Top five takes from the Washington Post's TikTok experiment. Global Journalism Seminar with Carmella Boykin of the Washington Post
RReuters InstituteMay 10, 2023 at 11:30 am1h 1min
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00:11Speaker 1
Welcome to the Global journalism seminars. This is the briefing. Tic Toc has become a global phenomenon. With over a billion active users a unique approach to short form video content are the atmospheres of scrutiny over data privacy. The digital news report found about half of your organization's are turning to tick tock to reach younger audiences and engage with users new ways. They're watching Washington Post's account has gained over 1 million followers and videos that cover news events the fun and engaging way. The future is not certain. Some years politicians have called for a ban on the app citing national security concerns. In Norway, journalists, public service outlets and RK are not allowed to have the app on their phones. They polled 14 journalists from around the world to ask whether these tick tock in the newsroom 31% said Yes, after they were more concerned about tick tock stated policies and other social media platforms 69% said yes. Our guest today Carmela Boykin as part of the hugely popular Washington Post, which includes Dave Johnson and Chris Masters. We'll look at some examples of how they adapt to new stories coverage of Tik Tok audience and ask what lessons they've learned on the app. That's the briefing. Let's begin.
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01:40Caithlin Mercer
Welcome to the Global journalism seminars. I'm Caitlin Mercer and I'm thrilled to be hosting Carmela Boykin today, as we delve into lessons from The Washington Post's epic Tiktok experiment. Before joining Dave and his can of Spam on the Tiktok team, Carmela was at news eight and Rochester New York is an on air and multimedia reporter and she has a degree in broadcast and digital journalism from the side Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, where she anchored the school's TV news station. Welcome, Carmela.
Unknown Speaker
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
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02:18Caithlin Mercer
It's great. We're big fans of your work. So I'm really looking forward to this conversation. We're going to be pretty interactive in this webinar, because that's the TIC tock way. Unfortunately, I haven't worked out how to put a cake decorating video at the bottom of the screen but we'll make do we do have some of Carmela videos. But just before we get to them for the uninitiated, can I start Carmela by asking what even is your job?
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02:53Speaker 2
Well, yeah, for sure. What do you do? My job is definitely it's um, like the newer realm of like in the journalism sphere. Basically, I'm a tick tock producer at the Washington Post. So my primary job is to make tic TOCs for the account, and then also do any supplemental journalism. I feel I want to do want to experiment or the Washington Post sees fit.
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03:12Caithlin Mercer
Yeah. So we let's kind of go into an example of that. And bear with me, here comes the Luddite, but we're gonna go to.
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03:56Caithlin Mercer
So that was a pretty viral effort. 3.1 million views. Yeah, it does. How, when you kind of interact with the Washington Post, tick tock feed you all three of you seem to have very distinct styles. How would you describe your style on the platform and how does it differ from the others?
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04:21Speaker 2
I would say my style is very rooted in music and beats. I grew up dancing. I'm not a professional dancer by any means. That is not what I'm claiming. But I grew up dancing. And so I like love editing to accents. I love adding like different characters and facial expressions. And so I would say that like pretty much encompasses my style, and then I'm on the team like Dave and Chris also have their own style, but what's really cool is like they all can kind of come together, especially when we're doing group tiktoks. And so we can like play off of each other. And we each bring in different elements, which I think makes for like a well rounded team. Yeah. I think what
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04:55Caithlin Mercer
separates you from other news outlets on the platform is a lot of news outlets seem to think they have a tick tock strategy, but that tic tock strategy seems to be taking their news clips and dumping them on tick tock. How do I phrase this nicely? Does that work? away? Why isn't it an approach that you've used? Why not just take the stuff you made for reals and dump it on Tik Tok?
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05:30Speaker 2
That's a great question. I think it can definitely be effective, right? Like when you're posting reposting the content you already have. It's already been run through a bunch of professionals who like edit the Best Bits and like put it together. And that can definitely create like viral moments. And it's definitely created success, especially within like the United States, like big broadcast organizations. But a benefit to what we're doing a massive benefit to what we're doing is it's a lot of community building. So like when we want to ask our audience something or like ask them what they're interested in or just get a feel for what's going on. We can like make a tick tock and we have immediate response people who are like really active and like care about us personally, or at least like our professional, our tick tock personas. And I think that's a strong benefit that the Washington Post has versus when you're just posting like content, like that's awesome that you can make videos that get a lot of views, but like, if you need something from an audience where you want information, they don't necessarily have access to that. Yeah.
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06:28Caithlin Mercer
What role would you say that humor plays in the work that you do?
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06:33Speaker 2
I would say plays a massive role. I think a lot of the times news is of course serious and when it's appropriate, we definitely need to be serious but when I'm watching content like especially on tick tock, that's an entertainment platform. I want to be entertained. I want like some like light brought to the day and like if a topic is going to be long and boring, like at least like put a joke in so I can pay attention to it long term. And so I think it's like connecting people humor kind of like, it makes things less intense. We have a running joke on our account where like, we dance when it's scary, so like, if it's a topic that's like, particularly like terrifying, like, I'm not gonna make a joke out of it per se, but like, if I have a little groove into it to like, make people pay attention. I'll do it.
