Welcome to the latest season of Media Voices: Big Noises! This season, sponsored by Glide Publishing Platform, we’ll be talking to publishing people with something to say. Media Voices co-host Peter Houston is tired of hearing the same old industry buzzwords. The publishing platitudes are starting to wear a bit thin, and he’s decided to see if he can shake the conversation up a bit by speaking to some of the biggest characters in the business.
On this week’s episode of Media Voices – the final edition of our Big Noises series – we hear from Bauer’s Global SEO Director Stuart Forrest. As Peter makes clear in his intro, Stuart has worked at most of the major publishers in the UK in a variety of different roles, which has granted him a unique insight into the good and bad practices of the industry.
He tells us about all the changes he’s seen over his career to date, why the publisher-platform tug-of-war is inevitable but subject to change, and how ‘clickability’ differs from ‘clickbait’.
We’ll be back later in the year with our autumn season of Media Voices. Until then, have a fantastic summer!
A highlight of Stuart’s interview:
On ‘clickability’ versus ‘clickbait’
I was doing some training for our editors on Google Discover last week. The phrase we use is “it needs to be clickable, not clickbait”. The content must be engaging and entertaining, solve a problem, solve a need and be different. And it’s fine to make that headline clickable, but there’s a there’s a nuance difference between clickable because it’s interesting and clickbait because it’s promising something it doesn’t deliver on when you get there.
We probably were driven in that direction by that never-ending quest for reach, particularly when publishing businesses were dominated by digital advertising which felt like a race to the bottom on volume. But I think those days are going and more enlightened publishers are trying to produce quality content that is genuinely entertaining and different – partly because that’s what Google wants.
Thanks to Glide Publishing Platform who have sponsored this season of Media Voices: Big Noises. Glide exists to make publishers more successful by removing any need to get bogged down building Content Management Systems, providing an industry-leading SaaS tailored to let publishers do more and spend less. Publishers using Glide direct more resources at their audiences and products, and focus on building things that make them money. You do the content, Glide does the management.
Glide have created 3 expert guides to getting much more from a new or headless CMS, created for editorial, technology, and product teams. You can get the whitepapers here.
