How The Telegraph turns community into content

This issue of The Publisher Newsletter is brought to you in collaboration with journalism.co.uk, who provide industry news, coverage, job opportunities and training for media professionals.

This issue of The Publisher Newsletter is brought to you in collaboration with journalism.co.uk, who provide industry news, coverage, job opportunities and training for media professionals. The below piece is a write-up from their recent Newsrewired conference, which is held twice a year in London.

How The Telegraph turns community into content

At journalism.co.uk’s Newsrewired conference last week, The Telegraph’s community editor Candela Orobitg-Baena and lead community moderator William Whittington led a workshop on how the publisher turns its community into content.

From feeding reader sentiment to newsdesks to publishing reader-led articles, or authors responding directly to readers, bringing the audience into its journalism is an important part of demonstrating subscription value and making the readers feel heard.

The Telegraph uses its community content for feature-length interviews, Q&As with experts and informational pieces as well as live blogs and highlights.

In their workshop, Orobitg-Baena and Whittington set out the main ways they turn community into content, and outlined a framework for publishers who are looking to do the same.

Online comments section

For The Telegraph, the comments section on articles is the main place where readers come to share their contributions. Only subscribers can comment, and comments can be ‘liked’ but not disliked, which gives an indication of sentiment without the negativity.

"We have an online comment section in most of our online articles, so there’s a huge supply of comments and thoughts and opinions that we use daily," Orobitg-Baena explained.

"This is where our readers share their opinions - they’re very opinionated - their thoughts, and also their experiences, which are some of the most valuable because they might turn into a case study for a follow-up piece."

Whittington shared an example of how an article from etiquette expert William Hanson about The 16 telltale signs you’re more common than you think generated over 5,000 comments. Some of these were extremely detailed, including family history and standards that had been passed down.

"Due to the extraordinary amount of comments, and also the detail that some readers went into, we ended up producing a read around that piece where we listed some of the best comments that weighed in on the telltale signs and showed how split our readers were and how much of a debate they were having in the comments section," Whittington said. "It’s a great example of an easy win because this is content and comments that are already freely available on your site."

By continuing the cycle and highlighting the best contributions, the team were able to garner a further 800 comments on follow-up pieces. Some even suggested that the expert should contribute a weekly article, which has been fed back to the news desk.

Comments are not just restricted to the bottom of articles. The community team uses relevant contributions in other places on the website, from 'Telegraph readers react' sections in live blogs to 'Have your say' carousels.

Polls and voting tools

Quickfire questions, often with simple yes/no choices, are another tool The Telegraph uses to gauge reader sentiment quickly. The benefit of polls and quizzes is that they can be used to get an overall picture of opinions without someone needing to type a comment or write an email. Votes are restricted to one per logged-in user.

"These tend to perform really well in terms of engagement figures because it’s easy for a reader to just click an up or down button, or answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No’," said Orobitg-Baena. "That’s useful for us because it’s quick and we’re trying to follow a quick news agenda."

During the Conservative leadership election, the team used polls to ask readers who they thought should be the next Tory leader. A poll between the final two candidates, Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick, generated over 150,000 votes, with Badenoch leading on 69 per cent. Journalists used this and some reader comments to create articles on who The Telegraph readers thought should be the next leader.

"This gathered a further 1,365 comments," Orobitg-Baena shared, "It fitted really well with the news agenda of the day, and it got the readers at the front of our journalism, which is what the community team do every day."

Submission forms

In some cases, The Telegraph team embeds forms in articles to allow them to glean more personal or detailed reader submissions that audiences otherwise might not feel comfortable sharing in a public comment section. This can also be a useful tool when journalists are looking for more niche case studies.

In the run-up to the US election, The Telegraph put a more detailed form on election-related stories asking specifically to hear from US readers who were butting heads with family or friends over voting.

"We knew we wanted to talk to US readers specifically because it’s a completely different story of people that actually live out there and are going to experience the next president," explained Orobitg-Baena.

The form asked a few simple questions like which family members or friends they had been disagreeing with, and which political issues specifically were causing tension. Call-outs for the form were also put in relevant newsletters.

The team received hundreds of responses, some of which were included in other relevant US election articles. Journalists then used these to speak to four reader pairs for a more detailed piece on what some of the political issues causing clashes in US families were.

Keeping the cycle going

The Telegraph have a mix of longer-term community content projects, and more reactive pieces. They have bi-weekly meetings to brainstorm longer-term formats, particularly involving interviews which are usually more time-consuming.

"The important thing to remember is that once you get the content and produce it, that isn’t the end of the cycle," Whittington explained.

"It can still keep going around, depending on how your community then engage with that piece of content. You might commission something for a future project, or be introduced to a contact you could then work with."

Although the number of comments is an important measure of engagement for The Telegraph, it is also taken into account alongside the amount of time someone spends on an article, which in turn has a positive impact on SEO. Orobitg-Baena said that they had seen a correlation towards engagement time being higher when there were community elements within the article.

"Every desk can see that when we create an article, or when an author goes into the comment section and replies, our readers love it," Orobitg-Baena said. "It adds value to people’s subscriptions and is a reason why they would want to pay for The Telegraph, and [senior executives] can see that we get higher engagement and positive feedback."

Orobitg-Baena and Whittington noted that community contributions do not necessarily have to come from comment sections. Publishers with engaged social media followings could use these tactics to bring audiences into the conversation.

However, they have found that there is a difference between what their core Telegraph subscribers care about, versus social media audiences, and focus their energies on the former. 

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