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07:16Caithlin Mercer
Yeah. I want to show an example of where you didn't go with the humor line. And I think it'll become abundantly clear until
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07:29Speaker 2
the supreme court overturn Roe versus Wade. Here's what this means. In 13 states a trigger ban will take effect they were designed to take effect as soon as Roe was overturned and states without trigger laws like Alabama, Georgia and Indiana laws banning abortions would likely take effect in a few weeks in states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan abortion access will largely depend on midterm elections. If anti abortion Republicans win their races they'll have a clear path towards banning abortion access. There are many states that have laws explicitly protecting abortion rights in these states abortion will likely remain accessible
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08:03Caithlin Mercer
so I wish I began with this one. I want to WASC how quickly did that come out after the news came out? That little explainer
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08:17Speaker 2
I think okay, so here's the background behind like this Tiktok I was on the West Coast. I was the only person on shift that day date was in France and Chris was out. And so I like woken up on West Coast time in California. And row had already been overturned. I woke up at like 7am. So I've needed just something to like, tell the story turn quickly because this is like an incredibly important story, and something that fits a tone and so I want to say this came out within like four or five hours of being turned. And it performed really well. And I think this is a good example of just match that like the most important part of our tic TOCs is telling the story, do anything you can to get the story across and in this case, especially in the US when this is like such a serious topic, and really important. People just want to know what was going on. And so, this one said,
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09:06Caithlin Mercer
Tell me a little bit about the editorial process, typically speaking, are you how much of the job is reacting to breaking news and how much of it is planned out at a at a meeting in the morning?
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09:19Speaker 2
So every morning or team basically Okay, so this is gonna sound like an ad but the Washington Post has a newsletter called The Seven I fantastic colleagues work on it. And it's amazing because when we wake up like we can just look at okay, what does the Washington Post reporting have going on? What are the most important stories Yeah, and it's already distilled into like a couple of different bullet points. So it's really useful for us. Um, so we'll come to the meeting with ideas of either looking at the seventh or looking at the homepage and figuring out what's going on. Of course, just like in any other area of journalism, there's evergreen stories that we can kind of plan out ahead of time. But if there's breaking news, that's usually one of our top priorities because like, even though we're dancing like our head, or like tagline on tick tock because we're a newspaper, and so the goal is to inform people about like, what the top story is or what's going on.
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10:05Caithlin Mercer
Yeah, there's a question about that later, but I'll wait before we come to that. I want to know are there beats that it's like okay, this is Chris's Don't touch this is Carmela is Don't touch this is Dave's don't touch or is it? Do you just decide on the go?
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10:24Speaker 2
I think we've we've for the most part we decide on the go. What's really nice is our team has good communication so we can kind of like workout who's feeling the story, like if someone wants a story, and another person has an idea, like, of course the person was the idea and run with it. I'm the only sometimes like we'll have like different parts of our team. We'll have topics that we cover more so like right now Dave has been doing a lot of covering the mass shootings because he created a really honestly like a excellent format of you telling what's going on. And just showing like how many mass shootings are happening in the US and just like having a duet of like every other video he's done along with the newest one. But if we want to jump in, we totally could. But we also have a kind of respective like these are things that other people on our team have created too. So
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11:12Caithlin Mercer
let me see if I can very quickly show an example of that format, because it's quite powerful. Okay, here we go. And I'm not going to turn the sound on for this one. But essentially, how would How would you explain this to somebody who's not a tick tock user? What is what is David doing?
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11:40Speaker 2
Yeah, so on tick tock. There's a feature called duet, where you can take an old video and add your new video on top of it. And so that's what he's using in this feature. So it's already using like an inept feature that people know. And the video is honestly just silent. All you hear is the papers turning so you're not missing any audio. And it just kind of shows the magnitude of like, this is the same thing every time there's a mass
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12:00Caithlin Mercer
shooting. Sorry, just an example of that
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12:04Speaker 2
thing over and over which is crazy. Um, and then also like as a Tiktok. Team, how do you cover that? Because covered in all sorts of different ways of sitting at a desk and talking straight to camera or like showing visuals. Like with the Uvalde shooting in Texas. As a journalist, it's just crazy because they're a bunch of kids and like, how how do you cover that in a way that's applicable to the audience? That will make sense? Yeah, that's still engaging but shows also what's going on. So this format does really well.
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12:35Caithlin Mercer
Respectful, but informative at the same time. Exactly. Yeah. Great. How do you separate your personal life from this job? Because it must be very, must bleed into out of hours. How do you have any rules for yourself? Or does the team have agreed rules of like, when you don't open tick tock? Do you have an on a personal phone apart from the work phone? What's your strategy?
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13:12Speaker 2
are smart? I would say yes, it's completely separate. It's completely helped me, but that's not the case. And I feel like if you ask any social media person that like it's like, my life is on social media. 20 What is nice, exactly what is nice about the post is whenever we have comments or like a tick tock that is getting particularly negative comments, we can say I don't want to look at that because someone else looked at the comments. If there's constructive feedback, let me know but other than that, like I don't want to know what's happening. And that's really helpful. But in terms of like separating personal life and like tick tock, tick tock is I have two phones and it's on both phones. And I'm, I'm constantly checking to figure out okay, what are the new trends? What are new music that can happen or what's new music that I can use? So it's definitely intertwined. But I do try like on the weekends, I guess what's nice about this job is it's a tick tock not fun. Like tick tock is not like a an app for pleasure that we used for the most part so on the weekends, I just don't even look. But during the week like your girl was scrolling.
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14:14Caithlin Mercer
And tell me about the comment section that you mentioned. Is is it the three of you dealing with the comments section or is there an additional part to the team?
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14:25Speaker 2
Yeah, for the most part, it's the three of us like managing the account. We also do have an excellent person who's on the team who you don't, sometimes you see her name is Emma. Animals, right? And she, she posts our YouTube shorts for us. She helps us shoot sometimes she's excellent. And she helps us as well. But for the most part, it's the three of us and our managers.
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14:45Caithlin Mercer
So you've mentioned something really important there. You the YouTube shots. This is a new development. Tell us a little bit about who what where when why your tech talks are now available on YouTube.
