Digital Works Conference 2024 Q&A: Thinking like a publisher - unlocking the value of editorial content

Our ‘thinking like a publisher’ panel session at the 2024 Digital Works Conference explored the value of editorial content, as well as the processes, thinking and strategy required to produce high-quality editorial content.

Thinking like a publisher.

Zosia Poulter (Content Strategist, Substrakt) moderated the panel with Matt Locke (Director, Storythings), Danny Birchall (Freelance Content Strategist) and Chris Sullivan (Freelance Content Strategist and Producer).

We didn’t have time to get to all of the audience questions that were submitted so here the panel have generously taken the time to go through and answer the outstanding questions.

You can watch the full session (and all the sessions from the conference) by purchasing a Digital Pass (recordings are available from 8th May – 9th August 2024).

Questions & Answers

How do you successfully harness internal subject specialists while not pandering to their naff ideas or demands that are not user focused?

Matt Locke (ML): Work hard on the questions you ask them! Think about things that open up their passion and curiosity, as this is at the heart of their expertise. Finding questions that let them open up about why they find something interesting will make better stories than just asking them to parrot their knowledge. Make them human and relatable.

Chris Sullivan (CS): During the panel discussion, Danny suggested that using templates or content types can be helpful for collaboration. This approach facilitates conversations about tone and voice, and practical concerns such as image licensing or digitisation requests. Templates also allow for a story-driven approach, where content takes the shape that suits it best. User guides like ‘Tips for Writing an Article’ can help share your perspective with a content expert.

Danny Birchall (DB): First of all, few ideas are irredeemably naff – one person’s dull hobbyhorse is another person’s magnificent obsession, and let’s be honest few museums traffic in content that’s truly mainstream – as Matt says below, embrace the niche! But also, never be afraid to edit. Editing doesn’t just mean cutting or rewriting the words after the fact – it can be a developmental and collaborative process, where writer and editor learn from each other. Just don’t lose track of the ultimate goal, to convey something interesting, enlightening and engaging to another person: someone you haven’t even met.

Imagine you are starting a new channel (e.g articles/videos) and you have no audience yet. How do you decide what topics to start with and which to leave for later? Best topics may attract an audience but may also be wasted with +-0 views.

ML: This is where good audience research and value proposition development is important. If there are subjects that you can create value around better than anyone else, it’ll be easier to find and build an audience. If you start writing about something that everyone is writing about, it’ll be a lot harder. Find a niche that you can be authoritative and authentic about, and don’t try to copy everyone else.

CS: Personal experiences can bring a unique perspective to your content, making it stand out and creating a deeper connection with your audience. Consider how deep you can go with a topic or a means of discussing it when planning. The medium is the message, so some topics will lend themselves to specific platforms, which could factor into your decision-making.

DB: Consider what’s timely, and what’s evergreen. There’s no harm in putting your best foot forward if you’re trying to attract a new audience for a new thing, as long as that content stays online, accessible, and identifiable with your organisation or brand (though it may not build up the googlejuice in the same way that things used to). Establish a core proposition: what you’re about, what you do, and then you have a space to evolve from.

What are the panel members’ views on creating content in-house versus commissioning models (with payment for external contributors). Do you have to be super clear on KPIs if you are committing significant budgets?

ML: The two best reasons for commissioning externally are diversity of voices and workflow. Ideally, your in-house team will own the vision and editorial direction of your content, but you should commission externally to bring new voices in, and to make sure your team don’t burn out by having to produce all the content. The question of KPIs and budgets is slightly separate – these should be tied to the overall strategic vision for your content, not whether it’s in house or externally produced.

CS: How publishing is situated within a museum or a department is essential to avoid an either/or proposition. Why not do both? External contributors expand the tapestry of voices on your platforms and allow for non-institutional viewpoints to permeate your work. In-house subject matter expertise is a gift and can be leveraged incredibly effectively. Still, you also need to take into account the existing staff workload.

DB: Not only a tapestry and variety of voices – but also expertise. It can often be more efficient to commission someone to write something they already know about than it is for a staff writer to learn and then write about the same things.

Any advice for nudging a traditionally ‘ticket sales only’ mindset organisation towards a more meaningful, editorial approach? And inviting audiences to start seeing us in a different way? (I.e. more than just somewhere to buy tickets)

ML: it’s important to map out the different roles that content plays for your audiences, and what value you can create for them, both for your own strategy, and to communicate it to the rest of your organisation. Some of this is ticket sales, but that’s not everything.

