Wannabe Hacks is the foremost community for people looking to enter the world of journalism. Especially in my pre-Interhacktive days, I found it very useful to read the community’s articles and comments on work experience and journalism courses.
George Berridge is the current social, communities and campaigns editor at Wannabe Hacks.
How do you try to get the Wannabe Hacks community involved in the site?
Wannabe Hacks was founded on the premise that it would be not just a site for articles but an active and engaged community.
Social media engagement is crucial not just in driving traffic but in making readers feel a part of a wider network of people with similar ambitions.
Of course, this is done with traffic in mind (returning visitors), but also because we genuinely care what our readers think about what we publish.
This means responding to commenters and people who engage via social media in a way that brings them into a wider community. We don’t just say ‘Nice opinion’, we encourage our writers and other readers to join in and debate. This helps our audience become one that is more likely to return.
We also host regular meetups which have been a huge success. We usually sell out tickets and it’s a great chance for readers to meet the team and the community. Making people feel like part of a wider group is important to us and it’s why we’re so keen to keep doing these. We’re also planning to hold our meetups in places other than London.
We know lots of our audience aren’t in the capital so it’s important for us to go where they are, too, and not risk excluding people from the community.
How do you deal with comments?
Comments are – largely – great on our site. Our writers actively engage with commenters and debate with them. We attempt to keep things friendly and constructive and 99% of the time our audience do the same.
We’ve never really had a problem with trolls. I think this is down to all the work we’ve put in cultivating our audience into a community of likeminded people. We get good, heated debate from time to time but it very rarely turns sour.
If comments are particularly thought provoking then we’ll always try and follow up on it in an article or else put it out on social media for the wider audience to debate.”
Who constitutes the Wannabe Hacks community? Does it mainly consist of university journalism students?
That tends to be the assumption but our site stats and social media followers tell us something different. We have people ranging from secondary school through to old hands and lecturers. Two of our new writers are sixth-form students. It’s not all journalism students – lots of people who we speak to have finished a course in something different and are looking at what to do next.
I think it really works to our advantage that we have a wide and diverse community. We’re all for the media being totally inclusive – if we can be a part of making that happen then we’ll be very pleased.
Who are Wannabe Hacks’ main rivals?
We don’t really see ourselves as having many rivals. There are sites like Press Gazette who we aim to be as big as but there’s not really much in that respect. When we were founded it was by finding a gap in the market and we’ve worked hard to cement our place as the main site for aspiring journalists.
What are your main social media / community engagement aims as a site? What are you looking to improve?
We know we’ve got room for improvement. We’ve had a tendency to neglect Facebook but we’re working on this now and have already seen a bit jump in traffic.
We’re also looking at using Google+ to host hangouts with journalists and editors. Hopefully we should see this happening early in the new year.
A big part of my role is also to look at what other platforms are available and better ways in which we can use our current platforms.
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