Transcript:
Hello Conor could you just tell me a little bit about yourself and your role, and the Irish Times as well.
I’m Conor Goodman and I’m the current Deputy Editor of the Irish Times. When I started working with Contribly I worked as a Features Editor and I was specifically involved with a project around the Irish diaspora – that is Irish immigrants around the world of whom there are millions.
The Irish Times is a general interest website and broadsheet newspaper at the quality end of the news market in Ireland. We focus on general news, business, sport, features, culture, lifestyle, property. One of the unique areas of coverage for the Irish Times is Irish people living overseas and we also have a number of foreign bureaus in Washington, London, Brussels, Berlin, and Beijing.
How did you start using Contribly and why?
I was involved in the project that originally developed the relationship with Contribly back in 2017. We had discovered that Contribly had relationships with the British media and we were looking for a way of deepening our relationship with our readers and specifically with Irish people living around the world. We wanted to practice, and were practicing, diaspora journalism – so allowing people to read stories from wherever they lived in the world on our website. This was very much a digital project. The diaspora were contacting us through email, we were contacting them through social media and it was working quite well but we weren’t really happy with the ways in which they were contributing to us. It was quite clunky, it was quite time consuming editing things that came in by email. We really struggled with photography and video so we wanted a simple mechanism for Irish people around the world to contact the Irish Times and to share their stories with us and we would then edit them and publish them.
We asked Contribly to work with us to develop a tool that would allow people to share the stories, comments, photos, and videos. It needed to do a few things for us: it needed to be really easy for readers to use it; needed to be easy for us to use at the back end; that we could get a simple output; we needed to collect information like email addresses like phone numbers so that we could verify contributions and that we weren’t getting false information; and we needed a mandatory field for legal terms and conditions. Contribly worked with us on all of that.
How do you use Contribly and reader engagement in in your editorial?
With every subject there’s a new way of tackling it that is unique to that subject and Contribly can be used in quite inventive, creative ways. We apply our minds to the best way to use it and the best way really to take in the views of your readers, your viewers, your audience and what they want to say. It’s not always a top- down ‘media knows best’ type relationship. We use it for all kinds of things, it has many uses that go beyond its original purpose which was for us to take in the stories of immigrants.
Tonight Bruce Springstein is playing in Ireland, in what’s the first of a series of concerts, and Springstein has a lot of ‘super fans’ so Contribly is a way of us contacting those people saying “okay when you come out of tonight’s concert in Belfast what did you think of it.” So we effectively get reader reviews in a ‘live’ way to sit alongside our critic’s assessment of the concert.
It really assists with our two-way relationship with readers and subscribers in particular and with the engagement we have so it’s very good that way on ‘fun’ stuff but it can deliver pretty serious support to us in serious journalism too.
For example, some of the largest technology companies in the world have their European headquarters in Dublin. It’s a big part of the Irish economy, and a big area of coverage for us. About two years ago that sector was hit by a series of shocks and began to lay off staff so we wanted to find out ‘what’s it like if you work in one of these major companies? What’s it like to suddenly go from earning very good money, living in an expensive city to suddenly being cut off?’ Staff working in those companies are notoriously shy about speaking to the media because they have quite restrictive non-disclosure agreements so we we would try Contribly. We asked people to get in touch using Contribly. We could then follow up with those people who didn’t want to necessarily be seen with a journalists in public. They were happy to do it through like Contribly. We then interviewed them either in person or on the phone having verified their details, So yes, it can play a valuable journalistic role.
The question I try to pose is: what information is out there that we want, that our readers want, that we can’t really acquire by traditional news-gathering means?
At any given time we have a number of call-outs on the go. I’ve mentioned the Springstein one but we also have one ‘tell us about your experience of getting divorced in Ireland’. Quite a difficult story to get at! We might get twenty or fifty replies, we might get three, but they might be quite of a high quality so sometimes getting a small number that are of a high quality is just as good as getting a lot of responses – better in fact!
Another example – ‘do you think the atmosphere at Ireland’s six rugby matches was flat?’ We were absolutely inundated with the responses on that. Also ‘Why did you vote no in some recent referendums?’ There’s such a variety of subjects that Contribly can assist us with.
We use it for personal queries where we invite readers to send in questions about their relationships, their medical problems, personal finance queries, parenting dilemmas. Our experts in those areas take these questions, and reply to them and we publish those.
Another example is of maybe a a slightly thorny subject that we had to tackle a few years ago. Vaccination was very controversial and we knew there were lots of people who were afraid of getting vaccinated against Covid-19 so we asked our readers what their reasons were for not getting vaccinated because it’s a very divisive issue. We felt we didn’t want to give out false health information or give credence to extreme views, or incorrect ones. The way we did it, we took people’s reasons that came in – some of which were very valid – all of them were valid because people were behaving in a particular way one way or the other as a result of their beliefs. We got a panel of doctors and scientists to assess ‘does this reason have scientific validity’ or ‘what’s your response to that, what would you say to this person one way or the other?’. I thought that was quite a good way of taking a complex subject, tackling it, dealing with it – not sweeping it under the carpet and yet trying to give valuable public interest information on an issue that was important at a national level but also very much at a personal level to individuals as well.
Why do you use Contribly versus other tools?
It’s easier to use than email. It’s easier to use than social media. We can apply terms and conditions, all the legal obligations for the reader and for us can be included. It’s a really good way to build a two-way relationship with readers. Plus it’s stable and easy to use.
How do you expect the tool to help with your processes in the next 12 months?
I think it has a lot of applications that we haven’t fully tapped yet so it can be used in a lot of different ways. We are reorganising our video and photographic areas. One area we haven’t really developed our use of Contribly on is video. We want to try to use photographs more and that has worked quite well on certain occasions particularly in extreme weather events. People can send in their photographs during major festivals, sporting occasions, those kinds of things people share their photographs but we want to develop the photographic and video potential of the platform better in the months to come.
And then my last question – why did you choose Contribly?
We knew they had a good record. They worked with some established media in the United Kingdom. We met Contribly and I believe one other company and we liked the people we spoke to. There seemed to be a genuine wish to try to make our project happen and I think we made the right choice and we remain very happy with that choice.
Thank you. I love that!
