With the unprecedented success of Buzzfeed and its ilk, it’s no surprise that more and more websites are trying to emulate its model; serious, hard-hitting news reports on one side, and “viral” content like “listicles” and cat videos on the other.
Mashable, with its 40 million unique visitors a month and large audience base in the 18-44 age range, is one of several websites that attempts to do both and do it well. Unlike a lot of its competition, however, it is profitable, and has been almost since inception.
Jim Roberts, executive editor and chief content officer at Mashable, sat down with media reporter James Bradshaw (The Globe & Mail) Monday night to talk about his transition from the New York Times to Mashable, how his company does “viral” and its best practices in how it deals with content.
Roberts first found out about Mashable about four years ago, not by Google search but by people he was following on Twitter. This is an important distinction to make — Mashable sees its website as only one way of distributing articles. More than anything, Mashable relies on its audience to act as a distributor, and that’s why every article has a big green number at the top of every article that shows how many shares it’s received.
The whole idea of “viral” was the most discussed topic of the night — Roberts’ definition of what makes something viral is getting in the neighbourhood of 10,000 shares or higher. When Bradshaw asked Roberts to reconcile articles like “Innovative pit bull puppy conquers fear of doorways butt-first” with more serious, in-depth reporting, and Roberts said that those two types of content don’t have to be polar opposites.
Roberts gave the example of an Oct. 24 piece called “Eyewitness to hell,” which examined Liberia’s struggle with Ebola through the lens of a camera. Powerful photography can go just as “viral” as a video of a puppy navigating doorways butt-first.
Mashable, Roberts says, strives to tell a story in the best medium possible. Surprisingly, his 55 young “content creators” — mostly in New York City but also in Los Angeles, Australia, Canada and even Croatia — prefer writing to other means, and Roberts continually explains that it’s only one way to tell a story: tweets, Instagram images, videos and more are all other ways to convey information. For example, during the recent U.S. midterm elections, Mashable came up with the innovative Lego Senate to illustrate the results in real time.
In searching out stories, Mashable employs what Roberts calls the “real-time news desk.” Though it sounds like a redundancy, it involves scouring not just what the major networks are reporting, but also what’s being talked about on Twitter. When the Ukraine crisis began unfolding, Roberts said, Mashable found a lot clearer of a picture of what was happening via tweets than CNN or the BBC’s coverage. To ensure accuracy of social media reports, Mashable uses services like Storyful and gets alerts via Dataminr and more.
As well, Roberts says, Mashable has “content creators” covering niche beats. One writer, for example, focuses on gender equality, while another focuses on climate change. But their job is far beyond just writing out stories — they’re keeping Mashable’s many Twitter feeds running and scouring the Internet for new ideas.
Roberts sees Mashable continuing to grow in the future, and he’d like to see its growth including more in-depth reporting. As foreign bureaus become harder and harder to maintain, perhaps Mashable — cat videos and all — may help to fill that hole.
