DNA09: News orgs must reassess why they are using social media, says Ben Hammersley

It's too early in the morning for an interview really, but he's got an appointment with the Ministry of Defence to talk about killer robots in an hour, Ben Hammersley, associate editor of Wired UK, tells Journalism.co.uk apologetically.

Hammersley, who will co-host this week's Digital News Affairs (DNA) 2009 conference, seems to have killing on the brain - when talking online apps that is.

This year, news organisations need to reassess what they are doing online and whether it fits with their business and editorial principles, he says.

"People have embraced an awful lot of stuff because it's fashionable or they feel they should (…) When you actually look at the thing, you very rapidly come to the conclusion they're not just a waste of time, they're a waste of creative resource and money," he explains.

"If you're looking for a return on investment or increasing retention, then a huge number of these social media innovations are massively destructive."

Hammersley, who describes himself as 'the slightly stroppy old man in the corner' when it comes to social media arguments, speaks from experience: he has experimented with online editorial tools and new ways of storytelling throughout his career, experiences range from multimedia political reporting to launching new blogs at the Guardian.

"It's fine for an individual blogger in their own time to experiment with this stuff, but that sort of early adopter thing, before it's placed into mainstream media, needs to be assessed very strongly and thoroughly: for return on investment, the core reason for doing it, how it's going to work out in terms of staffing, legal risk, technology; and where it fits in with the political structure of the organisation and branding," he says.

"There are many social media and online journalism innovations where we already know the answers to these questions. It's not actually a new and interesting online experiment to find out about user-generated content [for example] - we've been doing it for nearly 15 years."

News organisations should take their lead from companies who 'kill' projects when they're not working, like Google and Amazon, he adds.

These projects are applications, not the equivalent of new radio stations, magazines or TV channels, and as such have different methods of development and deployment - not understood by news organisations.

"The metrics are much more important and so you need to have a whole series of iterative testing and actual data-based research and development, which you just don't just get with old school media. The people who look at it from that point of view just don't get it. It's not their fault - they're not software developers or software business people," he says.

"The key metric that people should be looking at is not which companies launch new stuff the fastest - the key metric is which online companies kill the rubbish stuff the fastest."

Such applications are a part of 'magical thinking' from news groups that 'the internet will save us, but we're not really sure how', says Hammersley.

Traditionally print media has been good at shutting down loss-making or ineffective projects - the same thinking needs to be applied online:

"What you get in the UK is an awful lot of post-facto justification of things. Comments underneath stories in the vast majority of cases are an utter unmitigated disaster, both financially and culturally. But at the same time they're shutting down their investigative journalism teams or cutting down the number of pages," he says.

In a recession this assessment of how a news group uses its online and social media tools, and the content that these bring in, is brought into even sharper focus by scarce financial and creative resources, he says.

Media can either aggregate cheap and plentiful content to draw in a mass audience or opt for high quality content, which pulls in fewer but more valuable people for advertisers, says Hammersley.

Wired, which launches in the UK next month, will opt for the latter. With at least five 8,000-word articles in each monthly issue, the Conde Nast title will bring a new kind of long-form, literary journalism to the UK strongly influenced by the US’ Vanity Fair, Esquire and New Yorker style, he adds.

"Everything in the middle [between aggregation and high quality] will die away and you're going to see that in every industry, which is why we're launching a big glossy magazine in the middle of a recession," he says.

The current economic and industry climate isn't something to be scared of: periods of recession breed innovation, says Hammersley, who is confident that advertisers will be attracted to the high quality content and design of his magazine.

"It's a difficult time to be launching a bad magazine and there's the difference. But even in a downturn there are advertisers and people still want to advertise in this space," he insists.

"Given the opportunity to choose between magazines, they are going to go with the one that’s the best with the best readers.

In his mission to be the best, Hammersley - who is planning features for December's issue already - and his team will subject all copy to a rigorous editing process.

"From all of our feature writers we require multiple drafts and there's an awful lot of rewriting. When the rewriting has happened we fact check every sentence. We call people back and check their quotes. We ask for citations for everything," he says.

"This is very standard practice in magazine journalism in America. In the UK it's much more rare, but this is how we're starting.

"Will we hit this sort of standard all the time in every issue? I hope so, maybe not, but this is what we're aiming at."

Articles will cover 'innovation in every field', but the magazine is categorically not a technology title, stresses Hammersley - the words geek and gadget have been banned from the Wired UK office.

Investigations, international coverage combined with a new journalistic style - Hammersley is keen to break the UK magazine mould with this launch.

Attracted to the project by a long-standard admiration of the US edition, the chance to 'apply proper craftsmanship and old-fashioned hard work' to a magazine has been particularly satisfying for the online pioneer.

But innovations don't just happen online - a point Hammersley is keen to prove with Wired UK: "Personally, I aim to cause trouble with this magazine."

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