Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 20 - Part 3: Being a trusted source of information amongst all the noise
75 Plays2 years ago
In part three of episode 20, we're discussing being a trusted source of information amongst all the noise.
Nigel Lewis joins us for episode 20 discussing everything content and how you can better engage your audience.
Nigel is Head of Content at The Negotiator, an industry magazine focused on the estate agency sector. The Negotiator provides a daily newsletter and a monthly magazine.
Nigel writes for a number of other outlets as a freelancer and has an extensive career in creating newsworthy content.
In part 3 we look at the:
📺 Impact of social media on journalism
🔍 Blurring lines between truth and fake news
🧩 Fragmentation of the media landscape
👋 Understanding your audience so you can engage them
⚠️ Fact-checking information before reposting
Recommended
Transcript
Transition from Print to Digital Media
00:00:00
Speaker
I suppose one other thing that I was interested in, I know we've covered a bit around what makes a good story and that ultimately comes down to how you angle it and understanding the audience, so the other aspect I suppose is
00:00:15
Speaker
Once you put something out there, how has the way in which people have engaged with news and content changed? Even recently, I know it's probably over the last few years, as you said, it's probably gone from print to digital, but what have been the general trends over 30 years and over, I suppose in the last few years?
00:00:34
Speaker
Yeah, no, no, absolutely. I think no one's going to get a prize for guessing what I say next, but which is that social media is making huge impacts on the jobs of people like me because it's changing how people consume news.
00:00:50
Speaker
I think we're coming out of the woods at the moment, so certainly for the last two, three, four years, particularly around what was going on in America and Facebook and Twitter and what's truth and what's fake news and all this sort of thing. I get annoyed by the fake news thing because there's no such thing as fake news. There are stories and there's different angles you take on it.
00:01:13
Speaker
And a person at one extreme might call a story at the other extreme fake news, but it's essentially the same story, just reinterpreted differently.
00:01:22
Speaker
But the certainly social, I think what people are learning or I get the feeling they're learning from social media is that although no one likes journalists, it's funny, isn't it? No one likes politicians, journalists and state agents. But in fact, we all need them. We all need the state agents to sell our homes. And everyone's very nice about state agents when they do a good job and sell their homes. Everyone slags off journalists until they're in a position where they need someone to be there.
00:01:50
Speaker
advocates in a competitive world where they feel they've been wronged. And equally, everyone slags off politicians, but if you watch, you know, committee meetings of what quite a lot of MPs do daily, it's just unbelievable what they do for us, and that all they do is get slagged off for it.
00:02:07
Speaker
However, but the interesting thing is that with news is that I think people are starting to realize that what they see on social media isn't necessarily had a robust filtering process before it was put out.
Social Media's Influence on News Narratives
00:02:20
Speaker
And that's fine when it's sort of teddy bears being chucked off cliffs or people swallowing ice cubes for a bet or whatever. That's fine.
00:02:28
Speaker
But when it comes to really talking about serious subjects like housing or whatever, then it is therefore a good idea to pay someone who has got a skill set to look at the facts and work out what's real and what's not and then present the story based around some solid
00:02:48
Speaker
factual data which they have checked first because so I think there was a period when a lot of people said that blogging and vlogging and Twitter and TikTok and what have you Snapchat would all eclipse organizations like the negotiator
00:03:07
Speaker
overnight. It has definitely undermined some of our leadership. There's no question about that. Some agents only watch the Facebook pages now. That's fine. They're just competing with us. With the same type of topic area, that's fine. But there's no one really filtering what's being said and going. And this is the big thing about Facebook, around Facebook, is who at Facebook is working out what's rubbish and what's not. There's no one.
00:03:34
Speaker
certainly isn't a twist in our books, or X, sorry, that it's been taken over by Elon Musk. So that's really, I mean, I'm not complaining, I'm just saying that's an interesting debate, because you've got to say, who is the arbiter of fact in our society? And do you say that's journalists or do you say that's bloggers? Has that blogger had any sort of training? Do they have any idea what
00:03:59
Speaker
I remember talking to a blogger and she was very good, big numbers on her platform and stuff, and she wrote a lot of stuff, including occasionally housing. But she'd never had any sort of legal training on what constitutes libel or defamation. And I got stuck in that, and I'd been sort of attacked.
