19. LinkedIn's unusual approach to news on social media, with Katie Carroll

It's time to geek out. Hello and welcome to Geek Out with Matt Navarra, with me, Matt Navarra.

And me, Martin SFP Bryant. These days, the headlines are full of how social platforms often badly handle the information flowing through them, letting misinformation poison discourse and poor-quality sources fill our feeds. But one platform that seems to be doing it right is LinkedIn.

Yes, LinkedIn has a news service that employs journalists around the world to curate and package news in a way that's useful for busy professionals. And Katie Carroll heads up those efforts in North America and the UK.

Katie joined us to discuss what LinkedIn News does and why, how they handle that pesky misinformation, and what the future holds for how LinkedIn serves its users with news. And just to note, as you listen, you'll hear a question about LinkedIn Stories, where we ask about the future of that particular feature. A few days after we recorded this, LinkedIn announced they were killing Stories in its current form at the end of September. But this was before that was announced. So keep that in mind when you listen.

So here's what happened when we talked to Katie Carroll.

Well, maybe the first thing to do then is just to introduce yourself and what you do, because I know you've been Senior Manager for the UK and North America of LinkedIn News. And I know you've done a lot of other stuff stuff before, but maybe give us a quick summary of what you've been doing and then what you do now.

Yeah. So I am originally a startup kid. I did start in sort of the startup scene in San Francisco, ended up working at an amazing news reading app called Pulse, which became part of LinkedIn's content journey. We got acquired in 2013, and I was fortunate enough to end up on the editorial team, which is now called LinkedIn News. Essentially what I work on now and what all of our work focuses on is bringing professional news and insights to members to help them stay informed and encourage them to add their own voice to the conversation. For what that means for me specifically and my team specifically, we are looking at news trends, hot conversations, things that are happening in the UK, the US, and Canada. And, you know, working to cover those and showcase really great perspectives from our members.

So yeah, one of the first things I was gonna ask you about is in terms of LinkedIn News, you know, people know LinkedIn for many different things depending on what your purpose for being on LinkedIn is, which typically is obviously searching for jobs for a lot of people, I would guess, but there is a lot more to it. And so in terms of LinkedIn News, can you just give us a sense of the scale of what LinkedIn News is as a team and within the organization and kind of what sort of things it produces and the size of its audience on a day-to-day basis?

Anything like that would be good to sort of Give us some context.

Yeah, absolutely. So we are now about 85 editors all over the world. We're in 15 different countries. And then our content reaches about 47 million professionals every day. It's distributed in 96 countries and written in 9 languages. So we're actually one of the world's largest business publications. And a lot of the work that we do is around sort of news and trends. So one of our flagship news products is called the Daily Rundown, which you may see if you check out the notifications tab of your app or LinkedIn.com. You'll see that there. Essentially, that's, here's what you need to know to start your day. These are the top professional topics every morning. Then each of those is curated and summarized, written up by our editors. So that's a foundational thing that our team does all over the world. But we do everything from producing video, producing LinkedIn Live video, We come out with regular reports using LinkedIn data. Really, what ties it all together is a desire to help people figure out what they need to know to get ahead, how to connect themselves to opportunity, and also then adding their own voice to the conversation to build their brand and connect with people who can help connect them to opportunity.

So how does it work in terms of things like for curation purposes or deciding maybe which particular stories you might link out to or share or comment on from LinkedIn News pages or accounts? You know, is there a set list of publications that are within that that you kind of keep adding things to? Is it anything is open to potentially being featured or used within LinkedIn News' own activity on LinkedIn News? You know, give us a sense of that because that's always been an area of sort of animosity or trouble for some other platforms I wondered if that was the case for LinkedIn.