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15:02Speaker 2
They are they're available on YouTube short, that's Washington Post YouTube shorts if you want to subscribe. Um, basically this came about because when Tiktok started to get shaky and there were rumblings about oh is Tik Tok gonna get banned, like what's gonna happen? Um, one thing I've always been like adamant about is like diversifying where you post your content is really important because if one platform collapses, it's really important to like that we have a brand elsewhere. So this is something that um, I kind of pitched him was like, Hey, can we start posting on other verticals because if other things are popping up, it's great to not only like expand our audience everyone isn't on tick tock like how can we reach more people and it got greenlit The Washington Post's already had like an account, our team already had account we can use and just kind of like revamp, and it took a minute at first was like, Is this even worth anything? But we started like posting more and more and now we have over 50,000 subscribers on YouTube. So it's been going really well.
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15:58Caithlin Mercer
Well, you've queued up. Oh, no, I have not downloaded the video of you guys talking about maybe I have Hang on a second. Let's see is this the TIC tock ban video?
Unknown Speaker
I got I got I got
Unknown Speaker
I got
Unknown Speaker
my d&d.
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16:41Caithlin Mercer
That put the gift of love that one. Yeah, it must be. It must be unnerving for you guys as a team to watch the story unfolding is I
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17:00Speaker 2
don't necessarily feel unnerved but it's just another example of like, oh, like things are gonna change as they've always changed and will continue to change like, change is inevitable, but it's always gonna be like uncomfortable for sure. I think if tick tock does end up getting banned like in the US, it'll be unfortunate because we have like a really nice community on tick tock, but again, it's like that's why we're adapting and like moving forward. And so we'll continue to push on we'll continue to make vertical content like we're not going to stop. And it's kind of similar to what happened with vine where there was like a bunch of people had a massive community that didn't want to weigh people went to YouTube. And some people made it and some people didn't, but we're gonna put our best effort in for sure. Yeah.
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17:45Caithlin Mercer
I wanted to ask you another question about this. Let me just scroll down here and I'll sorry. What is the Oh yeah, it do we do. We know what the latest news is on the proposed ban.
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17:56Speaker 2
That is a great question. I don't have a like a prepared answer. So I don't know. But I recommend you go to Washington Post for any reporting.
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18:06Caithlin Mercer
For all of your news needs, other titles are available.
Unknown Speaker
Okay, you can say Carmela sent you
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18:15Caithlin Mercer
Yeah. Yep. Do we get a discount code? I watching Okay, so it's it's a it's a wait and see thing. The contingency plan? Is there anything beyond the YouTube shorts and diversifying the way you post your content? Is there anything else that you've prepared? There's not
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18:38Speaker 2
anything officially in the works, but I think as like new verticals continue to pop up. Well, like continue to expand on that because it's of course, like in a big company. It's like a pitching process and you have to go through a bunch of layers to make sure it gets approved and everything. So right now we're focusing on YouTube shorts, but there could be other things on the way.
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18:56Caithlin Mercer
Yeah, how many subscribers are on your YouTube channel now?
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19:00Speaker 2
We have 50,000 subscribers. 50. Yeah. And that's on the past couple of months. Like that's very recent.
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19:07Caithlin Mercer
It's like two months, right? Yes. Wow. That's pretty good. Pretty good. How much crossover? Do you think there is between Tiktok followers and YouTube followers?
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19:18Speaker 2
I think there's a good amount of crossover we have had people say I'm like, Oh, I can't believe you guys are here like so you guys have to check all the time. But there are also people who post on YouTube or like, Yo, we haven't like we haven't been on tick tock so when you first thing I need to
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19:33Caithlin Mercer
Okay. Okay, that's interesting. Tell me about kind of surprised to hear that you've got a tick tock on your work phone and on your personal phone. It's not I guess it's not as risky given that you're not making news and dealing with sources and so much as interpreting news and making it available. Is that fair to say? But just as we saw on that, in the briefing video, NRK has banned reporters from keeping it on their phones because they see it as a security risk. Is there anything in place for other Washington Post reporters that says, don't host this?
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20:24Speaker 2
Not to my knowledge, to be really honest, I think. I can't say for certain, so don't necessarily quote me on this. But yeah, I don't I don't think so. But I think, of course, like government regulations are different than like, organizations. Yeah. So it's definitely like following whatever.
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20:43Caithlin Mercer
Have you ever had a conversation with an investigative reporter, for example, who said, Oh, no, I don't have that on my phone. Or I have spoken to a
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20:51Speaker 2
few people who are like, I'm wary about this. Like, I don't feel comfortable having this. I don't feel comfortable like with them having my information without being on my personal phone or my work phone or I'm tracking my location or whatever. And I think that's totally valid. Like I think, at the end of the day, like you have to do, what works for you, and what your values are and what fits like your belief system. You're not I mean, I can't speak to that at all. But
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21:15Caithlin Mercer
yeah, I was kind of surprised when we polled the fellows, our journalist fellows who are mid career journalists from around the world, that 69% of them said they were more concerned about tick tock and its data and privacy policies than other social media platforms. Do you have any kind of reaction to why people might be more fearful of tic toc than other platforms with potentially similar data policies?
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21:49Speaker 2
I would say again, like I'm not super privy to like what's going on behind the scenes and like any government decisions, or like how, how intensely tick tock like, Isn't everything I would say people always have, like, where are people are always worried about new things, of course, and then potentially like, who owns Tiktok but again, that's like far beyond fortunately, like that's beyond what my I guess my realm is
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22:19Caithlin Mercer
remit. Yeah. So to give like an in depth commentary on data privacy law, we invited you here because you're a great Creator, and a great interpreter of news for different audiences. So let's go to another example. Here we go. getting good at this Sharon. Here, guys
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22:45Speaker 2
she noting is Russia going to deploy nuclear weapons? Let's deploy means move. Oh, let me look. Okay. On Saturday, Russia announced they were going to store tactical weapons in Belarus, where a country that shares a long border with Northern Ukraine, right then the US and European allies to Putin, it was dangerous rhetoric. NATO said the moves were irresponsible. They were monitoring the situation but see no reason to change their strategy. US officials said there wasn't any indication that Putin actually moves nuclear weapons around and Russia responded that Western sanctions won't stop them from moving nuclear weapons to Belarus questions you just duck and cover.
