Jessica Davies of Digiday writes about the new “war room” in London for CNNMoney’s expansion.
Davies writes, “The war room, a replica of those it has built in Atlanta and Washington, D.C., leans on in-house technology to mine the Web, to identify high-interest topics the publisher isn’t yet covering. They will use in-house tech like its social tool ‘Surge’ — a clunky acronym for Social Unit of Reach, Growth and Engagement — to monitor how existing stories are performing in real time; determine how content should be repackaged for different social platforms; and spot topics likely to go viral. The same data will be used to inform stories which run on its main broadcast channel.
“‘We go where the audience is, and that may mean doing five different versions of the same story for each of the social platforms, whether it’s Facebook, YouTube or Snapchat,’ said Ed O’Keefe, vp of CNNMoney and CNN Politics. ‘We’re fishing in the waters of the areas those audiences are in, and using video or text-based content to them. Now we’re really ramping that up for audiences outside the U.S.’
“With six people already in place, the publisher is hiring another half dozen or so including writers, multiplatform specialists, a viral news editor and at least one video producer, with more video positions to come. It’s also recruiting editorial staff in Hong Kong and Abu Dhabi.
“Plans for extending the model to the London hub have been six months in the making, according to O’Keefe. Since its U.S. war room launch, CNNMoney shot from eighth to fourth place in the comScore rankings for business and finance news sites. It’s this success that gave it the confidence the model would work internationally, he added.”
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