Well, one thing that helps a lot is the fact that everything we do has a professional lens, a professional context. So in terms of how we sort of pick topics, we're constantly scouring everything on the internet. You know, we're looking at what's happening and what people are talking about on LinkedIn itself. We're looking at, you know, what's breaking in the news. We do work with a good number of publishers, you know, to help showcase content from their journalists, you know, make sure that especially around topics like COVID, you know, we are getting trusted voices and trusted sources of information front and center for members. But yeah, it can kind of come from anywhere. You know, all of us are trained journalists on the team. And so, you know, we have a sense of, you know, what members are interested in and, you know, what they're talking about already. And then also, you know, what we sometimes call sort of golden guts in terms of identifying the topics that are going to be really impactful, have, you know, relevance within the business landscape, and that we think are going to be valuable for professionals to know.

Absolutely. And before we move on to something else I wanted to ask you about, or Martin was gonna talk about with this sort of stuff as well, is do you get a sense from publishers, from the larger publishers, how much of a, percentage of the kind of traffic that comes their way or the audience they get are coming from things that happened on LinkedIn? Because having myself come from a news background, working for a tech news publication, and looking at Google Analytics every day to see kind of where we're sort of getting people coming in from, where they, you know, where are they consuming this news, where is it being shared, LinkedIn, I mean, this was quite some time back in fairness to LinkedIn, but it was a very small sliver of that. Is that, do you think that's changed? And, or do you think that that isn't even a relevant point now because that isn't the purpose that, you know, publishers are having this relationship relationship with LinkedIn News to do stuff?

I don't know the specifics on traffic, and I'm sure obviously it will depend publisher to publisher and also frankly article to article. We definitely have seen plenty of stories where a publishing partner that we might be working with will come back and say, wow, this really exploded on LinkedIn. This is awesome. But for us, we're really thinking about what is what is going to provide value for members, what is going to encourage people to join in a conversation and share their perspective. And very often, you know, if we can, if we have within our sort of trending topics that are curated by our team, you know, if we have, let's say it's a story about Amazon, we might have an Amazon exec and an Amazon warehouse worker and the journalist who wrote a story about you know, some big breaking news that's happening. And for us, that is, you know, the magic combination of being able to put all these perspectives front and center. And, you know, we definitely see ourselves as being, you know, collaborators and complementary to other newsrooms, you know, because we want to get this out there. We want to get their stories out there and help, you know, newsrooms and journalists build followings on the platform as well.

Martin.

And not every social network is as big on news in the way you are, but certainly news is one of the most important things that is so shared on social platforms. How are you seeing from the user side of things, you obviously mentioned publishers there, but from the user side of things, what trends are you seeing in the way people use news as a resource on LinkedIn? What are people looking for from what you do?

Well, it's been a particularly interesting year, 18 months across the board, obviously, but I think particularly for how people are coming together around news, around topics like how to be successful with remote work, what's happening with return to office plans and how are companies thinking about it. We're seeing people really come together and share advice, look candidly for advice, be really open about some of the struggles that they're having. And so from my perspective, it's actually been really kind of— I don't know if heartwarming is the right word given everything going on in the world. But it's been really powerful to kind of see people come together and truly build a community around some of these topics and some of these issues that we're all grappling with and sort of trying to figure out how to navigate this world. And we're seeing that I see that genuinely happen on LinkedIn every day. And it's pretty phenomenal, I think, to sometimes see what people are doing with the platform, how people kind of reach out and get help and opportunity from people who maybe they didn't know before this. But there's sort of a lot of goodwill that I've seen. And I think that that's become really core to a lot of the conversations that we're seeing on the platform.

Right.

Matt? Yeah, so misinformation and fake news stuff, that has been a big kind of part of the discussion when it comes to journalism and news content, and certainly through COVID with the sort of anti-vaccine kind of stuff that's going on and has challenged governments around the world, and certainly given a lot of headlines, not particularly pleasant ones for Facebook and others as well. And it's hard for a social platform to get away from that as a problem and not do something about it and have to tackle the problem themselves with policies or tech that kind of deal deals with it. I just wondered from whether it's users on LinkedIn spreading misinformation, either knowingly or unknowingly, or it's to do with LinkedIn News and your role as a curator of news, how does that kind of challenge fit into the things and the way that LinkedIn News works and how do they approach it, the people that work within your team?

