The Economist meets emoji
How chat apps are changing the way we view news
“It’s going up…it’s going up…we’ve hit 1,000! 300 of them are in Cambodia!”
This is what you would have heard in our newsroom on January 28th, after we sent our first push notification on LINE, a messaging app. We don’t know what the future of delivering journalism to people will be. So we’re experimenting.
We have increased our following on Facebook and Twitter, but we’re keen to see what we can do on new platforms, especially for millennials, who are as interested in global current affairs as their elders — they just read and talk about them in new forms. One place where we are trying to reach them is on LINE.
LINE originated in Japan and has around 212m users in 230 countries (that’s today). It combines the messaging and free calling tools of WhatsApp, the timeline of Facebook, plus emoji and customisable stickers.
Our recent briefing on Facebook explored how messaging services will play a bigger role in people’s online lives. I’m confident that the trend for mobile usage over desktop will continue, and that media organisations will embrace mobile chat apps as much as they have, say, Twitter.
More than a billion people use messaging apps across the world each month, and a study last year showed young people spend as much or more time on them as on social networks.
Journalism and messaging apps are a natural fit: they force us to deliver short and punchy reporting, a shot of news that busy people can either absorb or dig into more deeply. They make us think carefully about what people will want to have sent as a message straight to their phone.
LINE helps us tailor our journalism to places where we have fewer readers, such as Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, South Korea, Indonesia and Cambodia, and to those younger than our traditional readership. Currently 10% of The Economist’s readers are in Asia, but people are signing up for our digital content there faster than almost anywhere else.
Our community editor Denise Law saw LINE as an opportunity for us to showcase our journalism to new audiences in emerging markets. And we currently have four people making our LINE account relevant, informative, useful and attractive.
The Economist is not about to change its editorial direction to cater to metrics like clickability or growing an online following. And we don’t need to: luckily our coverage spans the world already, covering countries as vast as China to ones as small as Timor-Leste.
In the past six months we’ve had special reports on Indonesia and the development of the Mekong river, and weekly updates on the politics and economics of many Asian countries. One of our most successful online posts ever is a slideshow about Japan’s Yakuza.
We have a wealth of fresh and archive content. I mention Asia-focused pieces because that was a good starting point for us; but our data show strong interest in science and technology, business and economics, art and culture, images from our great picture desk, quotes of the day, and short facts.
We experiment with specific posts. We post about different topics, to see what people what to know about, and use different images and visual styles — and then decide what’s proving popular enough to be sent as a push alert (because we don’t want to spam our followers).
Our ethos on LINE is to explain the world in bite-sized messages so readers do not feel compelled to click on everything; they can enjoy a piece of journalism within their feed.
LINE also gives us a chance to produce ‘social-only content’. For example, when Aung San Suu Kyi’s chosen candidate took power in Myanmar, we recorded a short interview with our southeast Asia bureau chief, Jon Fasman, explaining what it means for the country.
We put together slideshows that are easy to scroll through on mobile. And we write news and ‘on this day’ facts for people to get an interesting take-away without clicking through to an article.
Our team is trying to transfer the style and content that editors at The Economist have honed over 173 years into formats that reach readers who’ve never heard of us before, or those who think we’re a stuffy publication about share prices.
You can download LINE here and search for‘The Economist’ to follow us. We’d love to hear what you think.
Jenni Reid is a social media writer at The Economist.