I’m a big fan of a 2×2 grid to help you communicate a strategy. I’ve done this in the past with ephemeral/evergreen content on one axis, and exploratory/transactional content on another axis. The ephemeral/transactional part of the quadrant is content that is about ticket sales – it should be on social platforms, and isn’t about long-term value. The exploratory/evergreen content is deep stories about the craft and impact of your work, which is valuable for audiences that want more than just a ticket. I’ll leave it to you to work out what the other two quadrants are!

CS: I’ll return to the idea of holistic alignment here. A blog post might help create a wall label. An acquisition paper might be the starting point of an interesting long-read article. A docent training session could be leveraged into an exciting short video for social media.

A lot of the time, you’ll already be doing the work to allow for a more ‘editorial approach’ when communicating with your audiences. By finding commonalities across teams and leveraging existing work, you can amplify a new type of storytelling and provide your audiences with new invitations to get to know you.

DB: A global pandemic is a good start! More seriously, every organisation has (or should have) strategic goals that go beyond putting bums on seats or feet on gallery floors.

Find a way to make digital speak to your organisation’s desire to mean more to more people, and find the things that your existing, visiting audience cares about.

Where should the content team sit in a cultural organisation?

ML: it really depends on on the role that content plays in the organisations’ strategy. I would be careful of siting content teams in Marketing, as this ties all the activity towards ticket sales. Again, think about the value propositions you are creating first, and this will help decide where the team sits, and how they interact with the rest of the organisation. It might be that a digital team makes most sense, but digital teams often end up as passive receivers of requests from the rest of the org for ‘content’, and struggle to own their own editorial strategies. If this is happening, build horizontal partnerships with other departments on specific editorial initiatives – eg with marketing, education, or programming – so you have agreement on what it is you’re trying to build together.

CS: I think it depends. At M+, our digital content-producing teams, print and digital, sat within the curatorial department. We were separate from the marketing team in terms of organisational structure. However, we always had a close dialogue with them. This distinction was important and, from what I understand, rare. This approach helped us facilitate work, align skills, provide space for holistic alignment across different but linked activities, and keep our activities mission-aligned.

DB: I have famously said before that this question is like asking where a couch should go in a living room – it depends on the couch and the room. Put it where it works. At Wellcome Collection, my team benefitted from being part of a Digital Engagement department that built all our products and services, enabling us to think holistically about user journeys across the piece. We spent a long time building up very good and extremely productive relationships with our curatorial colleagues, but when they moved my team into the curatorial department, it was time to leave.

It seems like a lot of editorial content contains characteristics of white supremacy culture (such as the worship of the written word and progress is bigger/more). How can we avoid this in our organisations?

ML: This is, again, where audience research and value propositions really help. If your organisation is not diverse, your strategy will bend towards their norms and needs, rather than reflecting the diversity of your audience.

Working directly with communities outside your organisation to develop and produce content is critical, but is also a much better way to develop unique and effective content formats that really create value for your audiences.

Large organisations have a terrible tendency to produce all comms in an anonymous, corporate voice. Not only does this hide the structural biases in the organsiation, it is incredible boring for audiences. Bigger and blander is not better.

The future of content strategy is in really understanding and empowering niche audiences, and producing things that people actively need and want to commit to, rather than copycat formats that are aimed towards algorithms. Tell stories with and for humans instead.

CS: Being mindful of such characteristics is a starting point. When developing a content slate, you might consider factors such as gender identity and geographic region alongside internal discipline-related designations (e.g., design, moving image, visual art) and content type (social media post, article, video, mixed-media presentation) as a planning principle.

You might even surface and highlight topics that you consider institutionally important—an example might be developing content pillars around themes such as ecology and sustainability, under-studied topics, and the global south, creating a series of videos featuring Sign language, or providing content in multiple languages.

I mention the above as practical examples and a means to keep these issues at the forefront of mind when creating content, as constant vigilance is needed to address institutional and personal biases, both conscious and unconscious. I recognise that a lot of heavy lifting in this sphere also needs to take place at the leadership levels of an organisation, and I say all this while being mindful of my background, speaking to his experiences working in a Hong Kong-based museum.

DB: Put the words in the hands of people who can challenge and confront (not merely avoid) these things.