So the first thing to mention there is that, you know, we have a dedicated team constantly, you know, monitoring posts on the platform, content on the platform to, uh, you know, take appropriate actions if there is, you know, misinformation that comes up, um, you know, anything that violates our terms of service. Uh, members are also able to report something as misinformation themselves, um, on any piece of content. If you tap or click the three dots near the post, you can report it there, and, and that's one of the categories. So, you know, just want to get that out there that, you know, we do have a lot of people and our tech directly focusing on this. I do think a couple of things that help, one is the fact that everything is attached to your professional identity. So that really does change, I think, the tone of a lot of conversations that you see in general. And it makes people particularly thoughtful about what they're putting out there. And I do think that that has an effect on sort of the overall ecosystem. And then I do, we make a very concerted effort LinkedIn News to put forth sources of information that are trustworthy, that are reputable. We feature a lot from the World Health Organization, for example. Here in the UK, we'll feature updates from Public Health England or similar organizations. We really want to make sure that what we are giving that additional level of visibility to is reputable and is something where it's going to cut through and be seen by members, and they can get that level of trust from what we're putting out there.

Yeah, as you pointed out there, the vibe of LinkedIn due to its professional nature is very different from things like Facebook, Twitter, et cetera. But also, I think the way you approach news is very different, and information is very different from all of the platforms, I think. Twitter has a team that curates trending topics, you know, and adds some context to them and things. Not nothing to quite the degree you go about things. Do you think that the online information ecosystem would be a bit healthier if more platforms took the approach LinkedIn does?

I— that's an interesting question. That's probably the million-dollar question in a lot of ways. Um, you know, I, I, I can't necessarily speak to, you know, what, what it would look like on other platforms. I think that, you know, we have sort of a magical combination of of, you know, humans, tech, AI, the whole sort of system working together. Um, and it is, it is really effective for us. I, you know, it's hard to say whether that's something that, you know, could or should be replicated elsewhere because I do think we've kind of ended up with a really rich system that kind of operates on a few different fronts. Um, you know, I, I think that we are— there isn't, there isn't anything out there that is quite like what we do and how we do it. And I think it certainly helps create an ecosystem where people are encouraged to weigh in on the sorts of topics that really affect people's professional lives, that really affect how they spend the bulk of their day, realistically thinking about work and the world of work. And I think that we have grown in such a way to ensure that the conversation stays in that, you know, sort of valuable professional space.

Yeah, I think, yeah, sorry, I think that, um, professional, yeah, that professional vibe, that professional atmosphere of LinkedIn definitely helps because I see no, none of the, are they a platform, are they a publisher kind of, um, angry arguments that you see in the States about, um, Facebook and Twitter and the like. You don't really see that about LinkedIn. And, uh, in a way, uh, it maybe seems relevant to LinkedIn in some ways, but, but you've kind of avoided that whole conversation with this professional approach. But I do wonder if there is perhaps something that the other networks could learn from you, and I don't see any reason why some of those other platforms couldn't go about introducing slightly more in-depth curation and editorializing like you do.

Yeah, I mean, I'm, you know, I'm incredibly biased because I do think what we do is, is great. Uh, so, you know, can't necessarily speak about other platforms, but I do think that it's, uh, it is really wonderful having the human element to what we do. And, and, you know, our editors are quite visible on the platform. You know, part of it is that we build up our own followings, and so we're, we're constantly posting content, producing content in different ways to try to fuel those conversations ourselves as individuals, as well as the LinkedIn News brand and company page itself.

Well, one of the other things I wanted to touch upon in terms of the relationship stuff with publishers in general and journalists, a lot of the things that Facebook and Twitter do in terms of training and development and building up relationships with different stakeholders, one of those groups is journalists and journalism as a whole. I know from experience again that we've had courses with LinkedIn and there's been other support things that have gone on that to, to, to guide both newsrooms and social media managers or content community managers from, from these, from news houses or from, from independent journalists. I just wonder if you could talk a little bit about kind of what, what does LinkedIn News do in order to help newsrooms get the most out of, of the platform and, and also maybe some of the things that people who are writing and maybe want to get themselves featured more or spotted by the team at LinkedIn News, what sort of things they could do to, to, to get to that.

