.
“Editorial intuition combined with our proprietary data tools, is leading to better, smarter creative decisions,” Brooke Siegel, vice president, content, Hearst Digital Media, told Publishers Daily.
“When our brands find a topic or story that deeply engages our audience, we chase it ambitiously and aggressively across all platforms. When we see a strategy working, we share it across all our teams. It’s a collaborative effort and it’s one that’s working,” she said.
Key words on these quotes: editorial intuition, data tools, story that deeply engages, and, most importantly, the use of the verb “chase” aggressively across all platforms.
That’s exactly what the dynamics of the modern newsroom should be all about: identifying stories that engage and chasing them across platforms, including social media promotions and push notifications.
In this new environment in a mobile first newsroom, the story is identified, then chased across platforms, and promoted. This last item is difficult for many traditional editors to understand. After all, they have always been in the business of journalism, NOT marketing.
Today those two areas are interlinked. A modern editor becomes expert at both.
Apparently, it is working for the Hearst folks:
The Hearst titles that more than doubled their video audiences from October 2017 to October 2018 included: Road & Track (1252%), Town & Country (945%), Esquire (579%), House Beautiful (216%), Car and Driver (170%) and Cosmopolitan (151%).
Read more about it here:
Hearst Titles Show Soaring Cross-Platform Growth
TheMarioBlog post # 2986