00:04:25
Speaker
So it was a funny time because she didn't realise that you could end up in the court and that you could end up and have a lot of money. Damages could be claimed against.
Generational Differences in News Consumption
00:04:39
Speaker
She just didn't know that because she started in the back room of her bedroom and it had gone up from there. And she did a very good job of doing some stuff about housing but she didn't have that
00:04:52
Speaker
just basic training. I'm not saying I'm particularly good at that, but at least I have the basics there to stop me getting sued, touch wood so far. So there you go. Does that help with that training help with becoming seen as a trusted new source? And how important is that these days? Do people know how to differentiate quite well between what sort of
00:05:17
Speaker
that unfiltered news on Facebook and what's a good piece? No, this is it. There's this whole generation coming up now who have been brought up, who are probably in the mid-20s now, who have brought up since they were late teens on not such well-arbitred news sources. And that's the problem. So I think older people know, they look at Twitter and go, it's just a load of rubbish.
00:05:42
Speaker
But there are younger people who probably look at Twitter and go, yeah, that appeals to my prejudices. I think that's true, even though it's basically not. So we have a problem, Houston, going forward. But it'll be thrashed out somehow. But amazingly, print magazines are still going just. So there is a place for them. I think it's just everything's fragmented. What used to be, you know, BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5.
00:06:12
Speaker
prints national newspapers, magazines, specialist magazines, and that was it. Now it's just fragmented into a million podcasts and a million blogs
Impact of New Media Formats
00:06:22
Speaker
and a million video blogs. So if you're interested in the housing market, now there's probably, I don't know, at least 25 half decent
00:06:35
Speaker
Different audio and video people you can watch who have views on this and they're quite interesting. So that has changed massively and that's where I suppose that's where you know people who work in the industry haven't they have a speciality in the knowledge and they that's the reason why they shouldn't go online and start talking about it.
00:06:53
Speaker
and it's only when they start trying to do facts is when I have a problem with them. So Charlie Borman who's a very famous motorcyclist and what have you and like you know he's yeah if you look at his twitter thing he's great because he has just amazing views on the latest motorbikes he does extraordinary trips around the world with or without his famous friend and but occasionally he gets involved in sort of disseminating facts and he goes wrong and he has to sort of
00:07:21
Speaker
He gets lots of people going, Charlie, that's not the case. Because he's not the sort of person, he hasn't got time, and I don't blame him either. He hasn't got the time to go and check if something is true or not that he's heard on a Facebook page. He will go, have you heard? The police are starting to check motorcyclists, X, Y, Z, boots or something. And then people say, well, that's not true. That was just one case. It's not nationwide. I'm not having to get into Charlie Baldwin.
00:07:50
Speaker
that sort of thing where celebrities get into the land of disseminating information, which I understand why they want to do that because it positions them as a source of information for their audience. But it's when those facts aren't necessarily checked before they're put out. And they can be not very harmful facts, but they can also, they can be harmful sometimes.
Challenges of Fact-Checking and Misinformation
00:08:14
Speaker
So that's really interesting. And if you look at the
00:08:18
Speaker
more and more. I remember like years ago the Advertising Standards Authority started sending out digital summaries for journalists prior to their
00:08:27
Speaker
before their decisions were sent out. And that's something that always done. But when I first started, you get the odd estate agent or the odd conveyance because their ads weren't very accurate. But now it's all social media influences who are being reported to the ASA, advertising standards authority, for being accurate or making claims which can't be substantiated or which are misleading.
00:08:51
Speaker
which is what the ASA is there to try and stop. And that's really interesting because it's clearly more and more, it's the digital where this is happening, not the company blogs. That's interesting. I suppose it's probably driven more and more by that need to try and compete more, you know, to stand out and so everyone gets a little bit more outrageous and can't get out of the van. Yeah. And I mean, going on a bit about fat checking, I know I saw a video
00:09:19
Speaker
recently where it was going on about McDonald's and how they use certain chemicals on their potatoes that, you know, then the farmers can't go in the fields and then you fact check it and you go actually, okay, it might have been the case, but it was 2009. Yeah, actually, that's no longer a thing. But it says, yes, it's hard to, but it's hard to go through every single thing you read and fact check everything.