Exactly. In terms of what people can do to kind of get featured by LinkedIn News or anything like that, we really are scouring the platform all day, every day. We have editors all over the world looking for really great conversations in whatever medium they happen to take place. So video, posts, long-form articles, et cetera. I would say just think about, what is going to encourage people to weigh in. We're looking for a perspective, an angle, insights that are unique to you about everything from immediate big breaking news to more topics around careers and how to get ahead, how to work remotely, all of those sorts of things. So the topics run the gamut. And really, I would say it's about being yourself, being authentic, you know, having something to say. And I think more people have something to say than people sometimes think they do. You know, very often personal experiences, career learnings, things like that can be some of the most valuable, richest conversations we see on the platform. So I would say, you know, even if you maybe don't think that you have an ability to weigh in on XYZ topic, you know, you probably do have something that is going to help someone else if you put it out there. So that's my sort of plug. Would strongly recommend that people, you know, bring, bring them full, their full selves to the platform and really speak authentically about that. In terms of sort of what we do to work with newsrooms and publishers, as you mentioned, you know, we, there are periodic, you know, sort of trainings for different newsrooms about how they can best use LinkedIn. You know, but it's really not significantly different than how, you know, we might work with any member or the advice that we would give to any member in terms of how to get seen or noticed by our team and featured by us.

So they should—

they should—

people be tagging LinkedIn News or, you know, pushing things into their, into their message inbox on LinkedIn to get discovered, or is that completely unnecessary? There's no point sort of hashtagging LinkedIn News or @mentioning whatever, you know, because those are the things I think a lot of people who would be doing, which also could be just annoying to you and useless to them.

Yeah, no, there honestly isn't any need to do that. We genuinely are looking, we're always essentially figuring out how we can find the gems of content on the platform. And there are many gems, but that is what we're trying to do 24/7 essentially. So yeah, there's no sort of special trick or any process to follow to sort of flag us. Watching. And, and, uh, yeah, that sounds very scary, but in a very benevolent way.

Um, anyway, editors who are, who are looking for good stuff. You mentioned like gems and things, and, and a lot of what we've talked about is what LinkedIn News and your team and you yourself do. But there's also news publishers and journalists that are putting stuff out themselves, either on their own company pages or the publisher's page or their, the profiles of their journalists. And is there any quickly come to mind? I always put you on the spot, but in terms of individual journalists that are on LinkedIn or news publishers that use the features of the platform to maybe, you know, really tell their story. You know, I know we're gonna come on and talk in a moment a bit about LinkedIn Stories, but there's lots of ways they can use LinkedIn. And I wonder if you've got any good examples or brands that are worth, you know, looking out for.

Oh God, there are a lot. One that has always stuck out to me, and I do sort of give this example all the time, is Nick Thompson at The Atlantic, He does a sort of regular Today or This Week in Tech video, and it is, you know, literally him just talking to the screen, usually at his desk, you know, very, very casual, and just talking about the things that he's noticing in the industry, you know, that day or that week. And I think what I like about it and what I, you know, always kind of bring him up to sight is the fact that you don't need to be polished. You certainly don't need to be suited up and very formal or anything like that. If you have something interesting to say, people want to hear it or read it. That to me is always a really great example of what it can look like to just give people an insight into who you are, how you think, what you're interested in. I think that's a good thing to keep in mind for, for anyone really in terms of content creation.

One thing I've been wondering is how Stories is faring on LinkedIn. Uh, it launched, um, a little while ago now, uh, but we've seen Twitter recently drop their Stories-like Fleets, uh, format. Um, so it clearly doesn't work as a format everywhere, but, uh, you know, I, I do see Stories still being used, um, pretty regularly on LinkedIn. So, uh, so how are you aware of how it's going generally on LinkedIn and in a news context, how are you using it?

