Wednesday 3rd July: How Sport1 uses AI and automation to maximise social media impact

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This summer sees a packed sports calendar with the Euros in Germany and the Olympics and Paralympics in France. Adding these global events to the regular sports schedule amps up the demands on social media teams, and realistically it’s hard to imagine how they would cope without the help of automation.

For this special Conversations episode, we’re joined by Symran Cashyap, Vice President of Product at social media and email automation and optimisation specialists Echobox and Jan-Niklas Häuslein, head of social media at SPORT1, one of Germany’s leading free-to-air sports channels.

They discussed the demands of adding worldwide sporting events to already packed sports calendars, improving efficiency and optimisation in a time of generally falling social media referral traffic, building communities across multiple sports and leagues and — of course — the role of AI in planning and testing.

If you’re a publisher with a particularly strong brand or two, the temptation is there to launch a sub-brand with the same ethos but aimed at a different demographic. The really tough decision, however, is what to do when that sub-brand finds success in its own right — do you fold it back into the parent publication or let it fly? I examined this issue for A Media Operator.

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I feel like I’m constantly forcing the worst people in the entire world into your faces every morning lately, for which I’m sorry! This time the thumbnail shows Ben Shapiro, but the associated article is actually really good, I promise. It collates all the evidence for the growing audience hunger for short video news — and is a reminder to news orgs that your journalists’ personalities are an asset, not something to be hidden away.

Cuts are always, always painful, and too often they’re simply done as a knee-jerk reaction to poor results. This profile of the Wall Street Journal’s editor dives deep into how and why she decided that cuts are necessary, and how it’s impacting the wider business. Dow Jones, the publisher of the Journal, recently announced record-breaking digital subscription numbers, so perhaps they’ll also be undertaking a hiring drive again soon?

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