Earlier this week Kate Day, Social Media and Engagement Editor at the Telegraph, kindly spared the time to visit City University and talk us through a day in the life of a very busy woman…
From the start she emphasised the paramount importance of planning for effective time management.
6am: Kate’s hectic day begins with journalists’ favourite, the Today programme. Reading a range of publications, including mainstream media competitors, is crucial for spotting stories the Telegraph may have missed and gauging what content is engaging the most readers online.
9am: Kate monitors the RSS feeds she has set up and reads the papers in the office. After checking in with editor Tony Gallagher, she presents for digital in the morning meeting, talking the rest of the team through which stories are doing well where in terms of traffic. She cites aggregation tool NewsWhip as particularly useful for a quick understanding of what’s going on around the world- NewsWhip scores display how fast a story is spreading across Facebook and Twitter.
10am: She will then talk through the big stories of the day with the editor and web editor, looking at what other news sites are doing and bringing in the audience’s view. What are Telegraph readers talking about in comments? What might the sentiments of these comments reveal about the story?
10.30am: Commissioning is next on the agenda, where the team starts to kick off some of the stories they have talked about. Often these are inspired by readers’ reactions in comments and over social media.
11am: As for analytics, Kate uses Webtrends and Google Analytics, the latter of which provides a great snapshot view of page views, unique visitors, link referrals and the like. The Telegraph have recently started displaying Chartbeat on their newsroom wall, a tool that displays stories in order of where readers are, slicing the data for just three seconds at a time. Interestingly the splash is not always at number one, even though it should be, and you can see how stories are performing compared to how similar ones usually do.
12pm: There is a conference where section pages are now shown online, making everybody more accountable for their web presence. Here Kate talks about audience reactions and the editor asks why certain stories are flying while others aren’t. All journalists want to be featured in the flying list which leads to them taking more of an interest in social media tools and techniques.
2pm: After the conference, she spends some time thinking about strategy- what will the next version of an app look like and are they providing their journalists with the right tools?
4pm: Another conference follows broadly the same pattern as earlier but there is usually a big surge of activity with stories breaking in the evening. The pattern of traffic tends to spike in the morning and again in the evening somewhere between 8pm and 10pm, so it is effective to be active on Twitter around those times, as different sets of people are reached.
Kate cites her main responsibilities as building momentum behind the stories, developing loyalty digitally, helping journalists to make their work better with the help of readers, increasing web traffic, and thinking things through in advance wherever possible.
It’s easy to get lost in her field, but planning, planning, planning is the way to go.
Interactive Journalism MA student at City University London. Blogs at jessdenham.net and tweets @jess_denham.