In terms of how it's going, I'm not sure about specific stats and things like that. But in terms of how we use it for news, we are posting, especially on the main LinkedIn news page, we post here are the top stories you need to know that morning, and just very quick bites of one sentence or a handful of words about what that story is, and then you can obviously click through to read more and see the full curated set of perspectives around it too. I think we're also— the fun thing about stories and anything like that, any short-form video content as well, is just that you get a bit more of someone's authentic self, someone's full life. You can get a glimpse of what people's desks look like, especially in this work-from-home hybrid world. I think people have been very open about about giving more of a glimpse into who they are. So I think that's always a fun thing to see. But yeah, we're focusing in terms from the news side on sort of these like quick nuggets of like, hey, you have limited time. We know that everyone's really busy. What do you need to know this morning in a really quick digestible format?

Yeah, so it seems like LinkedIn Stories isn't necessarily gonna go the way of Fleets anytime soon. Okay, interesting.

Yeah, I was thinking about the fact that, you know, we've seen quite a lot of this talk about creator economy and the creators of the world and monetization, all these technical jargony words that come into play a lot this year from certainly from the platforms. And there's this big battle to get more creators for whichever platform is trying to get them. And Facebook being one of them is launching or has launched Bulletin, which is its kind of newsletter platform. And I know that LinkedIn also has its kind of own sort of spin on newsletters and LinkedIn Editor as well and things. Um, and I just wondered, you know, what LinkedIn News is doing in this kind of area. Is this something that, that is more to come in terms of what, what we see already in terms of the newsletter sort of functionality, which not everybody has access to? Um, and that there aren't any features that I can think of off the top of my head where it's, uh, for creator to monetize on the platform in, in the way that you starting to see on, on other platforms. So a couple of questions off the back of that really are, you know, Is LinkedIn thinking about, you know, these ideas the same as like Facebook's doing Bulletin and others? And what do you make about, you know, how it's changing the landscape for news and the fact that a lot of these writers that work for big brands in the publishing world are now going to become more independent and maybe they'll write on platforms like LinkedIn?

Well, we do, as you mentioned, we do have a newsletter product that is, you know, a really great tool for creators. You know, people can subscribe and then every time they publish, their subscribers will get a notification and an email. We've seen tons of success with it. A lot of people are really appreciating the fact that you can use that to essentially build a community around your own insights, your topic that you're digging into, etc. We are seeing a lot of use of that and a lot of great great growth in numbers of subscribers and numbers of new newsletters being published, that sort of thing. In terms of sort of the bigger creator economy, frankly, creator ecosystem, whatever you wanna call it, we do have something called Creator Mode that you can turn on to basically, if you are really focusing on being a creator, on sharing content, you can turn that on and it'll, default your setting to follow to help build your following. You can also showcase the hashtags that you tend to talk about up at the top, better showcase your featured content, your activity higher up on your profile, just give people the sense of why they might follow you and what they're going to get when they do follow you. We are absolutely thinking very much about, you know, how to give creators the tools that they need to be successful and to really build up a community.

You mentioned the courses you do with journalists earlier, and I did a LinkedIn for Journalists course actually a few years ago. It must be almost 10 years ago now. It's quite a long time ago. And it was eye-opening for me. I remember coming away from that really excited about the things you could use LinkedIn for in terms of finding finding stories through data about companies and finding sources, all that kind of thing. Um, so maybe related to news, but maybe more generally, is there anything that, um, you have discovered through your time at LinkedIn about the platform that, um, you find a really useful tool or way of using LinkedIn that maybe most people aren't aware of, but just like it's some kind of power tip that, uh, is actually just something really useful that might— most people might not be aware of?