Being able to commission and support external writers and artists was a key part of this work at Wellcome Collection.

It required understanding and protecting an editorial space that was not the voice of the institution, but rather the platform of the institution: a space that we could offer to writers to challenge some of the things that we as museum and library employees, could not do so easily.

Pair writing with a balance of power. What do you do when that power is, as is surely common, not equal?

DB: This is my favourite question so far, because it recognises the way in which power and inequality work in institutions in the real world. Pair writing cannot erase imbalances of power, but it can create a space of trust between two colleagues, in which there’s an explicit understanding of each others’ roles (subject expert and comms expert); and a clear goal for the work to be done (templates and word limits help here lots).

It does require a certain level of overall support and trust in the organisation: in some cases it can even help build that trust: I remember the very warm feeling of hearing a programming colleague enthusiastically advocating for our process to other members of her team.

Web teams are constantly trying to keep users on their website for as long as possible, often not successfully. Has Wellcome collection seen an increase in user time spent on the website as a result of developing long-form content?

DB: Yes, but two things are worth adding here. Firstly, not all pages and content are equal. If you’re getting high dwell times on a long read article, you’re doing a great job. If people are spending five minutes on your ‘visit us’ page, something is broken!

Secondly, engagement has different aspects. If only a few people are spending a long time on your content, you’re superserving the specialists. High visitor numbers and low time on page sounds like clickbait. How many users are returning to read more content? Analytics opt-ins, and GA4 are changing the numbers that we report on ‘engagement’, but it’s always worth asking what kind of engagement balance you’re actually trying to create: a large audience, a loyal audience, a passionate audience?

Cultural organisations often produce highly academic studies. With the average reading age in the UK being 9, how can museums produce content that is both academic and accessible? Or is it okay to exclude some audiences sometimes?

ML: Making your experts human and unlocking their passion is the key. This is what great TV formats do with experts – they make them seen human, and make the ideas relatable to audiences.

A lot of experts are worried that this is about dumbing down, but it’s not – its about tapping into the passion and curiosity that first drew them to their expert subjects, and communicating this to the audience. If you can tap into that curiosity, that will really help them communicate to a wider audience.

So ask curators why they care about something, and why they find it fascinating. Asking for more personal reflections will make the more academic expertise easier to understand.

DB: If you publish an academic journal, that’s the place for academic language. Otherwise, what you publish should be accessible to as broad an audience as possible.

Even complicated and difficult ideas can be explained well in order to have a bigger impact. But it’s not just a case of running your text through Hemingway to tweak the reading level.

Find the emotional hooks that make it relevant to readers: get your writers to put themselves in the story, to centre their own experience in a way that gives readers a story to relate to.

CS: I’ve taken part in content writing workshops with colleagues from different departments (Editorial/Curatorial), which consider factors such as reading level and highlight issues relating to tone and voice.

These workshops are incredibly helpful for creating a shared sense of understanding regarding how we write.

Audience research on texts, such as wall labels or online content, is precious; you’ll always learn something.

From experience, having the mechanism to share these findings across teams, such as a working group, is also beneficial. A thoughtful and intentional approach is necessary when creating content for niche, underserved, and subject-matter-specific audiences, particularly for publicly funded institutions.

How do you think Google search’s AI answers will impact visits to museum websites given that search is the main acquisition channel for web-based storytelling content.

ML: it’s a bit early to tell, but experiments are already showing that people searching with AI search results will click through less to the sources of results.

As with everything, it will depend on the final user journey goals – if they want to buy a ticket or something similarly transactional, that will only be able to do that by visiting your site.

But if it’s more general knowledge searches, I think there will be a big reduction in traffic for general search queries.

This is why you should invest in deep content though – make your site a place people want to go to because they can really go deep into subjects in a way that AI will never really be able to do.

Make it more human, more rich, more experiential.

DB: +1 to what Matt said. I think there’s also an issue of trust: Large Language Model summaries can be flaky and/or uninspiring; make your museum content the opposite of that.

Speak with a distinctive and recognisable voice, and publish content that rewards a deeper level of engagement with it.

And don’t use ‘AI’-generated imagery in your own articles or event promos: it’s cheap, nasty and derives from existing artists’ work in unethical ways.

Any advice for honing in on subjects or a rich niche when you’re a large national with a broad sprawling remit? Both in terms of the content plan itself and advocating for that approach internally.