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23:23Caithlin Mercer
Let's do some tech questions based on me. So tell us a little bit. What equipment do you have at home? What equipment do you have in the office?
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23:33Speaker 2
Um, first walk into my home. This is my home living room studio. Basically at home I have this green screen almost all of our content is shot on iPhone. So I shoot on an iPhone and 4k. Yeah. hashtag not sponsored. And I also have like a pancake light that I use that like keeps me nice and illuminated. And for the most part, that's it. It's not anything super complex. Oh, and we also use mics. So I I love good audio. So like that's why I have this mic and use lav mics for any audio that we need our hands, but it's pretty simple. It's not anything super complex. And then a lot of like the big dramatic things that you see are just created like Photoshop and Premiere.
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24:15Caithlin Mercer
Do you use a tripod the phone is out of practice?
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24:18Speaker 2
Oh, yes. Yeah, it's um, tripod. tripod with with like an iPhone holder. Sorry.
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24:24Caithlin Mercer
Yeah. What? We've discussed that sound equipment. Tell me a little bit more about the lapel mic that you use.
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24:31Speaker 2
So it's just a it's really just a standard like lav mic. It's but it's an iPhone, lav mics, so it's one of the ones where it's like, oh, you plug it into a phone. And those work really well. I know Dave and Chris use, like traditional like Sennheiser microphones that plug into like a Zoom recorder so it's a little more like fancy and high tech. I also just got I'll just show you on here. Okay, I just got like these like little, it's like a DJI mic and they're like really tiny and small. And you can also plug in like one of like the iPhone mics into that and that works really well too. So for me, it's all about like portability and making sure I can like take all my stuff and run because if I'm in California, or if I'm in a different state, I need to just be able to like, shoot stuff wherever.
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25:17Caithlin Mercer
Yeah, and then I'm going to ask the stupid questions because that's what I'm here for. Do you record directly into Tik Tok? Or do you record onto the phone and edit somewhere else?
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25:27Speaker 2
So we record everything into well? That's a great question, because that depends almost all of our content. I record them to the camera app, but some of it like for the duets that Dave does. He'll record those in the app or like if we're using a special feature that's viral on Tiktok. We record those in the app so we can use it. But almost everything else is recorded into photos and then we'll transfer it to computer we edit it in Premiere Pro, and then we export it a big thing. If you want to export your content is exporting it into ADP. So that way tick tock doesn't like compress your content and make it really grainy and ugly. So even though it shouldn't 4k, we export and tend to be few technical
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26:05Caithlin Mercer
good to know that's one of the top five takeaways from today. expert in 10, ADP people. And then when it comes to uploading the content, do you have the Washington Post copyeditors checking your captions or whatever? Yes,
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26:21Speaker 2
so Well, we have our managers who act as our copy editors. So basically, what's nice is all of our content is pulled from like Washington Post reporting, starting them to like series and series of editors. But then, yeah, before we post, we send it off to our managers to check to make sure you know, the text is right and it's accurate and there's any spelling and like the the descriptions and the captions are all accurate. So
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26:45Caithlin Mercer
how many videos do you have in draft at any one time?
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26:50Speaker 2
Oh, that's a good question. I would say I don't necessarily have a bunch drafted but I have like parts and pieces. So I have like I would love to use a sound if the story comes up and like characters with this sound, I will be using it. Or I'll have like music that's drafted or I'll have like, oh, the story is really important. It's evergreen, but I just need like a way to make it interesting to an audience. So
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27:11Caithlin Mercer
when there's three of you and want to count this tick tock have a back end that enables you to log in as different users on that one account so you can see who's doing what.
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27:22Speaker 2
Well, we're all just logged into like the Washington Post account. Um, but yeah, multiple people can be logged and thank goodness, because then you can feign you can see who did what or No, no, but we communicate like offline of like, Can I comment this? Can I comment this back this person? Can I post this?
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27:42Caithlin Mercer
on Slack doing that kind of comes or?
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27:45Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah. So sometimes if we get like a particularly snarky comment, or we get like a comment, we want to make a joke back to a Slack Dave and be like, Hey, is it cool if I, if I comment this, and usually it's Yeah, sounds great.
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27:58Caithlin Mercer
Okay, that's enough of me monopolizing you. Let's welcome everyone else into this conversation. I'm going to go downstairs. I'm actually going to start with Yossi I mentioned earlier that we will come back to the we are a newspaper question. And I wonder if our team is there. Hi. You see, you want to go ahead and ask your question.
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28:24Speaker 3
Yeah. Hi, thank you so much for talking with us today. I had a question about the aesthetics or style of content. When journalistic publication is present on tick tock. I guess one approach that Caitlyn also kind of like referred to earlier would be this more traditional of looking like journalism in a very recognizable and maybe classical way, and maybe even describing your reporting to differentiate
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28:51Caithlin Mercer
your say Give us one second. Its targets first day with the remote and it's very difficult with that remote. Let's just give them a second to get you in the frame. And, and then let's start again, because because it's, it's, it's not so easy. There you There you are, yes.
Unknown Speaker
Were you able to hear what I was saying? Or should I
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29:18Caithlin Mercer
just start from from the beginning, okay, okay.
