SoPublishing’s Anna Marshall reflects on Journalism.co.uk’s newsrewired 2017 event

We love being nestled away in Gloucestershire, but sometimes it’s good to head back to the Big Smoke, with Journalism.co.uk’s 2017 newsrewired digital journalism conference being the perfect excuse for SoPublishing’s deputy editor Anna Marshall to do just that.

As an innovative publishing company, we always strive to keep our fingers on the pulse with what’s happening in the world of online media, and Journalism.co.uk’s newsrewired digital journalism conference proved an inspiring way to pick up the latest insights.

I was excited to head to Reuters HQ at Canary Wharf in London to attend the event, which saw a host of the industry’s top editors, social media experts, and online specialists come together to discuss challenges and innovations in the world of digital journalism.

The jam-packed programme featured panel talks about community and local journalism, keynote addresses about topics such as why we aren’t talking about mobile when it’s so dominant in readers’ lives, and workshops on making big things happen on small budgets.

While the 40-minute session on political journalism and election reflections was fascinating to listen to and definitely broadened my knowledge, I found the most relevant talks for SoPublishing were in the afternoon segment.

First up was the newsgathering and storytelling session, led by Matt Cooke, head of Google News Lab, a service which collaborates with journalists to help fuel innovation in journalism and fight misinformation online.

Matt’s talk highlighted digital tools that can help verify social media content, along with useful tools that will be invaluable when researching stories and looking for reliable information and sources.

Following Matt’s talk, we heard from Steve Rayson from Buzzumo, a useful tool that provides social insights for content marketing and SEO campaigns, who discussed the findings of a study that analysed 100 million Facebook posts to discover what the most engaging headlines are on the social media channel.

Given that we post a lot of our content to our Facebook page, it was really interesting to hear the findings that looked at everything from the most shared three-word phrases, ‘will make you’ came out top, to the number that encourages most user interaction, which was 10 in case you’re curious.

The results were incredibly interesting and we’ll definitely be looking to integrate a few of the popular results into our social media strategy to drive better engagement with Facebook readers.

The whole event was a really valuable day away from my desk here at our Cheltenham HQ, keeping up with current digital media trends, but also meeting likeminded people who are working in an exciting industry that continues to striv    e to adapt to the changing media landscape.

By Anna Marshall