ML: At the risk of sounding like a stuck record – this is all about value propositions again!

You might be able to tell stories about a huge range of subjects, but what are the stories that ONLY you can tell? What are the ones that you add so much value to that no-one else can do it?

For example, you might have an object about space and the moon landings. You might be able to tell a great story about it, but will it be different from the stories that NASA or the Smithsonian could tell?

If not, link through to their stories, and focus on things that you can be the best at.

DB: Another +1 to Matt. Think about your storytellers: what value do they bring to the content that others can’t.

If you’re writing about an archive, think about the archivist’s story too. This beautifully-written example by Elena Carter shows how you can write about collections from a deeply personal and unique viewpoint.

How do you convince senior leaders / CEO that is takes time and money to make really good, meaningful, successful content.

ML: This is really hard, especially if senior leaders are used to seeing huge inflated numbers from social platforms. I would do four things:

1. get evidence from your audience about their behaviours, and what they want from more complex content
2. use this to create a strong value proposition for these audiences that aligns with your orgs strategic goals
3. have a vision of what the impact will be in 12-18 months time – large archives of content are hugely valuable once they’re built, but it takes time! Sell a vision of what you can do when you’re got 100s of bits of content.
4. start small, and iterate quickly. Choose formats that you can produce, test, and measure sustainably with only a few extra resources. This is probably not a complex narrative podcast or ambitious video series. It is more likely to be articles, interviews or short format video. When we do format development with clients, the last question we ask is “how can you test this in an hour with only £10?” You’d be surprised how many formats you can test this way.

DB: Show them examples of other people’s successful content, and then tell them what it took to make it successful.

If we agree to care about fewer but more deeply engaged people/users/viewers/readers, what would be a good balance of efforts between retaining existing vs attracting new people? (In tourist museums we don’t care about retention!)

ML: Again, this isn’t an either/or. You should have a broader audience development strategy that includes retention as well as growth, and deeper engagement is not the right goal for all of them. If your organisation is more focused on transactional relationships with tourist audiences instead of deeper engagement with loyal, returning visitors, then deep editorial formats might not be the best option.

DB: find the point of interest, what is it that your tourist visitors care about and have come to see? You can still create a relatively small amount of evergreen content that will answer some of those questions, in advance of or after a visit, and perhaps attract visitors who didn’t know that a visit would answer these questions.

For publishers, content is synonymous with IP, something that has potential to be licensed, repackaged and sold in multiple formats. How might cultural organisations usefully think about content as IP?

ML: TBH, exploiting IP rights across formats is a deeply complex issue that really depends on the content formats. It is also completely dependent on whether there is a potential buyer for the IP. This really depends on scale – IP licensing normally only becomes a real conversations when something is already a success in one format. So I’d focus on developing successful formats first, then think about IP licensing!

DB: This obviously came from a position of being reasonably well-resourced, but at Wellcome Collection, we CC-BY licensed all the words that we published. This made it relatively easy to syndicate or assign translation rights, and a couple of our articles were reproduced in the national press, with links back to Wellcome Collection. We thought of it as an addition to the public realm, licensing the same as our collections data and images. For illustrations, we licensed differently, because the benefit to us of permanently open-licensing a one-off illustration wasn’t worth the extra cost.

Can the panel, specifically the consultants, say something about e-newsletters and how that works for content. Is this how we build the user base and make this more sustainable?

ML: Newsletters are becoming more popular as a way of developing a regular, first-party relationship with your audience that isn’t mediated by another platform. A subscription is a very strong signal that someone gets value from your organisation and wants to get more value in the future, so don’t treat newsletters as broadcast marketing. Someone has invited you into their inbox on a regular basis, and will only read your newsletter if it continues to add value to them. This is unlikely to be the case if you just use your newsletter for marketing. Again, ask subscribers what they want from the newsletter via surveys, and then use this to develop the value proposition and format for the newsletter. A good way to do this is to write an imaginary chat message from one of your subscribers to their friends, imagining how they’d recommend your newsletter. What would they say it is for? Why would it be valuable to their friends? If you’re struggling to write this, you’re probably not clear enough yourself about your value proposition.

DB: The one experiment I wanted to try at Wellcome Collection was the equivalent of a tinyletter, where we sent out exclusive full-length stories to subscribers only. I have no idea how that would have worked out in practice!

Further resources on this topic