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29:21Speaker 3
Yeah, so I'm interested in the aesthetics or style of content when journalistic publications on tick tock, so I guess one approach would be this, looking like journalism more traditional, more recognizable as we are as a legacy media here among you on Tik Tok. And maybe even describing your reporting to differentiate yourself from other content creators that are present on tick tock and who adhere to very different kinds of principles and journalists do. And the other option could be, you know, the line of thinking that it's more important to play by the rules. of the platform, which in tiktoks case, is probably entertained and being funny. I guess this is the part that the Washington Post has chosen. And then of course, the, you know, you can play down the more traditional or classical aesthetics or visuals of journalism. So do you have a thought about which one is better? Or do you see this more traditional way possibly working on tick tock for for an organization that was in Washington Post?
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30:31Speaker 2
I think honestly, the answer is a hybrid between the two. I think the most effective thing for brands like big news organizations and even individuals is to be and this is gonna sound corny, but be like the most authentic and what's the most natural for you? So like for us like I'm naturally like a light person. I will Caitlin said in my intro was I was a brought a local journalist in Rochester, New York, and it was a really serious job. My job was to stand up there and just have, you know, a serious face and be like, really intense because I was talking about serious topics, and that's what thick, but that's not like what fit my personality, or is this job I get to be a little bit more of myself. And I think that translates really well to an audience and it leads to more success. I think I'm also on Tik Tok. A lot of audiences are really kind of privy to like when they're being performed to versus when they're being like told the story authentically. So there are a lot of journalists on Tik Tok that feel like they're just like telling you a story and like you're there with them and like you're kind of an equal. And I found even when we do content that's more of that like serious broadcast style or like sitting at the desk or things like that. They don't necessarily connect as well because people don't, they don't feel connected. Um, so for us, like leaning into my personality and being a little bit more light, because authentic to me, also plays on the platform but for people who are more serious, like you can do serious news and still not necessarily be behind a desk. If that makes sense. There are still ways to do it that connect to an audience that aren't super traditional. Yeah, that answer your question?
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32:01Speaker 3
Well, Jamie kind of made but I'm still interested in hearing your thoughts about whether or not a news organization can differentiate itself from other types of content creators when they are on social media, especially maybe on tick tock. By being more maybe transparent about them during journalism there.
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32:22Caithlin Mercer
You'll see is it fair to say the question is Can Muse itself be your differentiating factor on a social platform?
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32:32Speaker 3
Use and I guess journalistic principles,
C
32:35Caithlin Mercer
journalistic principles, okay. Absolutely.
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32:38Speaker 2
And we've done that as well. We've talked about especially when the war on Ukrainian was first starting. And people wanted to know, like, how that where was that information even coming from? Like, are we making it up? Because a lot of people had questions like about what was going on and going through and because we're a massive organization we can explain. Okay, so here are reporters that we have that we're getting information from, here's where they're getting their videos from, and like here's a shot of them taking the video that you saw, explaining how we got the information, how we were cross checking information, because at any major news organization there fact checkers behind the scenes like verifying where video is coming from, and being able to show that process really like gained a sense of trust with the audience. And so yeah, I think that's definitely a unique area that organizations have and that are really valuable to us.
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33:23Caithlin Mercer
I like I want to stay on this point for a second because Andrew Purcell has a question in the q&a, saying what is the ethical process you go through when you put the ideas together is there do you discuss ethical problems? Or is there a legal team or ethics team that you kick problematic content up to?
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33:44Speaker 2
A lot of the time again, because our content is already vetted by reporters and then editors and then series of a series of proceeds to get published we fortunately don't have to deal with that a ton, because the content we're using was had already been previously published, like on the Washington Post, but yeah, we talked about ethics and what are proper, what are proper and appropriate ways to cover things? Like, again, going back to the mass shootings? How do we cover this in a way that's ethical and sensitive to families? And people who are being affected, but also giving the information properly? So whenever you have questions, that's why we have managers were able to send it to them and say, Hey, and if they don't, they don't have an answer, but take it to their manager. So sometimes it'll go up the train of like a manager to manager to manager to get cleared. Um, but that's, again, a massive benefit of having a being part of a large organization
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34:33Caithlin Mercer
team. Yeah. And is there an example of that you feel comfortable sharing?
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34:39Speaker 2
Hmm. Not necessarily because I don't want to get in trouble. Yeah, there have been a couple but there I will say there have been a couple of examples, especially like recently, where it's like, okay, we want to cover this topic, but the post is still working on its ethics on how to figure out how to cover those topics appropriately for an audience, basically, just so it's clear, so the audience understand what's going on. And we're transparent and what we're doing. So
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35:05Caithlin Mercer
Alex from Newsweek has an excellent questionnaire, what's a two parter? How familiar are you with UTM codes and the death of UTM codes and how that might affect your work? Is that a question for someone upstairs? Most definitely.
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35:22Speaker 2
But now that you said that I'm going to look it up because I don't know what a UTM code is. I'm sure it affects my daily life and I don't even know it. So but more importantly,
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35:31Caithlin Mercer
what does success mean to your team? How are you gold? What are the metrics like how do you know that you're being successful?
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35:40Speaker 2
So the most obvious one is, of course, what everyone can see is looking at views, right? You can look and see this is how many people that we're reaching, but a massive way to tell that we're being successful, especially on a platform where content can be suppressed and like you don't even know it necessarily is looking at the comments. When we look at comments when people say, wow, this really explained a topic that they didn't understand, or can you guys elaborate? Can you guys post a little bit more content on this? I want to know more about it, or I really liked this content, or I really learned from it or I didn't understand this at all. Could you clarify it again? Those are really great ways of telling what kind of job we're doing. Because at the end of the day, our goal is to inform people about the world around them through Washington Post reporting. And so we know we're doing a job effectively when the comments are like, Yo, I didn't understand what was happening in this element about the war in Ukraine or I didn't understand that. Like, this is where you're pulling videos from or this is how you're telling that this video from the war in Ukraine is fake. It's was altered by whatever editing.
