Monday 10th July: Mpho Raborife on keeping Gen Z engaged

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On this week’s episode of Big Noises we hear from Mpho Raborife. Mpho is Managing Editor at news24, a South African-based news outlet with a primarily Millennial staff and audience.

Mphoh tells us about how she caught the journalism bug while doing work experience, why news organisations that don’t listen to their younger staff members aren’t effectively serving their audiences, and why young people in newsrooms need to know they have a future in the business to remain invested and engaged.

Peter also asked her about her research project for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, and how she hopes younger people will be more nurtured by newsrooms in the future. She echoes what Lucy Keung has said about the need to listen to the younger members of staff – and how those who don’t are leaving societal and commercial opportunities on the table.

I firmly believe it should be as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to take one out – i.e. if it can be bought online, it should be able to be cancelled online without needing to phone someone. However new proposals from the UK government do seem to be a bit excessive, meaning publishers could end up having to process cancellation requests made via social media and the like, which just isn’t feasible.

If – after every stunt Zuck has pulled over the past few years – you’re still tempted to give Threads a go as a publisher, I’d encourage you to give this a read. “There are more than enough amazing communities — sports, music, fashion, beauty, entertainment, etc. — to make a vibrant platform without needing to get into politics or hard news,” Instagram’s head Adam Mosseri has said this week, noting that they won’t be courting the news industry in the same way Facebook did a decade ago.

This is a great read on AI in publishing from Thomas Baekdal, complete with some neat visual aids that encapsulate the problem with the current ‘summarising’ models. I’m also going to slide in an extra article recommendation here about the chaos an AI-written Star Wars story has created over at Gizmodo. “I have never had to deal with this basic level of incompetence with any of the colleagues that I have ever worked with,” one editor commented.

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