Learn How The Christian Science Monitor Uses Flipboard for Success
As the founder and manager of the Flipboard User Group, I have had the privilege of meeting and interviewing many interesting people over the years. Greg Fitzgerald, Communication Manager at The Christian Science Monitor is one of those inspiring members. Greg has helped take this publication to new levels. He uses Flipboard to create magazines worth reading and sharing. In this interview, he shares how The Monitor found even more success on Flipboard.
1. In a few words, please tell us about yourself
I split my career down the middle with my first two decades producing, reporting for, and hosting public radio and television magazines at NPR, WGBH, and WBUR and was part of the team launching New Hampshire’s first public radio system. Then I got bit by the engagement bug, starting my own company and launching news magazines from Germany’s main public broadcaster, Deutsche Welle, to PBS stations in the US. Seven years ago, I rejoined The Christian Science Monitor as Communications Manager to help the Monitor make the transition from an ad-supported website to a subscription-funded website and daily newsletter.
2. What prompted you to start using Flipboard?
I inherited our Flipboard account from a social media manager who moved on and I discovered pretty quickly that it had great potential to engage with audiences who were not familiar with Monitor journalism.
3. How has Flipboard changed the way The Christian Science Monitor shares content?
It hasn’t so much changed, as it has expanded. Much of my job is working with the editors of external news organizations such as Apple News, LinkedIn, Flipboard, and a handful of other niche publishers to share our content. The goal is to either boost revenue or pull new readers into our subscription funnel so they are exposed to additional stories on the site and get hooked by this great journalism. Then they’ll hopefully end up subscribing to our free newsletters or a 30-day free trial. Flipboard has helped us introduce a lot more readers to that journalism.
4. How does Flipboard compare to other news and content aggregator apps you have used?
Flipboard sends readers of our Flipboard magazines and storyboards directly to our website. That’s huge for the Monitor. We work with other “walled garden” aggregators that provide us with a ton of story reads, but the reader stays inside that aggregator’s app.
Publishers also have a lot of control over how their magazines look by changing cover images and reordering stories. And publishers can in a matter of minutes create gorgeously designed storyboards focused on series and grouped stories.
Flipboard’s relatively new relationship with federated social (Mastodon, Threads, etc.) gives us instant access to new social audiences without having to lift a finger.
Publishers also can have a direct relationship with Flipboard editors to pitch stories they think deserve getting a push into one of Flipboard’s own curated magazines and newsletters.
5. What advice would you give to other large publishers considering using Flipboard?
Like any aggregator, Flipboard uses an algorithm that boosts the engagement of certain stories, magazines, and storyboards. If a publisher launches a magazine and stops adding new content for days or weeks, the algorithm will pretty much ignore that content. Publishers can use their RSS feeds to ensure content keeps flowing, but I also recommend creating other magazines that are manually curated by someone on staff and to make sure the captions are included with hashtags.
For example, we use RSS for some of our basic international and national news magazines but create alternative magazines for specialized coverage. Our major international news magazine is What Just Happened in Your World? But I also created a “What’s Next for Gaza?” magazine. I manually add stories to that magazine, even though the same stories have already been added to our main magazine.
Publishers should also be creative with their magazine titles. Our national magazine was once titled “National” but changing that to “The American Story” saw increased traffic fairly quickly. And changing the magazine’s cover image often is also important. I’m now reviewing all of our titles to make sure they have a bit more of a marketing touch to them.
Finally don’t assume “because you created a magazine, people will come.” They won’t unless you promote your magazines on all of your social platforms.
6. How has Flipboard helped The Christian Science Monitor?
During the past year, Flipboard has become the news aggregator driving the most traffic to our site, even more than Google News. We’ve doubled page views from Flipboard since the summer of 2023. We get a lot more story views on “walled gardens” like Apple News, but those readers never make it over to the CSMonitor.com website.
7. Have you found a unique niche on Flipboard that you may not have discovered otherwise?
The storyboards are a great resource for reaching niche audiences. Once created, they can be promoted to specialized audiences on social. We had a major series focused on how young people are facing climate change — several cover stories — which we used as the basis of a storyboard. We used “The Climate Generation” storyboard as a means to reach out to a number of groups including colleges, high schools, and climate groups.
8. How do you measure success on Flipboard?
We use Adobe Analytics to measure all of our engagement so we can get daily, weekly, or monthly page views from Flipboard. That’s how we discovered our page visits from Flipboard doubled during the past year.
9. How do you interact with the Flipboard community?
It’s tricky. There are just so many hours in a day. I’d love to spend more time connecting and collaborating with some of the popular news-focused creators on Flipboard who have large followings. It’s a big goal in the coming months, but it’s only beginning.
10. Do you create any of your own personal magazines on Flipboard?
For sure! I spend a lot of time over coffee each morning before work adding new stories to two specific magazines I created last year on my own Flipboard profile.
I’m a great lover of literary fiction and share daily profiles, interviews, and essays from a ton of different paywall-free literary newsletters and sites, everything from LitHub to the Guardian. I’ve got over 400 stories in my “Meet the Writer” magazine.
There’s also a magazine I called “Hub City Hotshots”, featuring stories profiling the people advancing technology, culture, and social progress in Greater Boston.
11. Share your Flipboard profile and your favorite magazine.
The Monitor’s profile: https://flipboard.com/@csmonitor Of the 20 magazines, “Why We Wrote This” is my favorite. With audio, transcripts, and images, each week we interview one of our writers to explain the approach to a specific story or set of stories. It’s a great teaching tool for young journalists. And it gives our journalism real transparency.
12. If you had a few wishes, what would Flipboard change/improve in the coming years?
- Match iPhone and iPad posts. iPhone images often get cropped placing the object out of the frame and iPhone posts don’t include captions which have a lot of essential info. Viewed on iPads, however, these posts look great and have the captions. I’m not sure if that’s the same case for Android devices.
- Allow publishers to add their own graphics to the main image of a storyboard. The current workflow only allows grabbing an image from one of the stories in the storyboard. Many publishers have their own graphics staff who spend a lot of time creating series logos and images.
- Provide publishers with a sorted view of their followers, sorted by how many followers they have. Currently, it’s just a random list with most having just a handful of followers. We want to reach out to share our posts with other major influencers and publishers, but the process of finding them is not easy.
- Make the whole Mastodon relationship easier to understand. Any time I bring up Mastodon and server platforms to our writers, their eyes tend to glaze over. Social media managers may understand the relationship, and I know Flipboard has tried hard to do that, but I don’t think individual users get it, yet.
- Most other aggregators (Apple News, and LinkedIn) host frequent webinars with publishers providing best practices, product updates, and problem-solving tips. Would love Flipboard to do so as well.
Thank you, Greg, for your valuable insights on using Flipboard. Your tips provide publishers with great advice for increasing traffic and gaining more readers.
————————————————————————————————————————
Happy Flipping!