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36:42Caithlin Mercer
Yeah, yeah. If if you were talking to a freelance reporter, for example, PC young, who's got a question for you. He's just started making videos about the work that he does. What advice would you give them? How important is it for freelance journalists and journalists in general to be making versions of their content or behind the scenes of their content? Help? Do you think it's part of being a journalist now short form vertical?
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37:19Speaker 2
I think that's a great question. And it kind of depends on what your goals are. But I would say if you want to create an audience or you want people to know who you are, and you want to have an audience that trusts you, especially as a freelancer, um, then Peter, I would say, yeah, that's, that would be a great thing to do. And it doesn't have to be every day. Maybe if like once a week you're just pulling some content and explaining how it's a process how your process goes. That can be really valuable because people don't, a lot of people don't even know how journalism is put together. Like for you. You'll of course, though, like, this is my day to day like I wake up and I do this and that and it's really easy. And I just important. Export and like this is how I pitch because I'm a freelancer. And that's just your life. But a lot of people don't even know that. So you could definitely find an area of people who are interested in that. And also you're a storyteller like if that's your gig, if that's your thing. You already know how to put together a story. So you just, it's just figuring out how to tell it in a different way on a short form. Form.
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38:15Caithlin Mercer
Yeah. We've got a question from Ashley Fraser about the frustration of being with business verification, not being able to access certain sounds and how do you get around that?
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38:31Speaker 2
So this is definitely a problem. It's a problem that we have because our business account. What I do is I have a bunch of different burner accounts and I only like certain content on those burner accounts. So one of my favorite accounts that I have is a DJ account, because for whatever reason, and I hope this doesn't change because I'm saying this but I follow DJs when they mix music, like we're allowed to use it because it's not like copyrighted, so a sound that sped up, or like the sound that you heard was Kendrick Lamar has DNA, but someone put like just a jazzy beat behind it. Right. So we could use that because it was a mix. So I would encourage you to use mixes.
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39:08Caithlin Mercer
mixes, okay. I feel like it's 1995 again. Okay, I want to just bring into this conversation. One of our journalists Fellows is Bridget Brennan from Australian Broadcast Corporation in Australia. And Bridget's working on a project about indigenous. Hi, Bridget. About both how Indigenous Affairs are covered and how the people who cover them are treated in newsrooms and bridge I think we've had conversations about indigenous content on tick tock and I wanted to ask you, do you feel like it needs to be part of an Indigenous Affairs beat? And do you feel I mean, let me rephrase this. Do you feel like tick tock has given us new ways to reach marginalized communities? Yeah. Thank you so much, Carlos.
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40:15Speaker 4
That's so interesting. I would love to talk to you for three hours about what you're doing. So it's so cutting edge. But yes, we were finding that we were starting to notice that because indigenous people in Australia are a very young group of people. So the majority of our population are under the age of about 25. And so there was starting to be like a lot of conversations or debates even on Twitter about Indigenous Affairs, sorry, Twitter and Tik Tok, that were sort of on Twitter, maybe about like sort of seven to eight years ago. And then we're finding a much younger audience. We're having really cutting edge interesting conversations on tick tock that we felt we were missing. And so what it has become a place that we've started to have a look like what do people say my tick tock? What you know, what's trending, in terms of debate, and conversations about particularly about indigenous rights and land use debates about politics in Australia. So, yeah, certainly, we felt like it was really important for our work to have a look and a really important platform for marginalized communities. But what I would say is we were really slow, I think, last time out loud, but I think we were quite slow as an organization to tap into that, and even like starting to produce content specifically for that audience. So yeah, we'd love to get your thoughts on that. As well. Camille.
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41:41Speaker 2
Yeah, I would say it's a big like consumer behavior question, I think. And if people if young people if young Indigenous people are in that area, then I definitely think it would be valuable to make content where they already are. Just like for our team we're making content. Primarily, the idea is to get younger people interested and aware of what the Washington Post even is. And so that's a big part of our job. And so if that fits the demographic that you're trying to reach, I would definitely say meet them where they are, and try and make content in similar formats that they are because a lot of the time I feel like, especially in journalism, sometimes and I say this, because I've done this is where it's like, you know, like all of these important elements that you want to talk about are you have access to all of these resources. And sometimes we'll put content in a way that's like make sense in your world, but not necessarily like in the world that you're trying to reach. So figuring out ways that you can pull those elements of the world that you're trying to reach into the content that you're making can help you reach the audience. Does that answer your question?
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42:48Caithlin Mercer
I'm gonna ask you a question from Yesenia Marquez. But I'm gonna ask it cautiously. And but I think there's something important here. Yesenia says how do you master the algorithm? And I think the honest answer is we don't know because we don't know what the algorithm is. But there might be some tips that you have or things that you've learned that you would share with other journalists trying to reach an audience.
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43:17Speaker 2
Yeah, that's a great question. And that's when especially when I was starting out, I was like, I'm gonna master it. Like I'm gonna figure out what I want to do like how do you do this? And the reality is, Tik Tok is a business at the end of the day. No, I, an individual, or like a group of people outside of the organization aren't going to be able to predict like, what's going on internally? Like, it's just not possible. But, um, a couple of things have worked consistently. So making sure that our visuals are quick, that we're changing them every two seconds or so, making sure that we're telling an engaging story. Because at the end of the day, like story is what does the best fun tic TOCs when you sit the girls in their car and they have the microphone, and they're just like, Hi, I'm here to tell you about like, my day, like as a data that you'll never believe what happened. It works because they're really good storytellers. Um, and then changing visuals, adding music, anything that's potentially trending. Also help as well. But then also occasionally avoiding like big trigger words. So the Tick Tock I posted yesterday had the word pandemic and abortion and both of those words can potentially get our content suppressed. So an abortion I made the I'm exclamation point and in pandemic I maybe I an exclamation point, because sometimes that'll help. A lot of the time when we're covering gun violence, like even typing out the word gun violence or saying gun violence, Tik Tok will recognize that word or any, any potential like word that they don't want on the platform, so a workaround is to change the spelling of it. There are certain like known spellings on tick tock of how to alternate what things or how things are spelled which can be challenging and a little frustrating as a journalist and you're just trying to get the information across, but it's figuring out little tweaks like them that helped.