Power tip. So that's a tough question. This is going to sound a bit sappy, cheesy, whatever you want to call it, but I really genuinely believe this, which is you are going to be, you know, you're going to set yourself up for success on LinkedIn if you are your authentic self and if you are engaging consistently. You know, that doesn't necessarily need to be, you know, posting consistently. If you're going in and commenting on other people's people's content, things like that. It's all great. It all essentially keeps you bubbling up in people's feeds and it helps people discover you. And so I think that level of just consistent engagement, it's certainly not the secret hacky tip that if I had it, I would tell it, but it really is the key, I think, to essentially just putting yourself in the position where you can connect with the right people and the right opportunities. And the number of times that I have seen or talked to somebody who said, you know, yeah, I, I was in a really difficult management situation and I posted and asked my network how I could think about this or how I could get through it, and, and I got great responses. You know, people really wanted to help out, wanted to jump in in. Um, you know, that sort of thing happens all the time. So, um, you know, it— there's a lot of serendipity in this, and, and I've seen, I've seen the, the success stories of that level of serendipity if, if you are really, you know, sort of out there and just being present on the platform and engaging with the community.

Now, one of the things that you used to do in your former life before LinkedIn, um, was, um, some of the stuff that I and others probably tuned into this have done before, which is become a social media manager or work worked closely in the world of social media before you transitioned into like an editorial and curation and the more technical role that you're in today. I just wondered, do you miss your old job as a social media manager? And what would you make of, how would you feel about being a social media manager today with the way the world is with social media?

Oh, I think it's fascinating. I mean, I absolutely would be, you know, completely game to jump back in. But the truth is, I think because of the work that we do and working for LinkedIn, you never really leave either, you know? And I think, social is anything and everything these days. It's like so much of our lives and our world is online that you never kind of flip that part of your brain off. And I think because what we're trying to do in terms of getting insights and information to the right people, getting people to share their own perspectives, if I were a social media manager today, I would be trying to do those same kinds of things, even if it was on behalf of a different brand or on different platforms. I think a lot of it, a lot of the notion of sort of community building and building up an audience or a following is very similar regardless of sort of the particulars of the role or the platform or anything like that.

Absolutely.

Martin?

Yeah, kind of bring things back around to LinkedIn News. What's the future of LinkedIn News? How do you see the, You can't really call it a product, can you? It's kind of a, a service. I don't know what you call it, but, uh, the service, the product, how do you see it evolving over maybe the next year or two? Um, it could be in terms of new features you've got on the roadmap or the direction you'll take LinkedIn News.

I, I think for us right now, the, you know, the big thing that we are looking at and the big place where I see us continuing to focus is on really trying to grow a pool of amazing creators on the platform, you know, really working to find the best, you know, the best of the best content that we can put in front of members to help them get value and be successful, you know. And so for all the things like creator economy are sort of a hot topic everywhere, you know, for us that really does mean You know, how can we find the sort of content that is going to help people? There's always a value add to it. And so I think that we're really thinking about what that means for LinkedIn News, you know, as these things kind of develop. But, you know, it is one of those where like the rising tide lifts all boats. You know, the more great conversations are happening, the more great content that we can find, the more people who are are, you know, really saying interesting and engaging things, that helps us tremendously on the LinkedIn News side because that's, you know, a huge piece of what we're trying to do is just to, you know, make sure that that content gets in front of the right people.

Absolutely. Well, I'm gonna pull things slightly to a close on that point because it's a nice kind of back to the beginning of where we started in terms of what was the history of the LinkedIn News to where is it heading. In the future. I'm also conscious that we're taking up your precious time. So thanks so much for spending the last half an hour chatting to us. If people want to kind of find you online, if you want to be found, is there a specific place you'd want them to kind of head towards to kind of reach out to you or talk to you about anything?

Well, I am on a really great professional network called LinkedIn. So please feel free to find me. That's a good one. Yeah, isn't it? Please feel free to find me over there. Katie Carroll. I'm a redhead. You can't miss it. And then I'm also @kredcarroll here on Twitter.

Thanks to Katie for taking the time to talk with us. I know that there are people who will have found that information incredibly useful.

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