Q&A: Jack Mazzeo, Head of Product at Flipboard
The Idea caught up with the Flipboard’s top product guy and talked platforms, publishers, curation, and storytelling.
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The Idea: Can you tell me a little bit about your background and what you do at Flipboard?
JM: My background is as a product developer. I transitioned into product management about ten years ago, because the thing that made me most excited about working on product was really closely connected to the problems that they solve for people. And when the opportunity to come to Flipboard came about I was really excited. I went to the University of Virginia and worked at The Cavalier Daily. I was the features editor there for a year, briefly the news editor, and the operations manager. I developed all of these close friendships with people who eventually went into the field of journalism. Not long thereafter the business of journalism started to become more and more difficult. I would hear stories about the hardships in newsrooms, so the idea of coming to a company like Flipboard that was really looking to help publishers navigate this new distribution model was super exciting.
How does Flipboard work with publishers?
Flipboard has really adopted the stance that any success that we have is really shared with publishers. We have a publisher partner team that works closely with our publishers to make sure that not only are we getting the right content from publishers, but also that it’s showing up in the right place to the right users in our app and helping them understand how they can cultivate their audience and grow their traffic to, potentially, a new set of users on Flipboard.
Flipboard supports subscription credentials for a handful of larger publishers, and users can access subscription content directly on publisher sites if they have access. But as more publishers move their content behind a paywall, do you have any plans to evolve how Flipboard will work with subscription content?
It’s definitely something that we’re looking closely at. One of the fundamental tenets that we have at Flipboard is that we always want to do the right thing for our user. It’s very important that our user understands how to consume content and understand what they’re seeing in the app. We’re in the process now of talking to several of our large publishers that have paywalls to understand how we can better support them in this model. We haven’t announced anything yet, but we are working directly with publishers — especially ones that have either implemented paywalls or have implemented changes to their metering strategy — so we can figure out how to support them better.
Flipboard has been more top of mind among publishers as they’ve seen a higher proportion of their traffic coming from Flipboard since Facebook’s most recent algorithm change. Has Flipboard seen significant changes in engagement metrics since Facebook announced it would deprioritize publishers? And how might the change in Facebook’s algorithm alter your relationship with publishers?
In general, I think algorithms get a bad rap. Algorithms are really a product of who is in charge of providing the incentive to the algorithm — how the algorithm prioritizes content. At Flipboard, something that we’ve always really believed in is trying to put the best, highest quality content from trusted sources in front of users. Engagement, while obviously important, has never really been the top priority for us and how we choose what content to put in front of the user.
We want to make sure that content is high quality and we want to make sure that it’s from trusted sources. A few years ago, this message wasn’t landing; I don’t think that people really understood the implications of having an engagement-first model. One of the things that has been really rewarding for us — especially in the last few months since we went back out to market with a new message around Flipboard being a place to spend quality time — is that we’ve been hearing back from the market and back from publishers that this message is really landing for them. It’s really resonating now. As part of this, we’ve also been seeing a generally growing trend in our engagement. But that trend in our engagement has been steady and ongoing for awhile. It doesn’t appear to be connected with any particular shift in public sentiment.
So what goes into determining which sources are trusted or reliable?
At Flipboard we have an editorial team, which is responsible for curating stories in some of our biggest topics. Our editorial team has a rubric of criteria that it uses to evaluate the quality of our sources. The rubric includes everything from whether the sources are the sources of original reporting and original sourcing, through to their accepted expertise in particular topics. Every source that comes onto the platform goes through this evaluation process so that we can decide the most appropriate way to surface them.
Some stories are categorized as “Conservative View” or “Liberal View.” Through what mechanism do those labels get determined and applied?
In addition to curating stories themselves, we also curate sources associated with topics in our system to make sure that users who want to see content about those topics are seeing the type of content that they would expect. Politics is something that we spend a lot of time curating; it’s done individually story-by-story in addition to source-by-source so that the taxonomy is right.
Typically in our news coverage, what we choose to do is surface stories from all sides of the spectrum from reputable sources to make sure that our users have the complete picture from all sides. But inside of conservative view and liberal view, we’ve curated the sources of those stories to be specifically either conservative-leaning or liberal-leaning. We’ve gotten feedback from users that they appreciate our approach, but really want to see one perspective or the other. So we wanted to give them that option, and wanted to really make it clear to them when they were setting up Flipboard that that option was available to them. They didn’t just need to consume politics from our standard curated politics feed.
A lot of content you see on Flipboard is algorithmically curated. The editors provide inputs and work with our data engineers. But in certain sections — especially around politics — there’s a lot more story-by-story curation by editors.
It sounds like the team at Flipboard prides itself on the influence of its human curators.
When we think about what sets Flipboard apart, in addition to just the algorithms that we have that are always gathering the best of editorial curation as well as algorithmic curation, there’s the fact that the users on our platforms who select stories for their own magazines are also doing some of that curation for us. Users are choosing stories that are meaningful to them and that they view as high quality. So on Flipboard, the curation is not limited to what our editors do. We have a vibrant community of users that are also creating magazines on topics from recipes to surfing to entrepreneurialism. We also have publishers who are creating magazines on our platforms that group stories that are similar, linked through some common thread, and that help explain a topic more completely to their readers.
This notion of curation as an action that our editorial team takes is true, but we also have what publishers and users are doing on our platform every day. That activity all helps us identify what the best, most meaningful stories are across a wide array of topics.
Are there any trends or innovations in media that you’re particularly excited about?
I’m most excited by this trend towards more robust storytelling paradigms on mobile. They have been a long time coming. It’s something that we have moved early on when we launched our magazines on Flipboard about five or six years ago, but now with the emergence of stories on Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook and with Google’s Stamp, just the fact that we’re seeing the multimedia packaging of content makes a ton of sense to help users make more sense of their world. I think this is a really positive trend that’s going to be great for users, just as citizens of the world that are trying to make better sense of what’s going on around them, offering more context for information that they’re about to take in. I think we’ve just scratched the surface with this type of media packaging.
This Subscriber Spotlight first appeared in the May 14th edition of The Idea. To get your weekly update on everything new and innovative in digital media, subscribe here!