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45:09Caithlin Mercer
We have to now that you've said the word suppressed. Just touch on the suppression experiment, where you've actively tried to get suppressed
Unknown Speaker
when it failed. miserably.
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45:21Caithlin Mercer
Okay, okay, glad you said it. What did you learn from that experiment? Um, or honestly people don't know about that. What you attempt to do you want to give a rundown of what you attend to, and maybe why, why it didn't work and what you learned from it.
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45:45Speaker 2
For sure. So today's idea was, whenever we say certain like, content on the blog, whenever we say like certain things on the platform, they tend to get suppressed. So when we're talking about the war in Ukraine sing war tends to get suppressed or saying Ukraine sometimes gets suppressed, or literally any word that you could think of that could potentially be problematic or need some sort of trigger warning might get suppressed. So what would happen if we made a tick tock that one had all of those words in it and one had none of the words in it? And so we made the one that had all of the words in it, and it performed better than the tic tac but didn't have any of the words in it. Both of them have like over a million views. And basically, what we learned is one we can't predict what's going on to we may or may not have some ideas of maybe our tic tock got a little heated, maybe something behind the scenes was getting those tic TOCs more views. But at the end of the day, it was just we're just going to continue making content because if this is what happened in our experiment, like we just need to keep going forward because our goal is journalism like this is a fault of the platform. This isn't us necessarily. So it can be challenging and frustrating, but part of the process.
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46:56Caithlin Mercer
I think the bottom line is you don't know for sure, ever is that you used a bad word and you're being suppressed, or you just made a video that didn't work. Like there's no real way to tell
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47:14Speaker 2
is there. There are some tells on the platform like sometimes when you look at where your content was being viewed. So if our content we find is only being viewed on the following page versus the for you page, then it's like okay, so that might be a little suspicious because it just it's suspicious. Um, and then sometimes, sometimes it's not the case and sometimes it really is just the content and the story didn't land. So yeah, like you said, you can't predict it.
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47:43Caithlin Mercer
I think my my only lesson in social media is that if somebody comes to you and says, I'm going to charge you a certain amount of money because I know how to make the algorithm work for you and they don't work at Tik Tok. Or at Facebook or at LinkedIn, or wherever they're lying because you just don't that algorithm changes every single day. So there that's my lesson today. Question for you from Felix. It's so dangerous Aidan. When you cross posts to shorts, are you tailoring that content for shorts or is it just across both straight cross post?
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48:28Speaker 2
We tailor it slightly. So when you posted on Tik Tok, it adds a watermark into the content that little tick tock watermark and other platforms hate that. So there are a couple of different downloaders you can use refund copy the link from your Tiktok, put it into the downloader and download it without the watermark. Which is like pretty simple. So that's what we do. And then that way any graphics that we add in tic tock because so many of the graphics we use we add in like the Tick Tock editor. Those little colored boxes are all on tick tock. So that way, when we download it, we still have that text and then we cross post it so we post it without the watermark. And then we retitle it sometimes we'll title it something different than what was on tick tock that way. Like it it matches the platform a little bit better. But other than that it's a direct cross post in terms of content. We're not changing anything.
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49:20Caithlin Mercer
Do you remember off the top of your head some of the websites where you can download without the watermark?
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49:27Speaker 2
I'm genuinely I think if I think if you Google it if you say you're done like tick tock without watermark. I want to say I don't even want to say it. I don't really want to find a hole what's going on guys. Very simple to find. It's not like you don't have to do anything crazy.
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49:47Caithlin Mercer
Clementine from Pink news and a lot of other people have asked about monetization. And I think there's a lot of pressure when you come to your boss and say, Hey, we need to start a tic tock account because we need to reach these younger audiences. Or whatever. The big pressure is like okay, but how do we monetize it? What lessons have you learned with regard to monetizing on Tik Tok? Are there any formats that you use that are monetizable and my follow up question would be know that you're monetizing the YouTube channel is who's giving who's giving better bang for buck.
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50:34Speaker 2
Um, so the way my job works like with within the corporate structure within like the Washington Post, like I'm not necessarily dealing with like the ins and outs of like how much money is being pushed around. But I can't say that like, when you on our account when you see an ad. That means that like company is investing in our team because they want the visibility that they get from our team. So we just posted an ad on Sunday. From Netflix that they paid to have on our account. So that's one way that we're getting money through tick tock Now it's important I think as a brand to be cautious with that because if you just start posting straight ads will not why are people going to follow you so we post our ads on Sundays because we're not typically posting content on that day anyway, so that weights are designated that day. But very important, I think for brands to be cautious. And then also then on YouTube, we can just like monetize, like within internally because YouTube has like a monetization system. So I would say the plan is like we have financial people that are running everything behind the scenes. And that's not in my realm. But you don't tread lightly. But I think it's also important to even if it's not getting monetized, it's still creating brand awareness because a lot of people didn't even know a lot of young people didn't know what the Washington Post was before Dave started the TIC tock account. And now they do. Now they know that what kind of coverage we have. So
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52:01Caithlin Mercer
yeah, and those are two very different I mean, one you can see the return on investment from the paid partnerships and yada yada is, but this kind of building brand and trust and with a new demographic. You can't really put an ROI on that. But it's working for you guys. What what are the metrics look like for your audience? The in terms of demographics,
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52:29Speaker 2
yeah, so we're right in the sweet spot of like, I believe it's, we did a survey on this and I believe it's like 18 to 32 is like our prime demographic. But it's primarily a young audience. It's like Gen Z and millennials which is like not right in that like sweet spot of people who are aging into purchasing content, right? Because like graduating college and so now you're in the real world that you need to know what's going on in the world. And like starting a family and so that like key demographic of like, going into business landscape is really valuable.
