Lessons from an accidental journalist
Had the pandemic not happened, I’d still be running Snap now and would never have created Freewheeling.
But I did and, in the process, I’ve learned some fascinating lessons about the way modern media works.
1. It really is all about social media
I joined Twitter in 2009 as it seemed likely to be big and I wanted to grab @thomasableman before that Ophthalmologist in Maryland got it. (I should try to meet him sometime). Having done so, I then didn’t compose a single tweet for over a decade. I was responsible for social media at both Chiltern Railways and Snap but was more interested in building the company’s brand than my own.
The result is that when I started tweeting out Freewheeling blog posts, hardly anyone saw the tweets and a handful of retweets made a remarkable difference. My most popular blogpost to date was this one about the challenges of the Scottish border. It was retweeted by @seatsixtyone, and then got retweeted and retweeted and - suddenly - it has been seen by almost twice as many people as my second most-popular post. In the process, I’ve gone from virtually zero followers to nearly six hundred.
In the modern media landscape, social media is the gatekeeper to eyeballs.
2. Conflict is more popular than consensus
One of my former Chiltern Railways colleagues recently told me that I’d become the Katie Price of transport. Well, I wasn’t best pleased about this. Putting it mildly, that was not the look I was going for when I started blogging during the depths of the lockdown.
But you can see why he sees it that way.
I have been through my back catalogue and categorised each of my posts as:
a) ‘crunchy’. i.e. could be seen as critical of an individual or individual organisation in recent times: risks putting peoples’ backs up, the kind of post I re-read several times before putting out there. For example, this post on the Hitachi crisis and the GWR response.
b) ‘negative’. i.e. reactively saying what’s wrong with some situation or policy proposal, for example, this piece on the railway ‘guiding mind’
c) ‘neutral’. i.e. telling an interesting story or giving some open-ended commentary, for example, this look at flying taxis
d) ‘positive’. i.e. making a purely positive proposal or calling out something great, for example, this praise for a marketing scheme of First York
What I found is that ‘crunchy’ or negative posts made up 45% of my posts but 71% of views. Purely crunchy content was just 18% of posts but 30% of views. Moreover, positive posts made up 24% of my content but just 13% of views. And that was heavily skewed by my interview with James Freeman, which was hugely popular. Take that out and positive content made up 21% of my posts but just 8% of views.
Every single one of my posts to go viral has been ‘crunchy’ or negative.
The reality is that I’m producing a blog in which the majority of my content is positive or neutral but you are seeing a blog that is primarily negative or crunchy.
3. It’s all about clicks
When I was young (good God, am I really old enough to be able to use that expression? Given I’m (just!) into my forties, sadly I think so…), journalists might have known how many copies the paper sold, but they wouldn’t have minute breakdowns of exactly which articles were being read.
But I have minute-by-minute live data showing exactly how many people are looking at every post.
Even though I’m not selling advertising and so have no commercial imperative to care about clicks, it’s still really hard not to care about numbers.
If you put out three blog posts in a row that get successively less traction, you get a graph that points downwards and you feel a failure. But get two in a row that exceed each other, and you feel like a success.
I’ve spent my life as a commercial director or an entrepreneur: I like my graphs pointing upwards and to the right!
Even though I have no commercial incentive to care, when my most popular post has 40 times the clicks of the least popular, it’s hard not to notice. Yet my least popular piece (my submission to the Transport Select Committee on Road Pricing) is probably the most important thing I’ve written this year.
For ‘real’ blogs and newspapers, who earn ££ on the basis of clicks, the temptation to chase down clicks at the expense of what’s important must be overwhelming.
I’m not a journalist, I’m… well, what am I? I’m a transport professional cum entrepreneur who’s about to join TfL. I’m temporarily blogging and have built a small following doing so.
But even at that minuscule level, it’s been really instructive to get a small hint of the real-world pressures facing modern media. The constant tyranny of the numbers, the reality that negative outsells positive and the fact that success in media means success in social media; all those truths have been demonstrated in my little blog. Like it or not, that’s the world we now live in.
