Matthew Bishop, U.S. Business Editor and New York Bureau Chief of The Economist and author of Philanthrocapitalism: How Giving Can Save the World (among many other books), has explored in-depth the potential for philanthropic problem solving within the convergence of social and business interests.
We connected with Matthew at the 2014 ASPEN IDEAS FESTIVAL to get his take on the power of social networks, storytelling, and marketing in both journalism and philanthropy.
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There’s been a lot of talk about “Content Shock” in recent years. How do you filter the information you consume?
Matthew Bishop: I use Twitter enormously to follow people who I can trust, experts in their field who will read and retweet stuff that matters in the areas that I’m interested in. So, that’s become incredibly valuable to me.
As a journalist, if there’s something that strikes me as interesting, I will tend to go directly to the source and ask for clarification, but I do think this information overload issue is a big one.
Unless you have a constructive network, which Twitter allows you to do, you are overwhelmed. You can miss stuff. But I think with the right selection of people, you’re not really missing anything.
With Twitter you can clearly follow a lot of people that don’t add any value whatsoever, but you figure out who the nerds and super nerds are and you use them.
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Since we’re at an ideas festival — where do your best ideas come from?
Matthew Bishop: It’s a real mix. As a journalist, you’re always thinking about ideas. You’re always testing thoughts out of it, the news that you see out there and the people that you meet.
I find, every now and again, there will be a book that will come along that I will read that will open up a whole other area for you, but much more from incremental conversations.
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Have you ever had an idea or story that you were surprised went viral on social media?
Matthew Bishop: If I think about it, I’ve had my biggest hits on Twitter. A lot of cynical commentary about National Donut Day being sponsored by the Salvation Army.
When my plane got grounded on the tarmac for 10 hours at JFK and I started tweeting, my tweets became the best news source on the plane. I got off the plane to see my tweets up on CNN. That stuff is unexpected.
I suppose the thing that I was most pleased about was I was a co‑founder of something called Giving Tuesday, which has been an online campaign to make the Tuesday after Thanksgiving a national day of celebrating giving.
We’ve done it for two years, and we had 10,000 organizations involved last year. It was trending second on Twitter, which was far more impactful than I could get from something trivial like tweeting on a plane.
We figured out it increased giving on the day by 260%. And we see ideas start to take off. There’s an idea I heard about called the UNselfie movement, which was associated with the Giving Tuesday campaign. I think we got about 700,000 hits on a story about that, which is pretty good for a first round. I think that idea will take off quite big this year.
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Are you surprised by the viral capacity of these more philanthropic ideas?
Matthew Bishop: I think there’s actually a growing appetite for it on social media. The more you’re expressing something positively about what you feel strongly about, the more engagement you tend to get.
I think when people start talking about who they’re giving their time and money to, they are very passionate. I think people react positively to passion.
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How does the power of storytelling manifest in your work, especially from a philanthropic point of view?
Matthew Bishop: I think it’s incredibly important. Certainly with Giving Tuesday, we’ve found that giving people a platform in which they can tell their own stories is far more powerful than just a centralization, a central person to tell their story.
The big challenge to journalism is going to be that people want to hear an individual’s own story more and more, and they are less and less interested in a third party interpreting the story.
People do still want answers. They want to know what’s going on. They want people to make sense of the individual stories.
We have to — for a magazine like The Economist, which has been very much analytical — we’ve got to figure out, how do we incorporate the voice of the person we’re writing about much more than our own?
It just seems like that’s the shift that’s going on. People have a real appetite for demonstrable authenticity. They want to see the person’s face, hear the words coming from them.
I think there is going to be a lot more change. It’s going to move a lot more towards the individual voice. The question will be, can those analysts, can they figure out better ways of storytelling that are more like the first person accounts, and less like dry academic papers?
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How has the strategic role of marketing changed in the media business, and where do you see it going by 2024?
Matthew Bishop: It’s a huge change in what it means to a journalist. I think, as a journalist, you used to take it for granted that you would have an audience. That was done for you.
Now, it’s rare that you can take it for granted. You have to build your own audience. That is not the skill‑set that most journalists have. It’s going to really take a while to figure out.
Beyond that, it also challenges the whole business model, because part of that captive audience thing meant that you could sell access to that audience to advertisers.
Now, you have to figure out what kind of relationship to create with the reader, and ask — can we monetize that?
Ultimately, the key is that you don’t want the reader feeling cheated when they thought they were getting independent, journalistic work, and they’re getting something that’s paid for by another brand. There are just a lot of big challenges.
At The Economist, one of our responses to The New York Times’ Digital Innovation Report was that we need to tweet much more.
Until now, Twitter had been seen as a bit of a diversion. But, we now have changed our editorial system, so that when you file a story, you have to put three draft tweets in for your editor to look at as they’re editing the story, which is a complete shift in our focus.
That marketing effort has to be embedded and told to some extent by the journalists, rather than just outsourced to our marketing department.
If you liked this post, you might like Journalism In The Digital Age: Q&A With Kevin Delaney or 10 Influencers On The Future Of Content Marketing.