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53:04Caithlin Mercer
Yeah. There are so many questions for you Carmela and we're running out of time and I'm not sure how to prioritize these. So I'm just going to do lack of the scroll wheel here guys, forgive me. I think we can maybe fit in three or four more questions. I saw somebody from the Yorkshire Post. I really wanted to read their question Where have you gone? Lancaster farming says Stephanie. She asked how the car to get around the semi lame commercial sounds. So we've got the look for DJ remixes any other terms and
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53:50Speaker 2
setup? Yeah, if you search like x sound sped up, you'll likely find spun up versions like
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53:57Caithlin Mercer
hey, X sound spreads. And I'm
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54:01Speaker 2
saying this because there are other big like accounts that do this as well. So like in the US like E News, like entertainment news. They do this as well, like you'll see it with a lot of the big magazines. So yeah, we're not alone in this. Yeah.
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54:12Caithlin Mercer
Nobody come for us. And Ahmed says, How do you strike? We've kind of covered this but let's talk about a little bit more. How do you strike the balance between the personality and brand that you've built on tick tock which is fun and friendly. You just want to be friends with you guys, versus the personality of the Washington Post which is Watergate serious professional. Do you have lines in place that you know not to cross Do you have any kind of policy see
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54:58Speaker 2
there because it's so new. We don't have like an official policy. But I would say again, it falls into like journalistic integrity like basic skills that like every journalist should have. And so one of them for me is if I were affected by the story, how would I want to receive it? How would I want to see it on the receiving end? If I saw this tic tock and I was like an impacted party? How is that going to make me feel right? How would that make my family feel? And so I try and really implement that. So even though like I'm dancing in a lot of stories, I try and maintain that balance. And I think that's really important when you're covering stuff on tick tock. And because then that lens into the goals of the Washington Post, which is, again to inform your audience about the world around them or about whatever your beat or whatever the demographic of your paper or your news organization is just good journalism. So
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55:51Caithlin Mercer
do you think every news outlet should have a tick tock team or a short form vertical team?
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55:58Speaker 2
I think every news organization should think about how are we going to continue to reach people, especially as they continue to go more on these vertical platforms? Because are they watching TV all the time? Like not necessarily like what are people's actual behavior and let's bring our content to them, so we can continue furthering our goals.
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56:16Caithlin Mercer
I got a question from Hideki in Japan. Do you ever feel like your appearance on tick tock puts you at risk
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56:25Speaker 2
knock on wood I hope not. I you felt honestly I felt this more working in local journalism. Because I graduated this in a date me but I graduated from university in 2021. And I was really scared as a local journalists like someone gonna come like up to me on the street and say, whatever nasty things and like attack me right. So I like I literally I drive the most boring car like that everyone has like I dropped like do all these things like make sure I look and fortunately because of my job and the nature of my job. I'm taking content that other massively, just incredibly brave journalists are on the frontlines doing and translating it. But it's always in the back of my mind for sure. Because as a journalist, like it's always it's always a risk, which is a little scary. But if it's in service of like, again, informing people about the world around them, I think it's worth it. And again, to just to clarify, like, the content that we're producing, I'm largely dancing in my home like, but there are just so many fantastic journalists at the Washington Post who are in Ukraine and in all of these like dangerous places that are doing just such valuable work. And I'm can't thank them enough. So
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57:44Caithlin Mercer
I want to go to Phil from Brazil. And see if this camera can make it to Phil. Yeah, no. It's hard to Yeah, I completely you have all my sympathy. But that is 123 button number four should get you to fall.
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58:12Speaker 5
Hi Carmela, how are you? I Korea is about one thing Washington Post user naming tic toc is of course was composed but the nickname which appears in every video is we are a newspaper.so Maybe the ones who are watching this. They are not aware that's Washington, Washington Post a post content. Why is that?
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58:40Speaker 2
So the lore is of the Washington Post tick tock account is when Dave started the account. People weren't sure if Dave's name was Washington, and he was posting or if the Washington Post like was in Washington State. And so people didn't like know what was going on. They truly didn't understand like what the Washington Post was. So it was as a response to that they've put in like the description. We are a newspaper like so there weren't any questions like the Washington Post is a newspaper. If they have further questions, they can watch the account and it kind of stuck and now it's a running joke that we can use, which I think is fabulous. And it's just funny like, because there aren't that many newspapers on Tik Tok. There aren't that many massive newspapers on Tik Tok. So, it's just a cute little like, war newspaper.
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59:29Caithlin Mercer
All right, we're in the final 30 seconds. Let's see if we can summarize the top five takes from Carmela. Do short form vertical video. Do it it's a great way to diversify the audience that you're reaching. Number two, be authentic to yourself and the platform you're on. Number three, your storytelling your storytellers tell stories. Number four burner accounts are a good place to find music. remixes and sped up yes, we've found a way. Go audience. Watch for trigger words. Number five. You may be getting your content suppressed. It's hard to tell. Don't trust anyone who tells you they can tell for sure. But watch out because there are trigger words that might get your content suppressed. And I'll throw in a number six just for good measure. And that's teamwork makes the dream work. Because I think it would be really difficult to do this job alone. But that you've really kind of cracked something interesting by working together not just with the newspaper staff but with three other people who you can say like okay, you take over the comment section now. So thank you, Carmela. Thank you. We're gonna end we're going to end with one more. We're going to end with my favorite because it has to be done. Thank you, Carmela and thank you everyone. We'll see you next week. Thank you. Oh my god.
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01:01:10Speaker 2
This is factually and contractually how we walk around the office but the key to success
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