00:09:40
Speaker
So that's why it's good to have those trusted sources. Yeah, yeah, because I mean, I mean, I mean, the Americans think we're really sloppy, because in America, all print media have, as well as some editors, they have fact checkers.
00:09:52
Speaker
and online media as well. They'd have fact checkers. And they would never, you know, the Washington Post would never think of ever sending a story out unless all of the facts mentioned by the journalists had been cross-checked prior to publication. It doesn't happen here. I mean, it was when I worked in national newspapers, it was assumed that my journalism was at a level at which the, I had checked the sources. They just assumed that. But they was never checked whether I had checked the sources or not. It was just that you would, if you were found to have made the,
00:10:22
Speaker
more than a couple of bloopers, like a famous Prime Minister who works in media before joining politics, you know, was famous, he got the sack eventually, because, because he, because he certainly got in trouble with editors, because he didn't do that. But so there's more latitude in the UK, whereas in America, he wouldn't have got away with that, because the fact checkers would have said, so this claim you're making about Liverpool is, can you just send us what, what's that based on, you know, type of thing?
00:10:49
Speaker
So he would have, so it's just, we're just, but we're still more of a gatekeeper than a blogger who's never had any sort of journalistic training. But there is such a thing as journalistic training in 10 years time, I don't know. A lot of people, I don't have it. Yeah, it'll be a space to watch actually. I think my final question, we're tying a couple of things you mentioned about together is,
00:11:19
Speaker
So we've got all these different, I suppose, sources now in terms of, you know, you've got bloggers, actual news sources, people sharing their own opinions online, whatever it might be. And then you've got generational changes. So people that know how to sense check whether something might be reasonable in terms of what's been posted online and those that only get news online, in terms of like younger generations. How do you then go about knowing or learning your audience to understand what message to put out and what angles to take generally when
00:11:50
Speaker
things are changing so much?
Crafting Stories for Target Audiences
00:11:52
Speaker
Yes. So if you take me as an example, when I first started working as a property editor straight reporter in national media, consumer media, I'll be honest with you, I didn't really understand the state agents or how they worked. But my training kicked in. So I knew what a good bad story was. And
00:12:13
Speaker
you had to start making contacts and getting to know people. But certainly, you know, I subsequently worked at Zoopla, worked at Primulcations, I've spent 22 years now sort of mingling in the property industry at various levels, exhibitions and conferences and what have you.
00:12:33
Speaker
So you get to know what they are interested in. I'm much more in awe of consumer journalists, I suppose, because they don't have that specialism. They just have to know what makes a good story because they have to understand general human psychology.
00:12:54
Speaker
Whereas that does have a, as we said earlier, that does have a role to play in when you're reporting on something specialist like the property industry. But you also have to understand what in particular gets agents going over a point. Yeah, interesting. I suppose that's probably where the
00:13:12
Speaker
negotiate your awards are quite helpful because you're actually getting to see everyone in person. Yeah, absolutely. And also they've had a couple of drinks, so their lips are usually looser than they might be on the phone on a Monday morning. No, I'm joking. But yeah, those sort of gatherings are essential. You've got to meet the people in the flesh and press the flesh and get to know them, both from a context point of view, but also from understanding the psyche of people in this industry.
00:13:41
Speaker
Yeah, that's really a point. And actually by doing that, you then get to understand your audience better and then also put the right stuff out.
Subscription Information for The Negotiator
00:13:48
Speaker
Thanks for coming on today, Nigel, and sharing your thoughts. Interesting as always. It looks great to chat. Thank you very much. If anyone wants to sign up to the Negotiator and follow the news you put out day to day, how do they sign up? So it is very simple. Negotiator.co.uk.
00:14:11
Speaker
So you can see the full bandwidth of the activity that we've been talking about there. I hope they enjoy it. Awesome. Lovely. Thanks for coming on. No worries. Cheers.